2022

I guess I have not done one of these year in review things in a while. Well, I haven’t done much of anything here in a while. New Year/New Me, so here’s a summary:

• Various health and psychology things, which I won’t go into here, because this is public. Spent a lot of time on various self-improvement schemes, some of which were useful. I also managed to not catch COVID.
• Finally gave up on the battle versus male pattern baldness and having hair. I know, ha ha, middle aged balding guy wants hair plugs, much laughter. Giving up and shaving my head was a difficult decision, and it impacted me more than I could know. And yeah, everyone says “just own it,” but that advice only works if you are psychologically self-confident, and maybe don’t live in a society where hair = power.
• 2,200,380 steps; 1,038.01 miles; Workout streak: 2,522 days. 2021 was 1,872,548 steps 883.23 miles, so good improvement there.
• Weight was… not good. I lost 35 pounds in the last nine months of 2021, and I gained back about 25 of that in 2022. So, guess what my resolution is? (Please, no stupid advice on fad diets. I know what I have to do; I just didn’t do it.)
• I don’t like to talk about work stuff here, so I won’t, but I did get promoted to director, finished hiring my team, and worked on big stuff.
• I sold my land in Colorado. End of an era there.
• Went to Chicago for my sister’s wedding in April. This was my first time on a plane since the beginning of 2020. It was a quick long weekend, and I saw a lot of relatives I haven’t seen in decades. I didn’t catch COVID, although many people there did. I also got to hang out with John Sheppard for an afternoon and do some mall-walking with him.
• Visited Denver for a week in June. I haven’t been back in a dozen years, I think. (2010?) I spent a day photographing the city with my friend Tarasa, and met one of my coworkers (only the third person I have physically met at the company). Lots of walking, took a side trip to Pueblo, and many photos were taken.
• Visited Stockholm for a week in August. This was my first time leaving the country since 2016, and a good test of if I can deal with long plane rides in my fifties. (I can’t.)
• Visited Maui for a week in October/November. Stayed upcountry this time, and that made all the difference.
• I was supposed to visit Indiana for Christmas, but hell froze over, and I decided to cancel.
• Completed a two-year MBA program in five months. Wrote 184 pages, memorized thousands of terms, and I’ve probably forgotten most of it by now, but I have that line on my LinkedIn forever. And I can get into arguments with people about the Federal Reserve, although I now know that anybody who is talking about the Federal Reserve who hasn’t taken a finance class is 100% wrong and most likely financially illiterate, so don’t bother.
• I quit writing in 2021. Towards the end of 2022, I “un-quit” and went back to identifying as a writer, and wrote about 50,000 words, mostly about how I couldn’t write and trying to figure out what I should be writing. I am not in a daily writing practice, but guess what my second resolution is?
• Blogged 17 times here. I need to work on that.
• I took exactly 12,600 photos. This is by far the most photos I have taken in a year. The highest was 3898 in 2011, and 2021 was 3779, with half of that in December. I had the idea that I’d take way more photos, and tried to hit 100 a day for a while, but there were some pretty dead months, and I did not take nearly as many as I wanted on vacations. I’m not sure how much I will do in 2023.
• I had a huge interpersonal drama situation that probably burned up six months of my life. I cannot get into that, and this is just a reminder to myself in ten years that you really need to cut the shit there.
• I don’t know how much I read, but it wasn’t much, except for finance and accounting books, and I really need to not do that.

So my goals are to keep writing, stop eating at Taco Bell, and keep writing. And all things related to writing need to change or get back on track: read more, take more notes, find new things, and write. And write. And write.