For each of the pages showing places I have lived over the years there is a set of metadata, or properties giving more information about the place and my relationship to it. These properties are:
country
Country is the most straightforward metadata category for the Places I Have Lived part of my blog, as it simply records the country in which a give home was located, or, for those times in my life where I have been travelling for a time between one home and the next, which country or countries I was travelling in. Note that this property is also used for my daily posts in the Journal part of my blog, to record which country or countries I am in on a given day. Therefore, filtering by country will get many more entries than just the list of where I have lived, if one doesn’t also filter for record type (Places I have lived vs Journal).
So far (as of 2026-01-24) the list of countries in which I have lived (or spent extended time visiting (e.g. a longer trip than just one SCA event)) includes:
| Country | total years there | % of my life there |
|---|---|---|
| USA (various states, mostly Alaska) | 31.3 | 53% |
| Sweden | 15.0 | 25% |
| Australia | 5.4 | 9% |
| Japan | 2.9 | 5% |
| Germany | 1.9 | 3% |
| Italy | 1.4 | 2% |
| Canada | 0.8 | 1% |
| Norway | 0.2 | 0.4% |
| British Isles | 0.2 | 0.3% |
| Crete | 0.1 | 0.2% |
| Total | 59.13 | 1.00 |
type_of_home
The property type_of_home records what sort of living environment I had for each place I lived.
- house: by far the most common is “house” which term I used for all free-standing single dwelling houses I have lived in, but which I also used for the one time the house was a duplex, sharing a wall with a single neighbour, because in all other ways it felt like living in the house, complete with needing chores like mowing the lawn.
- apartment: sometimes I have lived in an apartment building, with my space being self contained with my own kitchen, bathroom, sleeping, living, and storage areas.
- dormitory: a few times I have lived in student housing provided by the university, and have put them all in this category, never mind that some of them involved a dormitory situation with no kitchen provided and a need to take common meals in a cafeteria, and others were apartments with a shared kitchen for a handful of students to do their own cooking.
- tent: the summer I spent in the Brooks Range doing fieldwork I lived in a dome tent. I have also spent a great deal of time camping at SCA events in a pavilion, have not broken those out here, as they were weekends to 10-day events while living in a house or apartment. This section of the journal tracks only places I have lived for longer than that.
- between homes: On multiple occasions moving has involved some weeks of travel visiting people and places before arriving in the new place I would be living. These are tracked here, each as a single entry, even if the travel involved multiple countries. One of these was the time I spent in Australia waiting for my permanent visa to move to Sweden to be approved, most of which I spent living in a single house, but I still tracked it as “between homes”, as it wasn’t my house, and I was living out of a suitcase.
lived with
Under the heading “lived with” I record the sorts of relationships I had with the people I was sharing a home with (or travelling with, or visiting whilst travelling). In the context of that field, the terms are defined thus:
- Family = people I am related to (or people my partner is related to)
- Partner(s) = friend in a romantic relationship with me, with whom I am sharing a home at least part time
- Friend(s) = friend with whom I am not in romantic relationship, but with whom I am sharing a home or travelling (in some cases, this is a former partner)
- Housemate(s) = someone I didn’t really know before we wound up sharing a home for a time
- Alone = I didn’t live with anyone just then (sometimes it was only for a portion of the time spent at that home, which is why it may appear in conjunction with one of the other categories)
my_legal_age
The age at which I moved to or from any new home was calculated in a spreadsheet by subtracting the start from the end date for each location. Many of these dates are the exact date in which I moved into our out of a given home, but some of the earlier ones are guesses placed in the middle of the appropriate season, but the totals are accurate enough. This property includes the word “legal” because this is the age that governments see me as. This is in direct contrast to the way I think of my age, which is in terms of which childhood I am currently enjoying, or my “extra_childhood_age”
extra_childhood_age
Back when I was still little, in 1978 to be exact, adults started teasing me that I would soon be a teenager. I thought teenagers were horrid creatures (as that is how they were depicted in many books I had read), so I would reply “Nope, I will enter my second childhood instead!” Since I thought the best parts of childhood involved the independence to run and play and do pretty much what I liked, and babies can’t do that, I applied childhood logic, and decided that since the teen years start at 13, the logical thing would be to count Childhood number 1 (C1) as ages 0 to 12, and then have Childhood numer 2 (C2) start with age 2 and continue up to age 12 again. This meant it would be easy to keep track of how old I was. If other people born the same year I was were 15, then I was 5, I could just ignore the 10s place for most of my second childhood—only the last couple of years would be more complicated, as I would turn 11 when they turned 21, and turn 12 when they turned 22, but by then I would be able to keep that straight.
This worked very well for me, and I really enjoyed ny second childhood. When it wound to a close I opted to start my third childhood (C3), using the same logic to calculate my ages, only now I turn 3 when my contemporaries turn 23, and 11 when they turn 31, and so on.
Life is ever so much fun, especially when one keeps one’s childhood active, so I have been starting a new childhood every decade, and am now (on the day of writing this, 2026-01-25) in the ninth year of my sixth childhood (C6). In December I will turn 10, but everyone else who was born the same year as I will be turning 60. I can tell you that 60 doesn’t really feel plausible, and 10 really is a better match to who I am and how I am feeling. Therefore, I assume that in another few years that I will start childhood number seven (C7) exactly as planned.
Therefore, I have this property side by side with my “legal” age, so you can compare how old I feel with how old the government thinks I am for any given place I have lived. Note that changing from one childhood to the next usually makes my end date for the home I was living in just then look younger than the beginning age. However, I use the prefix C1, C2, etc., to show which childhood the age applies to. This is why I spent about nine years in house 13. Anchorage, Alaska, Lovejoy Dr. 1988, but I moved in at age C1:10.4, and moved out at C2: 9.3. Likewise for the nine years in house 49. Rutviksreveln, Sweden 2012 - 2021 I moved in at age C5: 5.9, and moved out at age C6: 5.0. These are the two houses in which I have lived the longest. It will be interesting if I ever spend so much time in one house that I change childhoods twice while living there.