At the end of last month I was given notice of early contract termination from my current client, so I am currently working out my final month of full time with them. Without a regular income, no mortgage provider will lend. And without a mortgage, I cannot complete this house build. Indeed, as self employed people get no unemployment welfare benefits in Ireland, we’ll be living entirely off savings aka house building fund. So it would be imprudent to begin building a house in any case until more money is found.
As much as this sucks, this is not a terrible time for this to have happened. Had we been just before first fix drawdown, we would have been in deep doo doo because we’d be out of cash to proceed the build AND out of cash to stay alive, and the banks here are known to not issue further drawdowns until you restore regular income. That would be the single worst time possible to lose regular income, and losing it now is very far from the worst time possible.
All that said, it is yet another delay one actually caused by me this time and I’m mindful that planning permission will expire in 2027. We need to get everything to wall plate level by then, or we are truly hosed.
My field of work has been in recession for about eighteen months now. It has been a constant story of headcount reductions throughout my industry with very little hiring especially for fully remote workers like me. I do not expect to gain new employment at an income level sufficient to get the mortgage I need (Ireland caps maximum mortgage to 3.5x annual income) in the next twelve months given the state of things. So there will be a period of unemployment – normally a welcome thing for me, especially given I have been working for eight years straight without a break which is unusual. But in the context of building a house, it isn’t helpful.
Given the near term unlikeliness of finding new fully remote work sufficiently well paid, I have come to an arrangement with my current client that I should remain available to them at short notice until Autumn which means I am not available for new full time employment until then. This guarantees that I will have the summer to clear a large number of backlogs which have built up during the past eight years of working without breaks. This post will be listing that priority queue of stuff to get done now I finally have the time to get them done.
1. Lose weight
Sitting in front of a computer all day long tends to add body weight especially as you age. I had been 65 kg or so before I went to St. Andrews, and I was 72 kg on exit due to too many fine dinners (I mean that quite literally – I came into some inheritance in my final year there, and much of it went on some very excellent restaurants with intelligent and interesting female companions, a very worthwhile use of that money). Working for BlackBerry in Canada took me to my heaviest ever, 86 kg and I found it hard to shift on return to Ireland in 2013. That led to blood pressure related health issues, so I tried all the usual things such as diets, more exercise etc all to no avail over the next few years.
I had to take a year off earning after the birth of my son in 2016 as my wife needed me to be home. This gave me the opportunity to properly focus on losing weight which now succeeded given I had the time to do it, going from 86 kg to 81 kg by Feb 2017, then to 78 kg by April 2017, and then to 74 kg by Sept 2017. I got it as low as 73 kg, but I never reached the 72 kg I had leaving St. Andrews. In any case, all my blood pressure related issues disappeared, and I was much better off generally at the lower weight e.g. climbing stairs no longer causes you to puff.
I did a good job of keeping the weight off after that not rising above 76 kg until covid, when it piled on again not helped by being laid up in bed by covid for four months. I have failed to shift that weight since 2022, and I’ve been between 80 and 83 kg for the last three years. Blood pressure related issues have been oscillating in the background reminding me it’s not wise to be this heavy. I need to get back towards 75 kg if I am to remain healthy long term.
Now I have the free time to properly commit to it, I intend to lose as much weight as I’ll be allowed to. It greatly helps if I can (a) sleep as much as my body needs so I’m not tired (b) not have to keep sugar levels up throughout the day so I can concentrate and (c) I have the time to get in far more hours of daily exercise instead of the quick daily 4000 steps I might grab around the park if the weather permits when I am working full time.
Given I’m a good bit older than last time, 73 kg is probably unrealistic as my metabolism will have slowed. But we’ll see how it goes. I’ve got another two weeks of paid work left, then I intend to work hard on weight loss.
2. Do stuff with the kids I couldn’t normally do
I’ll be on morning childcare this summer as usual, but normally I can’t go too far or do too much as I’d need to be back home to start work. Well, not for this summer!
