Back on track - chasing titles
It has been a while since I updated this blog. It has always been my intention to continue it, but life got in the way. So this is just a quick update on what happened to me while this blog was in coma.
The most important thing is that me and my wife moved from Northern Ireland to Hungary in 2021. We had a strong desire to live closer to Nature and grow green fingers, and decided to find a place for that in my home country. At the end of 2020 we started to organize the move. It was not an easy time - Covid restrictions were changing daily in Europe, so we could not even be sure that we will be allowed to cross the borders; and when we arrived to Budapest, we had to spend 10 days in a quarantine hotel without leaving our room. (It was a fine test of our relationship - but we passed.) 
After that, we rented an appartment in my mother's town, Siófok, and started to search for the right place to settle down. We did not have a clear idea where in Hungary we wanted to live, but after some hesitation, we decided to go for Baranya County, the region surrounding Pécs.
Pécs is a nice university town, mostly known for the fact that I used to study there. (OK, not really.) Anyhow, I have always liked the place, the landscape is beautiful (lot of green mountains), the people are friendly and land is cheap in the nearly villages. So, we moved there, rented another place, and started a more focused search.
It took us longer than we expected. We rented our appartment for six months only, but ended up staying there for a year. All this moving around, with the constant feeling of temporariness started to get on my nerves a bit, when we finally found something: a half hectare land with a somewhat shabby house on it.
It is a 5k distance from a nearby little town, and is practically in a forest, which means we have a lot of cute animals.
(Cute animals, plus snakes. A lot of snakes. They are a bit less cute, although not poisonous, so I don't mind them, but my wife does. She is from Brazil, the country of dangerous snakes, which means she refuses the concept of a harmless one. She never enters the garage alone, as one snake lives there.)
Anyhow, we moved in in May, and have been working on the house since then, and even started to do some experimental gardening.
But this is a chess blog on a chess site, so let's talk shop: after we moved in, I finally found that I have time and motivation to work on my chess again. As it turned out, our little town has a chess team in the second league (although most of our players are from Pécs), so I joined them. Even better, one of the team members is a childhood friend of mine, who also has ambitions to improve. We started to train together (or rather, we started to talk about how hard we will train very soon. Still, it is an important first step - you need to start somewhere.) 
I find the circumstances here ideal for chess improvement. Or, if not ideal, I don't think they will get any better in the future. It is now or never: time to go for the FM title, and later - if I still have motivation to go for more - the IM title. We will see how far I get. I am quite excited about the idea of starting some serious training and entering the arena again.
Meanwhile, I plan to update this blog weekly, as I will have more time to write, and more chess related stuff to write about. Now I just have to find some self-discipline to do it, and I am good to go...
