I'm in the middle of my vacation, and I have been enjoying it so far.
There has been a lot of things going on, so I'm breaking down some of
the highlights below.
First of all, I've quit my job and will be switching to another employer
during September. It was a tough decision, but in the end it had to be
done and I'm glad I did it. It started when my colleague announced that
he would quit in September. We have been understaffed for years now, but
somehow we have been able to keep the ship from sinking and have had a
lot of fun doing it too. But I guess enough is enough, and he had been
offered another job, which he decided to take. This leaves me in a
position where I would be the only Security Engineer left in our
SOC-team, which I would not at all like. With no new hires in sight, I
decided to look for other employment too. I found a new job pretty
shortly after that and announced my resignation too before summer. It
was sad in many ways, because I really like the team of analysts that
I've been working with. But with my engineering colleague gone, I feel
that we would not be able to deliver our services in a satisfactory
manner, and that is what I still think. Hopefully my new employer will
offer a better work environment in that regard. I'm nervous of course,
but I think it will be good for me to try something different. Or
rather, the same thing but somewhere else.
I started my vacation in August, and had a bit of a rough start. I
contracted COVID again and had to spend the first week in isolation
until it had blown over. I felt better towards the weekend, and me a few
friends set off for a hiking trip to Öland. We spent a few days there in
the nature reserves around Alvaret, which is a unique landscape as far
as Sweden goes. We slept two nights in tent out in the reserve and
bathed in the sea during the hot days to cool off and clean ourselves
up. The weather was very hot, which was nice. The unfortunate thing with
Öland is that it is very flat and located by the sea. Which in turn
means that it is very windy. Once we got tired of Öland, we drove back
to the main-land again and headed south to Blekinge, for a few days of
hiking on Blekinge-leden (The Blekinge trail). It was very enjoyable.
The weather was still with us, and we hade a hike of three full days
with great weather and some nice cool nights in the shelters that were
spread out along the trail. One of the shelters were part of a larger
camp-site, and there were a lot of Europeans there during this time.
They were friendly, but a bit quiet. We had a good time camping along
side them. Some came by car and others were fellow hikers following the
trail. When we got back to the start of the trail we were very tired and
worn out. We ate a quick lunch in Olofström, before we headed for home.
That is about it really. I've been doing some work in the dark-room
recently, but I'm currently looking to acquire a new dask for a work
area, since the one I have is really crowded. I also have been looking
at building or buying a new drying-rack to use instead of the
clothesline I've been using so far to dry prints. The prints tend to
curl up (especially fiber-based paper), and I've read some examples of
drying techniques where you squeegee the prints and dry them face down
of trays in a drying rack to circumvent this. It's going to be an
interesting experiment and experience.
