Life In 19x19

Joaz Banbeck wrote:I haven't brought her to Colorado Springs. It is a small rural town by LA standards.

Hey! I resemble that remark. There's only 20,000 in the whole county. Now that's rural!

Seriously, I can understand the issues of young kids, shortage of vacation time, etc. Family priorities are important. Luckily we're to that semi-empty nest stage where all the kids are college age and self-sufficient. And I'm lucky to work for a company that rewards longevity with expanded vacation time. So the wife and I are getting out a lot more on our own.

We are beginning to talk about going to Santa Barbara next year, my wife has a sister in Temecula, CA she would love to go visit. And this time I'll get her a non-player registration so she can come watch if she would like.

Joaz Banbeck wrote:I haven't brought her to Colorado Springs. It is a small rural town by LA standards. Very little to do if you don't have a fishing pole or a horse.

Interesting how people can have vastly differing points of view. I know Colorado Springs, having lived in Denver, but would not want to live there because it is way too big. I live about 30 miles from Blacksburg, VA, another college town and home of Virginia Tech, but I only go there for shopping every couple of weeks. it is just too busy for my liking. As for LA, I have only been there once but I hated it: way to big, way too much traffic, took ages to get anywhere and felt very claustophobic. Give me my small, one-traffic-light county in the mountains any time.

Last year, for the very well known family reasons I could not go Groningen although I had registered and payed for it

This year for the first time I managed to resist the temptation of mediterranean vacation with my family and went north to Tampere. The drawback is that now they still are in vacation with the whole family while I am back at my boring work and miss them.

But after all I am very happy I went there. The atmosphere was wonderful. Discussing my own games with extremely friendly pros face to face, attending their lectures, getting to know players from all over the world. That was an experience worth the time and money.
I hope next year I will be able to go to bordeaux, maybe this time with family

Most probably, I'll go to Bordeaux next year, and bring my gf.
In general I think there's a pretty big difference EU/USA since we have about 4-5 weeks vacation and USA only one. And (I don't know about the rest of EU but) in Sweden we can usually use overtime (working more than 8 h/day) to free time, and working late/on weekends typically gives you the right to take free time off x 1.5 or 2 - ie working 4 h on a Saturday, or 5.3 h nighttime allows you to have "vacation" on Monday.
As I understand this kind of overtime is expected to be done without compensation and is "included in the sallary" in USA (which may be parts of the notion here in Sweden that people in USA earn more than we do)
Anyways, this don't really apply to me since I run my own business and can work as much or as little as I want (not sure, maybe there's some laws against working too much but how could anyone ever check that)

My situation is a litle special, due to mainly two things: me running my own company and my gf (by then) studying Swedish and not working and also very interested in going to many European contries (she's Chinese)

/Mats