I’m always spontaneous during my weekends, so I’ll, possibly, be discovering Estonia or even Europe. I’m a big fan of learning new things, so, definitely, I’ll learn Estonian and another other language. A fan of walking and hiking, I’ll walk around and discover the smallest and most beautiful things around Tallinn as well. Summing it up, I’ll have more free time to do whatever I want, like and enjoy <3.

My success or progress is always measured by my happiness, hitting goals and living my dreams, as living here.

I have been in Estonia for 6 years and I’ve been married to an Estonian for 15 years and I tried to learn Estonian 3 times, unsuccessfully. The previous times I tried during work time, companies were providing courses, but as it was during work time, plenty of times I needed to prioritize between that and work, and work won many times which caused that little by little I stopped. Then, in the evenings or weekends I wanted to be with the kids or doing sports, so never got to try there because of a lack of time, energy and priorities. Well, I don’t have an excuse anymore for having Fridays off. I‘m very bad with languages, that’s why I thought a lot about committing to it or not, but the thing is that I feel terribly sorry when I go to visit my wife’s parents and I cannot talk to them. Especially with the father, who is a handyman and we share a lot of interest in building stuff. I never managed to have a proper conversation with him.

I think it’s time to set a goal. Use the Fridays for intensive Estonian courses (time is not a problem now) and commit that by the end of the year (6 months) I will be able to manage casual conversations with my parents in law and any other Estonian.

Quality time with my family. Working full time, having two kids and being someone who just loves me-time, can be tricky. Sometimes, the weekends are even busier for me than the work-week itself and very often, practical household and errands related activities take proportionally more of it than I would like. Therefore, I am over the top happy to have one additional day off every week. On Fridays, I will cover the home “to-do list” and take time for myself – fill my cup by reading, working out, visiting the SPA or planning a lunch with a friend I have not seen for a while. This helps me to be more energized, spontaneous and happy during the weekend when I spend time with my family. Having two full days for my family allows us to take more carefree quality time for wandering around the forests and hiking trails, planning weekend getaways and other things that bring us together. It does not always need to be an activity – being present and not thinking about the things that need to be done is a gift itself. 

Spending time with my kids and family is a reward difficult to measure. To have a tangible goal – I will take photographs and create a yearly memory book with the pictures and stories from our time together.

First ten years of my career I used to work as a software developer, switching later to less and less technical specialities, while still doing some pet projects in my spare time. Several years ago a friend told me that there appeared a cool new kid on the block, a programming language called Julia, and suggested that I needed to learn it for sure – because of the name. I also thought it was a cool idea, but of course the priority of this undertaking was not really high enough to give it proper time in a busy life, so I never started it. I learn a lot for my profession, but my technical skills have been degrading all the time and I really have been regretting this, as programming was my passion for many years. So now I am going to use this great opportunity of one more free day to accelerate my learnings in all professional areas overall and to finally start learning the programming language with such a wonderful name 🙂 

Well, I expect to be no less than an expert of Julia programming language by the end of 2022 🙂