Big Plans

So, over the weekend Rita and myself made a big step. We both sent in resignation letters for our jobs in France! Neither of us likes living in Montpellier and, although Rita’s job is more interesting for her than mine is for me, she wants to have a change of career and is trying to get a place to study occupational therapy in Innsbruck.

For me, my current post-doc hasn’t really worked out the way I wanted it to, and I don’t want to apply for a permanent job with CNRS in France, so I’m going to branch out a bit and try to get some freelance contracting work, either programming or writing (or more likely, a bit of both), spend some time working on open-source and personal projects, and learn to make beer and wine and schnapps!

We’re going to spend the summer at Rita’s parents’ place in Ravelsbach, so as to have a bit of time to configure our brains for a complete change of scene. We have lots of things to do over the summer, and we both have that feeling you get when you’ve made a big decision, that you just want, in some sense, to move on to the next thing. We’ll have three weeks more of work in France when we get back from holiday to clear everything up and get all our projects into a state where they can be continued by other people, then we’ll be packing up and moving here to Austria.

We’re both kind of excited by the whole thing. Even if it does mean that I really really have to learn German properly this time!