Reorientation

I haven't posted a ton recently, and it's because I was getting bogged down by... feelz, I guess.

I struggled with motivation a lot. I was feeling rather listless. I thought it might be because of a new medication I'm taking, and it very well might be, but the long and short of it is that I was just feeling... 😑

It got to the point where I was just sitting there playing Freecell. Which is incredibly out-of-character for me. I'm normally someone who has to be almost threatened with violence in order to play a game. Playing a solitaire card game is really unlike me. Especially one that I used to play on Windows 3.11 ("y'know... for workgroups!"), thirty years and change ago.

Another thing was that as I learned a bit more about France and visas, I started realizing that France just fundamentally does not want us to go there. Its entire system appears to predate the concept of remote work and has not been updated to reflect its existence.

So I'm staring into the abyss, eating a quesadilla, listening to King Crimson, and I think, "am I cooked?"

Because, frankly, I want to continue learning French. I want to live in France. I would like to work for Mistral AI (ignoring, for the moment, the fact that their openings that most suit me require a Master's degree). But damn, France is making it hard for me to do so.

But Spain is the place that makes it easy. And Universidad de Carlos III de Madrid has good degree programs that would appeal to my son. And I do speak a bit of Spanish (un poco), though more New Mexican and not Castilian.

So I think I'm reorienting a bit. My new plan is to find employment with someone willing to pay me via 1099 or some other way while I live in Spain, and use the Digital Nomad visa, and I believe because of recent laws that I'll be able to export/import my wife with me (that's kind of important). My son, being 18, will need a student visa.

(Yes, as you can probably tell, I really need to do a lot more research here. But my wife is more of the research type, and she's already decided she's drawn to Bilbao, so things are looking good.)

So now I'm focused on learning French but also investing a little less effort (~30 min/day) in Castilian.

And I'm still working on relearning calculus. I also have a plan for maturing and enriching my ML infrastructure skills. I need to start working through LeetCode again in Python to build my fluency and comfort with that language, which I've frankly neglected. And I need to exercise more consistently (I've been spending ~30 min/day rowing and lifting MWF). And I need to internalize my cookbooks, because I don't intend to take them with me but I hate to give them up 😓

So what the hell am I doing here? I have work to do!