Tag: end of year summary

It’s the end of the year, so like I’ve done previously, it’s time for the big dumb summary of the last 365 days. I’m actually doing this a day early, but I don’t expect much to happen in the next 24 hours. Anyway:

• In January, I went to Norway for my birthday. I liked the city, but January isn’t the best time to go, obviously. Had a really good dinner at Mikael Svensson’s two-Michelin-star Kontrast; met a former employee from India I’d never met face-to-face, and wandered the snow a bit in the short winter days. Oslo was a wonderful city, but you might want to go in like July.
• In April, I went to Cambodia. This trip was an extreme mixture of awesome, traumatic, confusing, and amazing sights, all juxtaposed in the most random way.
• In June, I went to Cleveland for a quick weekend and a book reading. I read from a book I still haven’t finished, which I was supposed to finish in 2025, but here we are.[
• In August, I went to Mongolia. I also tacked on a few hours in Hong Kong on the way back. Ulaanbaatar and the nature around it was interesting and strange and a mix of central Asian remote nothingness with a very Soviet-looking city. Had a couple of long trips to the middle of nowhere, and unfortunately got sick halfway through. This was probably one of the most out-of-comfort-zone trips I’ve taken.
• In September, Squeak died. We had her for almost 18 years, and she’d been in a slow decline for a while. This was the first time I’d gone through this experience, and it was incredibly hard.
• Then in November, Loca died. Her decline was rapid and painful to watch, and she was “my” cat, so this one really hurt.  Also having no cats anymore is a huge emptiness for me.
• I also lost my oldest aunt and a second cousin this year. It’s amazing to me that I had 13 aunts and uncles, and now I’m down to three.
• I got my Part 107 drone license. I also got a second drone, a DJI Mavic Air 3s. Of course, now the government has banned new DJI drones from coming in the country, and I’m very paranoid about crashing one of my drones and not being able to get a replacement.
• In December, I went to Wisconsin and Indiana. Pretty uneventful and painless trip, except I lost my DJI Osmo Pocket 3 camera at the University Park Mall and am still pissed about that. (I bought a replacement. I now need to use it more.)
• I started the year working on a sequel to Rumored to Exist, and added this subplot that got far too plotty, so I removed it and set it aside to make another book out of it. I ended up finishing neither of those.
• I shifted to a sequel of Atmospheres I’ve been trying to land for ten years now. Every month, I thought it was close to finishing by the next month. In about September, a confluence of bad things completely shut down my writing, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to escape that.
• I started working on a short book, built around some already-published stories from zines. This was intended to be a quickie thing I could publish by the end of the year. That didn’t happen, but I did keep writing all year.
• All in, my net new total writing in Scrivener this year was 154,288 words.
• I kept up the weight loss. When I started this round in October of 2024, I weighed about 230 pounds. By December of 2025, I was 162. My body fat went from like 35% to 19%. I found that this makes winter somewhat excruciating now, even when “winter” in SF is like 47 degrees.
• I still don’t know how to get any quantifiable data out of Apple Health to say how many steps I took or whatever. I did walk or work out every day. I didn’t regularly meditate. I know my numbers are down, but maybe I should stop tracking this entirely.
• I flew 38,876 miles, 7 countries, a total of 3d 13h in the air. (My record is 2023: 9 countries, 69,316 miles.)
• I took 9,019 pictures, which honestly is way more than I thought. I only took 3,384 in 2024. My high is 2022 at 12,604.
• I had no resolutions last year, so 100% there.

I don’t know what resolutions I have and I sort of don’t believe in the pressure of that, but maybe it’s time. Here are some vague things I want to work on in 2026:

• Finish this “quick” book and get another big book out. And more writing in general.
• I either need to cancel subscriptions or start using them. I have a bad habit of subscribing to self-improvement things and then never actually doing anything.
• I say this every year, but I seriously need to throw out, donate, or sell like half the stuff I own. I’ve slowly been working on it, but I need to make more progress on this. And it would probably help if I got rid of stuff faster than I bought it, so maybe I should slow my roll there.
• Take more pictures. More film. I bought something like 20 rolls of 35mm film for Mongolia and ended up not taking a film camera, so that stuff is just sitting here.
• Fly more. I only flew a few times in March, then did as much as I could in spite of weather in November/December, and that was something like 22 total hours of total flight time. So, more.

