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Italian Citizenship | |
July 21st, 2018 | |
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Today I am officially an Italian citizen. I went though an | |
extremely long process to claim my citizenship via a process | |
called jure sanguinis. I proved, in essence, that I have always | |
been an Italian citizen by way of birth since my ancestor who | |
immegrated had children before becoming naturalized. Thus, his | |
kids were born as Italians on foreign soil. | |
My son also has Italian citizenship as a result, and we're going | |
to file for my wife to get hers via marriage. I'll be getting | |
a second passport soon, and when the dust settles, we'll be | |
leaving the United States. | |
If you read this phlog, you probably already know that our | |
destination is Iceland, which will allow me residency now since it | |
is part of the Schengen Agreement, just like Italy. Moving to | |
Iceland as an American is a giant pain in the butt, but as an | |
Italian it should be quite simple. | |
This made my whole day, obviously, but it also helps me out in | |
some bigger stress areas. I've been stressing about what to do | |
next in my career. I have an opportunity to potentially move into | |
a CTO role with a startup, which fascinates me and would challenge | |
me quite a bit. It would also be an increased investment on my | |
time, and I already work a lot. The job I'm at now is wearing on | |
me more and more, and I don't see it as sustainable for very much | |
longer. The move to Iceland represents a refocusing of priorities | |
off of work and onto life. I'm planning on taking a significant | |
pay cut, living more simply, and focusing on the family and | |
hobbies. Since that timeline is finally "for real", it means that | |
my current work troubles have an end in sight. That is powerful. | |
While I finish getting all the papers in order for the family, | |
we'll also be selling our house and moving into a much smaller | |
apartment. We'll get rid of most of our things, place most of the | |
leftovers into storage, and live on what we intend to ship. Once | |
all that's in place, I'll be quitting my job, heading to Iceland | |
on my own ahead of the family, and we'll live off the house sale | |
money until I can find a new job, get us a new apartment, and | |
arrange to move them over and meet me. | |
I'm utterly thrilled! | |
Oh, if any of you reading this are Icelandic, live or know someone | |
in Iceland, or in any way could help me find something | |
code-related to do in Iceland to get us settled I'd be extremely | |
grateful. I run a technology team of web developers, front & back | |
end. I also act as the digital strategy lead (pharmaceutical | |
marketing) and head of analytics & reporting. I can code in JS | |
extremely well, and prefer using vue, but can learn whatever. My | |
php & python skills are a little rusty, but I can jump back into | |
that in a heartbeat. Ruby? I guess I could do that too. I'm not | |
much of a windows development guy, though. | |
Need a programmer? Need someone to run a dev team? Need an | |
analyst? I'm also good at balancing stuff on my chin! |