DaedTech Digest: So Are You, Like, Vagabonding Right Now

Hello all, and happy Friday.  As always on a Friday, it’s time for a DaedTech digest.

Last week, I answered a question lots of people ask me: how do you go for months with almost none of your stuff?   This week, though, I’ll answer a simpler question.

So, You’re in Michigan…. Do You Like, Live There, or, Is that Another Place You Travel, or, What?

In the open kimono spirit of these posts, let me talk a little bit about our living arrangements, pre-vagabonding.  In 2007, I bought a townhouse in the Chicago suburbs, which immediately proceeded to become almost worthless.  At the time of purchase, I intended to live there for maybe 3-4 years, but due to the vagaries of the real estate market, we still own that place.

While waiting for it to come back, we bought a lake house in Michigan in 2013.  We reasoned that 2013 was a great time to be a buyer and a bad time to be a seller so we, well, bought.  It was actually around this same time that I left the wage world and become a management consulting doing 100% travel.  So I stopped living in Illinois or, really, much of anywhere permanent.

My wife and I love the lake house and bought it with the intent to own it forever.  The Illinois townhouse is a thing we would prefer to sell (and have on the market, currently).  In that spirit, about a year ago, we actually changed residence and mostly vacated our possessions from Illinois.  So, in the end, we view ourselves as having a lake house and no primary residence.

And we like to spend summers at the lake house.

So, to answer the question, “are we vagabonding or do we live here or what,” it’s kind of complicated.  We’re choosing to reside somewhere because it’s fun, and it just so happens that we own the place.  But we don’t really look at it as a primary residence.

Clear as mud?  If you know us well, you now understand why it’s hard to explain our summer arrangement.  But you’d also know that this is why we love the place:

Picks

• I’ve got to do it again this week.  Come write for us at Hit Subscribe.  We’ve just signed a bunch of new clients, including some that I’ll make public soon that are .NET TDD fan favorites.  So, if you want to write for some awesome dev tools companies, fill out the form.  No blogging experience necessary — we’ll teach you.
• Speaking of Hit Subscribe, we’ve got a Facebook page, on which we’re kind of video-recording our vagabonding and Hit Subscribe-ing adventures.
• I’ve got a new tax prep/consulting firm, and they’re great.  They’re based in Michigan, but can help you anywhere in the US, as evidenced by them helping me with tax obligations in Illinois and Michigan in 2017.  Franskoviak Tax Solutions, they’re called, and they can help with tax prep for individuals and businesses as well as offering tax planning and consulting services.
• I’ve honestly been buried in work this week, doing 16 hour days.  So anything that I’ve enjoyed is a bit of a blur up until right this moment, when I’m relaxing with this tasty Lagunitas beer.

The Digest

• I wrote a post for the Test Environment Management blog that’s a little outside of my normal purview: one about test synthetics.
• Here’s a Freelancers Show episode where we talk about having “chaos clients.”
• And, finally, in one of my research posts for NDepend, I used NDepend to take a more detailed look at the code quality of Autofac.

And, as always, have a good weekend.