Okay, last day of the year, so as I did in 2023 and 2022, time to bang out a summary:

• Started off the year with my very first case of COVID. I was pissed I made it almost four whole years without catching it, and then the Denver airport Centurion lounge did me in. I was lucky to get on Paxlovid immediately, and spent basically two weeks asleep on an air mattress in my home office, watching the movie Moneyball over and over for some reason. I’d planned to go to Vegas for my birthday, but nope.
• Thanks to the time stuck in bed, I released my first album, 0. It’s an ambient synth album and pretty much nobody heard it, but it was fun to do. I recorded the whole thing in Logic Pro, mostly by cutting and pasting notes in the editor and using virtual synths.
• I got Invisalign, which was a huge waste of money and I wish I had not done it. Had to fire a dentist over this.
• I went to Anaheim for work and stayed at Disneyland. It was almost entirely a work thing, but there were some brief reverberations with previous visits, which I wrote about in the link.
• I went to Vietnam. This trip was amazing and difficult and shocking and incredible. I think more than any other trip I’ve taken, it’s had the biggest impact in disrupting my preconceptions about a country.
• I went to Barcelona on a work trip. This was almost entirely work and I only had a brief bit of time to see Spain, but what I saw was interesting.
• I broke my right arm in a stupid fall. I think this threw me off for about a month. No, I didn’t get painkillers.
• I was supposed to go to New Orleans in August, but Sarah caught covid right before we left, so I cancelled.
• In September, I threw out my back in a major way and spent a week on the couch, unable to move.
• In October, based on the above, I made the decision to enter food jail and completely locked down my diet. I’ve lost about 30 pounds since then, but probably have another 30 to go.
• I still walk every day, but thanks to the collapse of FitBit and the stupidity of Apple Health, I have no idea how many steps or miles I walked. It’s probably about the same as last year or a little less.
• I had both an aunt and an uncle die this year. Both were siblings on my mom’s side. The aunt was my favorite aunt and that affected me, but I did not write about it because the whole thing was non-public and weird.
• My 2014 Prius C was traded in for a 2024 Prius Limited.
• I published my 18th book, Decision Paralysis. It’s my second-longest book (100,000 words), and I’m happy I’m finally writing.
• I re-published Vol. 13.
• I wrote maybe 100,000 words between another large book and other random stuff.
• I only published 20 entries here, down from 25 last year, and way down from when I used to post daily. I briefly tried a Substack, but that’s stupid and just another distraction.
• I spent a lot of time, money, and effort working on my mental health. I won’t get into details, but I feel a lot better now than I did 365 days ago. This is my most important and challenging project, although writing every day is a big help with this.

I don’t have any resolutions for 2025. Keep writing. Get everything else out of the way. That’s enough.

I did this last year, so I should keep with it and do another big year in review post. So, in 2023:

• Started the year by going to Las Vegas for my birthday with a bunch of the regular crew. This was a great trip, and good to finally see a bunch of people and have fun.
• Went to Iceland (and London) for a solo trip. Hauled a lot of film camera stuff. The trip started very dark, but by the end, it all came together, and this was probably the most impactful and memorable trip of the year.
• Went to India (and Dubai and Qatar) for the first time for work.
• Solo trip to Poland. Great food. Auschwitz was overwhelming but necessary.
• India (again).
• Went to Singapore on the way back from India, and it was incredible.
• Went to Reno for Thanksgiving. It’s been a while.
• Went to Indiana and Wisconsin for Christmas.
• The travel total was eight countries total, six new, and something like 100,000 miles total.
• I finished an MS in Management and Leadership at WGU. I forget how much I ended up writing for this course, but it was 12 papers and two tests. I wasn’t as into this as the MBA, but it’s done. I started on 4/1 and finished on 7/31, so there’s my summer.
• FitBit and my FitBit scale crapped out on me, but I have Apple Health data and I did work out every day of the year. Steps are 2,568,505 and miles are 1168. 2022 were 2,200,380 steps; 1,038.01 miles, so a bit of improvement there.
• Weight is not good at all. I definitely did not meet that goal of quitting Taco Bell. I’m pretty much back to my pre-WW numbers, so I need to get on that.
• Returned to office, so I’m in SF three days a week now.
• I “un-quit” writing, but got no appreciable work done on anything solid. I have two titled projects that are starting to congeal, but there were a lot of roadblocks in the way on this. I got about 35,000 words into both.
• I “re-published” two of my unpublished books, so there’s that.
• I published two zines. That was a lot of fun, and I’d like to do more.
• I published 25 entries here. That’s eight more than last year, but it’s still rookie numbers.
• I did a lot of writing in Day One. I also published one-off hardcover books of my entries from 2013-2018 which were somewhat depressing and reminded me I’ve been trying to write the same three books for ten years now and making no progress.
• Only took 6490 photos. I got an Sony a6400 for the times when I need a “real” camera but can’t carry the full DSLR. I’m a bit burned out on photography, so not sure how that’s going to play out in the future.
• I gave up on dead malls and tried to take a big step back from nostalgia stuff in general.
• I got pretty much no reading done except for books on management theory, which were not exactly pleasure reading.
• Way more interpersonal drama I can’t get into, which involved taking a months-long break from all social media, which pretty much nobody even noticed, which tells me a lot about the strength in my online friendships and value of social media in my life.