They’ve got camps throughout the summer for varying weeks, so there is actually only one week where I have all three at once and for that I think I’ll take them to London during the weekdays. I’ve often said that we ought to. Now I can. So we shall.
There is only one other week where I have the elder two only so I think I’ll take them to Amsterdam that week. We can do older stuff that Julia is too young for which interests the elder two. We might also meet up with their Belgian godparents. Why not!
(The reason ‘why Amsterdam and London?’ is because those two are the only two with affordable direct flights from Cork airport. There are direct flights elsewhere, but they are not cheap. Actually, I lie – there is also a cheap direct flight to Milan, and I keep meaning to go but I’ve never been)
Those will be the standout weeks, but I expect now that I don’t have to be home by a deadline that we’ll be taking a lot more day trips and seeing how the day goes. Ireland is a tourism superpower, very few places on earth have the consistent density of tourist stuff that Ireland does. We’ve not exhausted what’s within an hour’s drive from us in my lifetime, despite our best efforts these past ten years. Ireland is very, very, very good at tourist stuff. If I can even drive ninety minutes away, it opens up a bonanza of more stuff to see and to do. I intend to make use of our very fortunate country of residence.
3. Move ISO standards committees
This June’s WG21 standards meeting will be my last. I gave it seven years of my life during which I achieved absolutely nothing. Not one of my proposals got anywhere. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I think that more on the C++ standards committee than on me. They have become very detached from reality recently, and it doesn’t help how much industry funding for C++ has simultaneously shrivelled either.
I’ll be taking my family with me to that June meeting, which is in Sofia, capital of Bulgaria. I’ll say goodbye to all the many excellent people I got to know during my years of service there. I’ll be moving on to the WG14 standards committee whose next meeting is in Brno, Czechia in August. There I expect to present three major feature proposal papers. Let’s hope I am far more effective at the C standards committee than I ever was at the C++ standards committee.
Now I’m free of work contracts restraining my time away from work, I intend to resume presenting and teaching at conferences. I expect to submit a talk proposal for ACCU in Bristol for April 2026. We’ll see how it goes.
4. Clear project backlogs
I only have nine weeks of summer left after all the above! But I very much intend to clear all the partially or nearly finished prototypes and projects for the house.
The highest priority of those is the 3D services layout plan. I’ve got ventilation and plumbing done. I have the wiring for one bedroom done. TBH, it’s very tedious work, I keep finding excuses to not work on it. But getting it done would save very significant time later on, so it’s highly value adding work. I just need to make myself get it done. Once it is done – and especially because it’ll be an accomplishment to have gotten it done – I don’t doubt there will be a post here about it as a show and tell with pictures.
There are several other projects I didn’t fully finish – the blind automation was not fully debugged, as an example. Yes it works, but it had quirks. Those need to be debugged and fixed. Ideally a blind should be put into long term testing too, make sure it’s truly bug free over months of testing. If unemployment continues to stretch out, I can start work on ESPHome assemblies e.g. the automation for the thermal store, or the automation for the sauna or the underfloor heating. There is plenty of work I can do now so I don’t have to do it after the frames are up.
Anything else?
There is a temptation to try more, do more, begin more now I have the freedom to do it. But I must be realistic – I will have to probably return to full time work in the Autumn. Starting anything new – as attractive as that is – doesn’t make sense as a result.
Maybe by the Autumn my builder might actually want to build me a house by then more than eighteen months since we shook hands on it? Who knows. If so, everything will hang on the quote he gives me. If I can afford to get that house watertight and still leave a sufficient cushion for us to live off in case my unemployment stretches on, I’ll probably go for it. If his quote would make that cushion too thin, I’ll just have to hit pause for now and hope sufficient new income turns up soon to reenable the mortgage application.
Things could be better. But things could be very considerably worse too. I cannot complain.
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