Our life in 2021

After the birth of our daughter in 2007, I started sharing New Year wishes in a little video.
Creating such a video is both one of the nicest and hardest parts of the year.

It’s nice because it forces me to look back at all the pictures we took. Automatically it makes me reflect on our past year.
It’s hard because I always try to link pictures to the song. Oh and selecting a song, with the kids growing older, that increasingly becomes harder.  In the past, I used to start pre-selecting pictures in November. This year the song was only selected on the 18 of December…
Instead of 2 months of working in the evening, I spend a full week of holiday on it.
The good news is, the older the kids get, the more they get involved. So it becomes even more of work-life fusion

Let’s look back at what the year that 2021 brought us…

  • Joppe passed his first year at university. Since March 2020, the University of Ghent has offered online videos for most of its courses. This means Joppe did most of his courses from home. Not the ideal way to spend ones first year at university. Yet that did not stop him from passing his exams.
  • Although we were very careful, all wearing masks and limiting contacts, Corona did enter our house in September. Luckily that was just after everyone had already two shots of vaccines. My partner and one of the kids were ill for a couple of days. They both stayed in their rooms and separated from the rest of us. Luckily our house allowed that.
  • At the start of the year, I published my book about constructing a house in the garden.
  • My godchild lost his father at the start of the year.
  • My best friend (from when I was a teenager) lost his sister, as I had spent many holidays with his family, it felt like I lost a friend or maybe even a sister.
  • We sold our second car. While we are all in lockdown, and with the kids being teenagers now, it felt the right moment to start living with only one car.
  • At some point it looked like both my mother-in-law and my mother would need surgery this year, with corona putting pressure on the healthcare system in Belgium, it was not sure this could happen.
  • No family holiday this summer. We did not want to take a risk.
  • Bent is studying to be a chef, and he worked this summer in Talloor d’Or
    ==> One child in university and the other started working, two big milestones for this family.
  • This summer was also 30 years ago I burned down my parent’s house. So we did a little event to remember it.
  • On a personal level when I worked at home I worked on my walking desk. So far I made 8.347.225 steps this year. That is +/- 900.000 steps more than last year.
  • I paid a lot more attention to my health. Although that already started in 2020, I was able to lose 10 kilos in 2021.
  • Working at home, also “inspired” to experiment with a beard and hair. You can see the result of different stages in the new year’s video.Community wise:
  • After three years of collecting tips, I finished the tips from the trenches book and I released also a paper version.
  • We did an agile week at my major client, where I invited some agile friends.
  • Thanks to all the remote events, I was able to follow a lot more events than most years.
  • I spoke at  some of them.
  • I was the track curator for Scaling agile beyond one team, of the Scrummaster summit
  • Jimmy Janlen recorded an interview with me talking about work retrospectives
  • As we are now in a remote and hybrid work, I started collecting tips on that.
  • I revamped my 10-year-old personal agility course.  That will become available again in 2022
  • I blogged about both the concepts of an after-party and a pre-party this year

==> Writing all of it down, makes me realize it was a busy year. Most of this community work I was able to do because I won 2 to 3 hours of not having to commute each and every day.
And the community things are what gave me so much energy and kept me sane since March 2020.

Just like other years, I hope to turn this into a conversation much more than a communication. So tell me, what are your achievements from 2021?