I think my resolutions this year are to try to get writing again (or figure out what writing even is); throw out or donate about half of what I own; stop buying dumb stuff I will never use; and continue trying to get healthy both mentally and physically. And write. And write.

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.

So, 2020. We can all go on forever talking about the horrors of the year: the pandemic, the economy, the job market, politics, and everything else. I don’t want to get into it. I can’t get into it.

Let me try to scrape together an update like I did last year and stick to my facts. I know that’s narcissistic, given everything going on. But, write what you know.

Good stuff:

• I published The Failure Cascade in December. It’s a little longer than the last few placeholder books, but it’s still not the Big Book I wanted to finish this year. Maybe next year.
• That book was 37,565 words, plus I wrote another 122,494 in my morgue project, and a hair over 100,000 in the book I couldn’t finish. So a little more than last year, maybe.
• 31 posts here for a hair over 30,000 words, which was better than last year.
• I edited and revisited all 1600-some posts here, which took me… a while.
• 2,010,005 steps, 2780 floors, 948.09 miles, which is lower than last year. Weight is 5.3 pounds more, but considering what I gained over the summer during lockdown, I’m about ten pounds lower than the peak, so I’ll take it. I also meditated every day of the year. Closed all three rings on the Apple Watch every day. Current move streak: 1791 days.
• No interviews, no podcasts, no stories published. Whatever.
• I wrote the intro and helped publish John’s book Latch Key Kids. Also helped Keith publish The Orphic Egg Caper.
• Only about a thousand pictures taken, which is amazingly low.
• Just took one trip to Vegas this year with Bill and Marc. Managed to go back to Area 51 again. Had vague “when this clears” up plans for travel, which obviously didn’t happen.
• I didn’t die.
• I didn’t catch COVID.
• I didn’t lose my job.

The not-so-good:

• My friend Joel died.
• My Aunt Eva died.
• Ray’s dad died.
• Two people at work died.
• Neil Peart died.
• I don’t even know how many people I know who caught COVID. My sister-in-law, two of my uncles, a few friends, and I can’t keep track of the rest.
• Because my job was locked down and my company is not doing stellar, everyone was working constantly. I started getting up early just to get caught up with a big project, and then that became a regular requirement. I started working weekends, started taking 6AM meetings, 9PM meetings, Saturday meetings.
• At some point (probably after my aunt died) my director told me I absolutely had to take time off, because I’d worked every day for like three months straight. I said okay, I’ll take next week off. An hour later, HR emailed me and told me I had to lay off 60% of my employees the week I was taking off.
• I actually ended up having to lay everyone off twice. They had a round of these “opt-in separations” and then none of the people took it (we’re in a pandemic) so I had to re-lay them off three months later.
• I didn’t know if I was getting laid off. I kept getting invited to these layoff meetings and wasn’t sure until they started if I was there to terminate people or if I was getting terminated.
• I’ve been working from home for ten years, so nothing new there. But it’s been a learning curve for having both of us here at home. And I usually go mall walking on weekends to break up the week, and that didn’t happen anymore.
• I had various health-related stuff of the cardiac sort happening, which is mostly from stress, an unhealthy relationship with caffeine, and whatnot. Nothing drastic, but lots of dumb tests, and I think my days as a carnivore are numbered.
• One of my crowns came off in May, when we were still in extreme lockdown, but my dentist was able to see me and fix it.
• The fires and the air quality were brutal this year.
• This was the first Christmas where me and Sarah were both home (i.e. our home) at the same time, ever. I’ll put this under the bad column because she was really bummed about not seeing her family. (It is the first time I didn’t catch the flu in December from air travel, though.)
• My iPhone 8 blew up (for a second time).
• My 2017 MacBook Pro blew up.
• Taco Bell discontinued the Mexican Pizza.

OK, that’s enough bad stuff. I don’t even want to get into what a cesspool Facebook and Twitter have been all year, or how the whole post-truth era has made about half of my relationships impossible. Let’s put all of that behind us. I don’t know if we can, and the 2021 memes are about to start, but whatever.

The first big thing that’s going to happen in about 21 days is that I will hit a very big birthday. And I won’t be able to do much about it. Maybe I’ll go off into the hills and hike all day.

No resolutions, though. The usual. Try to finish this book, try to stay employed and inch toward retirement, try to write here more and spend less time on FB. Try to get healthy. Try to stay sane. You?

I hate these posts. I hate January 1 and everything about it: the new year/new me shit, the pressure to change yourself into something else overnight, and the fear of taking a brand new, unscratched and unblemished year and driving it into the ditch by eating 16,000 calories of Burger King for lunch.

