I'm sticking with 'Recently', because 'Every 6 Weeks Note' doesn't have much of a ring to it.

Things have been... busy.

We moved. Our entire possessions were transported 40km across Berlin to the Brandenburg Stadt of Falkensee. It's green, peaceful, quietly prosperous and reminds me (in a good way) of the few years I spent living in the commuter belt of London. In German it's known as the Speckgurtel which literally translates to the "bacon belt". There's a greater-than-evens chance that your average Falkenseer is vegetarian if not vegan, but Quorngurtel hasn't taken off as a term so far.

There's probably a Berlin equivalent to the "if you're tired of London, you're tired of life" saying, but after 9 years and a pandemic, the thrills of living in the party capital of Europe were no long outweighing the downsides. Finding the equivalent space and level of greenery that we have now inside the city would have needed a 7-figure budget at least. The trade-off of an ever-so-slightly-longer and slightly-less-frequent journey to the places that I actually need to get to is worth making.

Despite promises to the contrary, the electrical work in the new house didn't finish on time. Quelle surprise. The entire old system (except the garage and outbuildings) got ripped out and replaced with a completely new installation, done to modern standards. Most of the old stuff dated back to DDR times, with copper-coated aluminium cables, cartridge fuses and a distinct lack of circuits to safely-support the kind of load that we're going to create.

To speed things up and keep the costs down, I ended up doing all the plastering to fill in the channels that the electricians had carved through the walls once the cables were installed. It was fairly back-breaking - plaster is heavy whether it's in the bucket or on the trowel, and most of the time you're working above the level of your head or equally-awkwardly low.

I'm fairly satisified with the end results, once I'd stamped my foot about the way some conduits and cables had been installed. There were some tricky spots to navigate around existing pipework, but some of the initial attempts were more bodged than I was prepared to put up with in a job that I was paying someone else to do. There are some hardware placements that I already wish I'd done differently, but that's the problem in designing a system for somewhere that you haven't lived in yet.

The cellar wasn't finished at the point where we actually moved in, so the first week was spent groping around with torches and tripping over extension leads. Not ideal, but not such a big deal that it was worth postponing the actual move for.

As well as new 415/230V electricals, I got the contractors to install Cat 7 cabling at the same time. Connecting that up wasn't done on time either, so I decided to do it myself, and was glad I did. Punching down the individual conductors onto the patch rack was almost medititive, slotting each cable in place and trimming everything neatly and identically as possible. I wouldn't want to do it for a living, but it was a quiet, relaxing way to spend a Sunday morning, after the panic of the actual move.

At the same time as installing the structured cabling, I've also splashed out invested in decent networking kit. We both live and work online, so I'm justifying it to myself as "tools for the job". Based on various recommendations I ended up going for Ubiquiti, which seems to be commercial-grade equipment at slightly-higher-than domestic prices.

Getting up and running was initially a bit fraught, but that was my own fault for not stopping to read the docs and follow the blessed process. Once I'd realised that, factory-reset everything and started over, it's been both flawless and highly-performant.

Unfortunately the only backhaul connection which is available at the moment is a 250Mbit ADSL circuit, which just about manages 230Mbit flat-out. While obviously I'd prefer synchronous Gigabit fibre, actually 250/230 is enough, at least for our needs. I've yet to notice any buffering or serious jitter, and the Ubiquiti kit means that the wifi is delivering the full 230Mbit throughout the house. Not bad considering there's three floors separated by some serious brick and concrete work.

My passport is now nearly 10 years old and the time has come to get it renewed, before I get caught out by the still-not-expired-but-can't-be-used-because-the-issue-date-doesn't-match-the-10-year-period problem. This is made slightly trickier by not being in the UK - technically I should carry the damn thing at all times in Germany, although a) nobody bothers to do this and b) I've got an Ausweis in the shape of a biometric residence permit card. Right now I've not got any travel plans, so it seemed like a good time to get on with it.

I'll be honest - I was expecting the process to be painful and was avoiding it, but it turned out I was wrong. The only slight wrinkle was getting a photo that the automated checker would accept - it kept rejecting attempts because of lighting and background. I finally decided to override the objections when it insisted that I had my eyes closed, despite them being very obviously open. What really blew me away, though, was the payment process. I would never have imagined a day where the UK Government would accept Apple Pay, still less for a service like passport renewal.

In Germany you're legally required to register with the local authority when you move, so that (among other things) there's accurate stats for population size and therefore budgets. There's been talk of this being an online service for decades, but because each local authority does its own thing when it comes to online services, and there's no way (or willingness, seemingly) of anyone imposing standardised systems, it's all analogue.

In a big, chaotically-run city like Berlin, just finding an appointment to register can take literally months, despite (legally) needing to complete the process within 10 days. In Falkensee, it's not big or chaotic - so the process is rock up to the Burgeramt, take a ticket like you're queueing for cheese at the deli counter, and wait about 5 minutes. It took longer to walk there than the process did end-to-end.