Phew, what a few hectic weeks it have been! Hectic I say? Yes! During the last 4 weeks I rounded my term as group leader of Scouting Deinze, switched jobs and … moved out to my own little spot in Ghent!
Still need to pimp this post with some pictures … check back next week and/or keep an eye at my Flickr account 😉
It all started during the last two weeks of August, as then a work year of Scouting ends. My two colleague group leaders and I had decided to end our term after the (now previous) year, yet some tasks still had to be done: preparation of the start of the new Scouts year, forming a group of leaders, election of the new group leaders, etc.
With over 50 volunteers to be a leader (we’re the 4th biggest group in Belgium, that’s why there are over 50 ;)) the division wasn’t easy at all. Lots of personal talks between us, the group leaders, and each soon-to-be leader led to an immense puzzle (leader A doesn’t like leader B and but wants to guide the members of age X to Y only if …, savvy?) which we finished on doing in one evening … from 7PM to 3AM (that’s 8 hours).
Then lasted the preparations of the new year (huge BBQ for all parents, weekend with the leaders where we plan everything, first meeting for our members, etc.) which still needed to be done. During the BBQ we had, we always have a little church meeting on our domain (not that we’re that religious, but hey, it’s historical ;)). During that mass the three of us thanked everyone for the last few years we’ve been through together and before it ended all of the sudden Stijn jumped in and gave a little speech to thank us for what we had done. Together with that we received a nice charcoal drawing (note to self: need to buy a new camera soon) of the three of us, together with a scarf with our totem on. Totally unexpected and damn nice!
So far the Scouting hecticness … now, as previously mentioned I was on the lookout for a new job as I had resigned at Wax for various reasons. After an initial search I found a vacant position over at extrafilm.be as “XHTML/CSS/Ajax Guru”. A few talks later I was offered the job, yet after a long period of thinking about it I didn’t find it to the dream job I was looking for (although the offer was good, not to say awesome) as it mostly would have been .Net development and it wouldn’t be that easy to combine with 3RDS, which has been going nice lately (some upcoming projects).
Then all of the sudden it hit me that the solution wasn’t that far away. In the past, Bart from Netlash had alluded quite a few times that I would be perfect to fit in his team of web all-stars. Given that, I gave him a call and 2 talks later I signed for the position of slicer (transforming a design to a pixelperfect cross-browser XHTML/CSS template) / frontend-developer (javascript/Ajax) combined with the additional back-end programming (PHP).
Now, my last day at Wax was on September 12, and today (Sept 19, Talk Like A Pirate Day!) I started my first day at Netlash. So what did I do in between? Quite simple: as Netlash is located in the centre of Ghent and the urge of moving has always been there, I decided it was time to leave the nest. And boy was I lucky! After only one weekend of searching and watching some studios/tiny rooms/unpractical houses/etc. I found a nice little studio in the Gravin Johannastraat.
St. Elisabethchurch @ Groot Begijnhof (St. Elisabeth Begijnhof)
The cool thing about the studio is that:
- it’s located in a real nice and calm piece of Ghent named Groot Begijnhof/St. Elisabeth Begijnhof (more) (1234 a.d.)
- it’s not that far away from the city center and can easily be accessed
- it’s located at only 400m from my pal (and ex-colleague) Thomas
- it’s located at only 1 km from Netlash 😛
So I signed for the little studio and as of Sept 15, I had the keys in my possession. That Saturday I packed all my stuff from home, tossed it into my (recently repaired) Berlingo and drove off to Ghent. By 11 PM, everything was in the studio, waiting to be put in place. Sunday and Monday were filled with cleaning, installing everything (as a true nerd I first set up my desk, and then the rest), buying some stuff like pots, pans, knives, etc. and Tuesday I drove off to IKEA to buy a lovely couch-bed.
Bed-Couch-Thing
So here I am now, installed and set to go … starting a new phase of my life.
Ciao!
B!
That’s a lot of change in a short period of time. Good luck with your new job & new home!
Changes are what makes life interesting. It would kill me if it would just go on and on and on and on 🙂
Am happy for you that everything worked out that well — karma 😉
Good luck buddy!
allez jong, al het beste ermee hé! en ‘t is nie verre van ons ook nie 🙂
@ wio : altijd welkom om een pint te komen drinken 😉
Loved reading this and feel glad you have the job you wanted .
I am so happy for you all is going so smoothly . Enjoy it to the fullest !
With love , Marian .