Since my last post, the rest of Winter, Spring and Summer went by so quickly, almost concerningly-so.

I visited the US once again for our annual company meeting, and once again spent an additional week in the country – this time visiting some friends in California. Winter hit hard while I was up in the mountains, meaning I got to ski float on the best powder I ever remember experiencing.

After our annual company meeting in D.C. in late February, we said goodbye to the company office. Our company is fully distributed, which still 4 years on people ask me if I'm lonely or unproductive. Overall, working remotely and distributed-ly has been a fantastic experience due to the autonomy of my time, emphasis on outcomes and writing, and colleagues I've formed connections with around the world. This does, of course, come at the cost of those spontaneous encounters or connection of ideas you make with unstructured social time. For that, and to get out of the apartment more, I've started going to a co-working space in Zürich and meeting my one other Swiss-based colleague in three dimensions.

Socializing in our (Swiss) German-speaking region remains difficult, but I'm slowly (mostly through my partner) building up a local network. I've completed my A2 course in June and will continue with a B1 course this Autumn. While I get frustrated with the slow pace of my improvements, it is nice to see that I am making some progress — a reminder to balance motivation with patience.

For trips since February, we've stayed local/regional, including a very nice staycation in May (1st photo below) and a bike trip in early July. While we had to change our bike trip plans more than once due to record-breaking heatwaves, we enjoyed roughly a week in the Alsace region in France (second photo below) and the Engadin valley in Switzerland (3rd photo below), the latter being over 1500m and bringing cool, if not cold, relief overnight.

I've started working on a project in the humanitarian sector, which has been a good sector to reconnect with.