I have had this website now for ten years, purchased initially to blog about mapping things I was doing or attending, and maybe getting my name as a GIS Specialist a bit more out there in the Ottawa area.

Fast forward ten years and I am still working with GIS, but in Germany. The tools I am working with have changed from QGIS to ArcGIS to FME, with QGIS and ArcGIS mixed in. Programming, if you aren’t counting FME, has completely vanished from my daily work load, and my job description is more cartographer with GIS focus, than just straight GIS.

A lot has changed.

This is, of course, emphasized by the current pandemic situation, where working from home for four months has given me a lot of time to think about what hobbies I have and which ones I would really like to persue.

I have a lot of hobbies that I dabble in, from photography to knitting, writing and language learning to hiking. Some of them go together quite well and some feel a bit eccentric, but writing and photography will likely be the focus of this site for the next bit. I have taken loads of photos over the past few years and have never really known where to put them online. Websites like flickr have come and gone with limited success, instagram is too bright and cheerful and my family in Canada isn’t on it. The nice thing with having my own blog is I can also put recipes on it, gluten free restaurant reviews, hotel reviews. Maybe I’ll even write about my attempts to be minimalistic, despite too many hobbies, health concerns and impulsiveness near shops. Generally whatever I want to write or post, I can do that here.

So that’s what I am going to do.

This may not work as much as I want it to, due to lots of different circumstances. I have the last term paper of my master’s program due in two months, and then I’ll start working on a research paper before doing my master’s thesis. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic. I am working mostly from home, but have to travel a few hours to check out my apartment in Stuttgart every so often. We will see how well this works out. I am also doing this as a kind of a therapy, a way to sit myself down and write for a bit, or think about my photos more. And I think right now, everyone could use a little bit of therapy.