Kit

Wow, I'm bad at keeping this updated. Sorry.

I am currently in England on "one last" work trip. Hopefully. I'm down to the last 30k on my UK house's mortgage so I have been making seriously good progress over the last two years.

I realised last week that December 2013 will be the 10 year anniversary of the mortgage, which I moved from one house to another in 2007. I am hoping to be able to completely pay it off by that point, but it may be slightly too ambitions (especially when there are other things to invest in - see http://canadiancouchpotato.com/ for an excellent view on intelligent investing/saving - the issue is that repaying my mortgage may not be the most effective *growth* strategy, but it is almost certainly the most effective *cashflow increasing* one).

In theory I am "retiring" in February or March, in order to start (or resume) a CSA box scheme at http://www.maisontuckerhouse.ca/ with my buddy Lindsay from my time as a farm intern in 2010.

So that is incredibly exciting! Nothing has been signed yet, but the agreement is there in principle.

I may also be doing some soapstone carving workshops with my wife at various Ontario Provincial Parks next summer, so next year should be considerably more out-doorsy than this year has been (despite the new house with garden - well, to be fair, this year has been considerably more out-doorsy than last year, so it's all good).

Back to the present moment. Tomorrow I fly to Finland with approximately 80kg of checked baggage. Then on to Hungary. Laptops, printers, and the assorted cabling required to run registration at a couple of small conferences.

The disparity between my normal life (walk to the supermarket, bank, hardware store) and this (taxi to the airport, eating out much of the time) is crazy. I'm quite enjoying it in a funny way - it's nice being with people, where working from home is lonely. The good news is that, once I finally get home, I will only be working from home for 3-4 more months and then mostly free.

Free! At 32 (and a half)! Pretty good!

I think I would like to be in an office for roughly two days a week, with 10 or so people around to chat with, and work on my own the rest of the time - that would be the perfect balance.

Anyway, my current plan is to spend at least a couple of weeks on some kind of road trip in February or March. I am feeling so much more relaxed about things knowing I'm financially fairly sound it's untrue.

That, and I just bought the Fleetwood Mac album "Rumours" (I know - 35 years late!) and it is *excellent*. Good music... makes me happy.

Now, for a hot bath. Ahhhhh, bliss!