What has your life been like since "the old days" of TGC?

[General Ceel]

Yeah, I'm doing another one of those sappy nostalgic threads in a time when we still only have two members, but I do think its worth our time to reminisce enroute to achieving our goal of moving forward. 

So, what have you been up to?

[Danster]

It's tough to know what's meant by "old days" considering how long it's been since its inception!

I was 14 years old when I first posted at the original TGC. In six weeks, I will have a child who is 14 years old! And she's got a young brother and sister, so that's one thing I've been doing. I've done a degree, worked a load of part-time jobs before starting a career in insurance claims that I'm still in, though now more from a software side of the insurance claims sector. I owned a small stake in the company I worked for that got bought out by a big American corporation early last year, so made a little bit of money out of that which helped us do a big trip to Disney World just last month. We're already planning another one for 2025.

[General Ceel]

I was in high school when I first set up TGC, and in college from 2000 to 2004 when the board was really rocking. Around 2005 or 2006 I moved out of the house I grew up in to a town about 30 miles to the North and I've been there every since. In 2007 I got back into running and that went on to define my life right up through 2018, when after having run 100 races and a dozen ultra marathons up to 100 kilometers, I finally burnt myself out. Beginning around 2016 I launched a youtube channel with Bane Nathos, invested in a lot of camera equipment and have been doing that ever since. In the meantime, for work, I spent several years helping to build houses and apartments. As the building part of the company wound down I transitioned into mostly patching, painting and simple upkeep jobs around the various properties of the company. I fully expected to pick up where I left off after the pandemic, but that never happened. They sold off most of the property.

On the relationship side, over the years I've had a handful of bad ones, which did nothing to help with the depression and anxiety I've frequently dealt with for most of my life. So I'm single, no kids, and not actively looking. Its not that I can't find relationships. Meeting the girl was never a problem. I'm 41. Maybe I'll marry one day later in life, but I can't see myself intentionally passing on these twisted genes I've inherited. hehe!

[Danster]

I didn't move quite as far from the house I grew up in. I guess you could say I moved out in 2004 to go to university, but it was only 12 miles away from the village where I grew up, and I was back home during summer and christmas breaks, as well as some weekends! And after I graduated in 2007 I moved back there, though this time with my missus. We were saving up to move out but our plans were bought forward when we found out she was pregnant, so in summer 2009 with our first child due in only a few months, we completed on a rundown three-bedroom, semi-detached house which needed a good bit of work doing on a rather unfancied estate on the edge of the city. Structurally it was find though. It was ok for the three of us, but when our second came along it started to get cramped, so we embarked on our first project sticking a 7 metre by 3 metre single storey extension on the back of the house which opened everything up and gave us a load more space. Then when our third came along we embarked on construction project number 2, this time adding a garage to the side of the house with another bedroom and shower room/toilet upstairs. Then last year and latest project added an entrance hall to the front of the house as prior to the the front door opened to a tiny little 1.5m by 1.5m square space with the stairs immediately to your right and the door to the lounge immediately in front of you. Now we've got a nice space for coats and shoes that the front door opens into.

In hindsight, we were really lucky with regards to the property side of things. We bought in 2009 when the housing market was at it's lowest ebb on the back of the global financial crisis, and then we were able to fund our three projects by extending the mortgage when interest rates were incredibly low. Not sure what it's like in the US, but here you could get a mortgage on a 0.9% interest rate less than two years ago, now you can't get anything much lower than 6%. People are having to deal with gargantuan jumps in their monthly payments.