“The only constant in life is change.”, said Heraclitus. That sentence echoed in my head when I tried to scan through important events in my life throughout 2023. Some fundamental changes occurred, and luckily, I think they were for the better. We heartily welcomed our second child, I switched team and project at work, and, believe it or not, we bought and moved to a new house again 🙂 Without further ado, let me conduct my annual retrospective of notable life events for the year 2023.
We celebrated my birthday one day after the actual birthday by having a nice lunch in a local restaurant. I must admit we were not strong in the creativity department as we kept visiting the same restaurant chain over and over again 🙂 I was happy to receive a nice pair of winter shoes from my wife as birthday present.
I attended a work-related team building activity in the third week of November 2022, where we had a fun indoor mini golf tournament continued with a superb sushi dinner in Stavanger sentrum. I and my wife (plus our girl) celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary in a restaurant a day later, and we concluded that weekend by visiting Kongeparken using company-sponsored tickets. The weather was good, albeit cold, and I had a lot of fun with my daughter.
We visited Vinterland i Sandnes on its opening day in the last week of November 2022, and my daughter enjoyed herself ice skating on the available outdoor ice rink. She still managed to do it well despite not attending ice hockey lessons anymore. We visited the venue several times until its closing date sometime in mid December 2022.
We drove to a Christmas market in Egersund in the first week of December 2022 to experience Christmas vibes. We watched some shows and enjoyed tasty roasted almonds. The market was quite crowded as we expected.
My daughter invited her school classmates (only girls) to her 6th birthday party at Leo’s Lekeland in the third week of December 2022. They started by eating popcorn and hot dogs, continued with a birthday cake that we brought. Then they enjoyed themselves in the play area. She received quite a lot of presents, and looked very happy. I was happy for her 🙂
On Christmas Eve morning, we took a chartered flight to Gran Canaria, trying to enjoy the warm desert climate for a week. We realized that there were quite many Norwegian tourists, and several restaurants we visited had Norwegian-speaking waiters. I guess it is one of the top destinations to escape winter for many Norwegians 🙂 We went to several children-friendly attraction places, including watching a dolphin show (which I found surprisingly interesting). We returned back to Norway on New Year’s Eve. All in all, it was a nice relaxing winter getaway, although it did not quite fit with my taste for a holiday. My daughter, on the flip side, enjoyed it very much, to a point where she asked to visit the island again. Well, we will see 🙂
Winter season is typically associated with winter activities such as skiing, but since my wife was pregnant, we did not have any family ski trip this time. We even cancelled our apartment booking in Trysil for a ski trip that we planned earlier in 2022. I, on the other hand, hit the slopes several times with some friends. I think I skied (and snowboarded a bit) for four days in total during the winter season. Not much, but enough to keep my body and brain happy 🙂
My daughter performed in a mini-concert together with other children (all cello, viola and violin students at the beginner level) in the fourth week of January 2023, and we watched a children theater show at Stavanger Konserthus a day after.
We celebrated the Valentine’s Day on February 14th by having a nice dinner at a restaurant. The food was good and the ambient arrangement was quite romantic. The only issue was several other couples who sat next to us kissed passionately and used their hands to explore very private areas of their partners’ bodies 😀 The scenery was not very good for our 6-year-old daughter. But OK, it was our mistake bringing an underage child to a restaurant for a dinner on Valentine’s Day. Lesson learned.
My girl joined another mini-concert performance in the second week of March 2023, and I officially joined another team at work one week later. I had enjoyed working in the subsurface area for about 2.5 years, and I thought it was time to try something different, something more on the renewable side of the company’s business. Still developing software, but on a different project. And I was honored to be invited to my last retrospective in my previous team with a nice buffet lunch included in late March 2023.
I joined my wife and daughter (and her friends) watching The Super Mario Bros. Movie at a cinema in Stavanger sentrum in the first week of April 2023. I think it was fun.
On April 15th 2023, our second child, a beautiful baby girl, was born through a natural childbirth. I was thankful that the process was very smooth, and I think my wife would agree. We arrived at the hospital at around 15:30, and the baby was born at around 17:30. My first daughter’s wish came true, as she had been asking for a younger sister. Well, I guess I officially became the most handsome guy in the house 🙂 My wife stayed at the hospital’s hotel for two nights while I and my eldest daughter stayed at home. We returned home together in the evening of April 17th. We became four!
Following a standard practice in Norway, I took a 2-week compassionate leave right after the birth of my second child, while my wife had started her paternity leave earlier (which would then last for about eight months). Since spring came a bit early, I and my eldest daughter took a very short hike close to our house in the middle of my leave, a week after my youngest daughter was born. The weather was surprisingly great.
I attended software craftmanship day gathering at work in mid May 2023, where several colleagues presented some of their latest cool stuff from work. A nice buffet lunch was of course included 🙂
Then came 17. mai, the Norwegian Constitution Day, which is one of the most important national days in Norway. Since the weather was not good (it was raining quite a lot), my wife and baby did not join us celebrating the day in the city center. My eldest daughter joined her classmates parading across the streets of Sandnes sentrum while I witnessed from as close distance as possible without immersing myself into the parade. It was her first experience joining an official school parade.
