Places I Have Lived

I started life as a “military brat”. Therefore, I have moved often over the years. When I was little because the military told Dad it was time to go, and to where. After my parents split, the moves were because mom felt like it, till I was old enough to start moving for University, and then I just kept up the habit of moving regularly, sometimes for love, sometimes for work, sometimes for University (sometimes more than one reason at once) till I got to Sweden and (mostly) settled down.

The posts in this folder summarise where I have lived (page down for the full list), when, and I have started adding some highlight memories of each location (all of which written on 2026-01-23, or later)

What counts as a place I have lived?

It wasn’t easy figuring out what to count, or not to count. I eventually decided that I wouldn’t count a place I stayed at only a few days after arriving somewhere new to live, but instead lump those days in with the first days at my official address in that town. However, I did count major vacations, especially the ones which were in conjunction with a move. In those cases I record the “type of house” as “between homes”. After applying these two rules, the 57 lines in my spreadsheet of places lived condensed to a total of 51 places. Colour coded by country, the graph of my travels looks like this:

For the most part I chose the colours fot this image based on the country’s flag, and took the exact RGB value for the exact shade of a flag colour from https://www.flagcolorcodes.com/.

However, too many of the countries from my list use the basic dark blue, dark red, and white combination to use those colours for all of them. Therefore, I used these variations:

• the yellow from Australia’s aboriginal flag,
• let all of the British Isles be the shsde green used on the Irish flag (as that is where that trip started, never mind that we visited multiple countries on those islands)
• for Norway I took the grey of the spear from the Kingdom of Norway (which flag I didn’t even know existed before making this graph).

Here is the list of colour codes (numbers in parentheses are the RGB values for that colour), in the order that I first set foot in each:

• USA (various states) = dark blue (10, 49, 97)
• Japan = red (188, 0, 45)
• Germany = gold (255, 204, 0)
• Crete = light blue (114, 196, 198)
• Australia = yellow (255, 255, 0)
• Norway = (153, 153, 153)
• British Isles = (0, 154, 68)
• Canada = white (255, 255, 255)
• Italy = green (0, 140, 69)
• Sweden = blue (0, 106, 167)

Multiple childhoods

In the “properties” for the notes for each place I have lived I track both my legal age, and my “extra childhood age”. The latter is a two-part number, where the first part counts which childhood (C1 = 1st Childhood C2 = 2nd Childhood, etc.), and the second is my age for that childhood.

Why count it like this? Because even when I was little, I never wanted to grow up. The year I was 12 years old (the first time), some adults teased me about soon being a teenager, to which I replied “No way! Teenagers are horrid! I am going to enter my second childhood instead!”.

However, while being a child sounded appealing, being a helpless baby again did not! So instead of turning 13 years old, I chose to ignore the digit in the 10’s column, and became 3 years old instead. The following year I turned 4, and so on, till, a decade later I was once again 12 years old.

That second childood was so much fun that I thought it worth doing again. My third childhood was so much fun, I did a fourth, and so on.

table of childhood ages and their years

If I am still alive on 10 Dec, 2068, I will have completed 10 childhoods, the first one of 12 years, and 10 years each for each of the subsequent ones. Sounds like a goal, so long as I keep enjoying them!