We visited Vitengarden with some friends in the second week of June 2023. We were just curious to see what were displayed in the museum. The weather was excellent.
My eldest girl joined another mini-concert in mid June 2023, and this time it was aimed to be a practice run for Sandnes Kulturskole‘s annual summer festival concert a couple of days later. She took part in the festival, and performed in Sandnes church together with an existing local children orchestra. She later decided to join the orchestra and practiced once a week for more than an hour.
We drove to one of the company’s cabins in Sirdal for a weekend trip with some friends during the first week of July 2023. The area is more well known for winter sports (i.e. skiing/snowboarding), but we managed to try two summer activities that were offered: mountain cart and climbing. It was fun!
We visited Soma farm in the first week of July 2023, where people could get close to farm animals and children could play. The weather was very warm and the day felt like a proper summer day. It is unfortunate that the farm is now closed to public, so we are happy to at least have visited it once.
We had a relatively long trip to Oslo by car during the last week of July 2023. And since we brought a baby with us, we stayed overnight in Kristiansand to have enough rest and to charge our car. We also stopped briefly in Arendal before heading to Oslo, and believe it or not, we finally had the chance to use Tesla Supercharger (we had always charged our Tesla at home since we bought it). The main reason for this trip was to process our baby’s passport, since physical presence in the Indonesian embassy in Oslo was mandatory. But, of course, we also used the occasion to enjoy Oslo a bit, and to meet an old friend and his family. A bit exaggerated, but I think we discovered our new must-go destination in Oslo: Paradis Gelateria. I am sure my wife could not agree more 🙂 We stayed in Oslo for three days.
On our way back to Sandnes, we stopped again in Kristiansand, but this time for three days. We visited Dyreparken for two days, and Badelandet for the remaining one day, and some friends joined us too. I and my eldest girl tried something different from our previous visits to Dyreparken: we watched Sirkus Jesper and the popular Kaptein Sabeltann show. The latter took place late at night, but it was worth it. I could still see my daughter’s excitement about Kaptein Sabeltann a couple of days after watching that show.
We attended Indonesia’s independence day celebration organised by local Indonesian community in Stavanger in the third week of August 2023. As I had not been very social within the local Indonesian community circle, it was nice to meet other fellow Indonesians at least once a year and ate Indonesian dishes 🙂
On August 30th 2023, we took over our new house. We made a decision to buy a new detached house (enebolig in Norwegian), that was still under construction but almost completed, a couple of months earlier. The rationale behind this decision was to have more space, since we had a new family member. I and my wife’s professions required us to sit (or stand) behind computer screens, so we needed two office desks at home for those days when we had to work from home, and our old house fell short in satisfying this requirement, unfortunately. The moving process was quite tough since my wife had to take care of our baby and our eldest girl could not help much, so we paid a local relocation service to help us. Thankfully everything was fine in the end (without any serious injury 🙂 ). The back- and front-yards are still homework for us, though.
I attended Equinor Developer Conference (EDC) in the second week of September 2023 for four days. I joined an excellent workshop carried out by one of my colleagues in our team at work, and there were several interesting presentations as well. The short talk by Børge Lund during the mini gala dinner was especially remarkable, as he managed to draw a character from his comic series less than a minute live in front of the audience. It reminded me how practice makes perfect.
Paying monthly mortgage for two houses (i.e. owning two houses) in Norway was doable but quite tough for us, so we started the process of selling our old house soon after the takeover of the new one. We used a service offered by a rather well known local house broker, and our old house was out in the market by the fourth week of September 2023. The house was thankfully sold in the first week of October 2023, one day after the public display/open house (visning in Norwegian). We were lucky there were several serious bidders who eventually inflated the final price way above our initial expectation. I guess the effect of our baby’s second/middle name, Fortunata, kicked in 🙂
We were allocated a cabin from my employer in Eigerøya during the autumn break (høstferie in Norwegian), so we stayed there for a week in the second week of October 2023. I had a wonderful hike with my wife and two daughters to the lighthouse one day when the weather was excellent (only I and our eldest girl actually managed to reach the lighthouse). Unfortunately, most of the days were rainy and windy. Some friends joined and came to visit us as well during our stay.
Our eldest girl joined another mini-concert in the last week of October 2023, and she joined her friends in our new neighborhood to gather candies on Halloween day.
Another year has passed, and there were certainly things that I planned to do but did not manage to pursue. But I am very happy to welcome our second child, and we became four. Moving to a new house posed some challenges, but I have so far been happy living in our new neighborhood. Switching team and project at work also meant learning new stuff, which I enjoyed, but became a bit difficult when a newborn baby was added to the equation. I think it is also worth noting that during the month of December 2022 I joined Advent of Code, solving daily coding challenges which I enjoyed. I managed to solve all of the 25 days’ challenges, despite some of them using brute force approach 🙂 I am happy to be in the top 10 list of our company’s private leaderboard, and I bought myself a nice T-shirt 🙂 At last, as always, I am looking forward to another year with interesting adventures ahead.
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