I did a few things in 2016, so here’s the list:

I released three things in 2016: a zine (Mandatory Laxative #14), a book (Vol. 13), and a joke picture book for The Same Picture of Jon Konrath Every Day.

I had two interviews published last year (here and here) and had parts of Vol.13 appear in Horror Sleaze Trash and Tall Tales With Short Cocks Vol 5. Paragraph Line was mostly dormant in 2016, but aside from my book, we also released John Sheppard’s Explosive Decompression, which is definitely worth a read.

I bought a new guitar as a birthday gift to myself, a Fender FSR Strat. I started taking lessons this fall, but I’m still a total beginner. No real goals here, just keeping at it until I can play barre chords without 4 of 6 strings buzzing.

I took an Arduino class at The Crucible this spring, and it was fun trying to remember electronics stuff from 30 years ago. I didn’t build anything substantial or keep with it and do more research, but it was interesting to do that.

I went to London in May, and took a short trip to Nashville and Memphis in August. Both were decent. I got a new camera before London, and feel like I’m not using it enough. I was also supposed to go to Nicaragua, but ended up cancelling because of work.

The exercise slashline:

• 3,031,167 steps
• 5900 floors
• 1,430.72 miles
• 915,742 calories

It was a frustrating year with writing, with politics, and with my mood in general. The midlife crisis stuff that hit hard in 2015 hasn’t gone away. I need to do something about that. Until then, I’ll waste more time on memes, and try to figure out this guitar thing.

You?

I hate January 1.

It’s a double-barreled hate. First, I have an overwhelming urge to look at what happened in the last 365 days, and that sends me down a horrible nostalgia spiral. That makes me think of what I missed, who is gone, what I screwed up, what I didn’t do, and imposes a thick layer of shame and regret that’s difficult to escape.

But also, the whole “new year, new me” thing cripples me. I feel like I can’t do the same thing I did on December 31, because I need to reinvent myself, do great things, set lofty goals, become healthy. I need to learn new things, start new projects, and instantly become a better person. And just thinking about all of this overwhelms me.

2015 was a shit year, for a lot of reasons I can’t even list here. I seriously had about five years’ worth of bad things happen this year. Health stuff, relationships, work, writing – it all went south in a big way. I managed to almost get out of the deep hole I dug myself into, but in many ways, I feel like 2015 was a wasted year. There’s more pressure for me to not do this with 2016, and find some relief and balance.

I did publish a book. It wasn’t that well received, and my book sales as a whole have completely dried up. But it was a long struggle to get anything done this year, so I’m glad that came out of it. I had a lot of fun making stupid memes on facebook, which was probably my biggest source of joy this year. I walked almost a thousand miles this year. So some stuff happened.

But yeah. Fuck 2015. Looking forward to getting more done in the next year.

For whatever reason, I have not been overwhelmed with this whole change in decade.  I vaguely remember the start of the 1980s, but I think that was mostly because I got the Death Star playset that Christmas.  (And when I got it, my dad joked that I should just leave it in the box because it would be worth more.  And if I would have, I could sell the damn thing now and pay off my mortgage.)  I also remember the 1989/1990 change, mostly because I was home for college, and this girlfriend I had back then came up from Bloomington to visit me, and we fought constantly for the entire week she visited.  And I guess we all remember the whole Y2K thing, mostly because we were all waiting for jets to fall from the sky at midnight, and nothing happened.

This decade change is pretty anticlimactic, though.  I think part of it is the addition of numbers behind that big 20 prefix doesn’t seem to have as much impact.  2012 and 2001 and 2112 and 2010 and 2020 all seem too similar to me.  Another possibility is that I’m so apathetic, I just don’t give a shit anymore.  I remember back when my first car hit 140,000 miles, and me and Tom Sample pulled over on the side of US33 and danced around the car like idiots because all of those zeroes came up at the same time.  My car just hit 30,000 miles, and I didn’t even notice it.  Maybe that’s because it’s just an LCD display now, and not actual dials of numbers.  Or, once again, apathy.

I also don’t make many new year’s resolutions, because all of the big things I do or plan never happen to land on even numbers like that.  But here are some vague ideas of resolutions I may or may not do this year:

1. Not gain back any weight.  I managed to stay below my goal weight for all of 2009, and I need to keep that up.  Actually, it wouldn’t hurt me to lose about five more pounds, but as long as I stay the same pant size so I don’t have to go out and buy more, I’m fine.
2. Publish Air in the Paragraph Line #13.
3. Try to write here more.
4. Try to write more, period.
5. Kill a dolphin with a spear gun from a helicopter.
6. Learn a dead language, and teach it to several of my coworkers, so we can talk about other people behind their backs.
7. Only eat hot dogs at baseball games.  I think I ruined this by eating a char dog at Midway airport, but come to think of it, that was still 2009, so who cares.
8. Memorize one page of a dictionary word-for-word, and then tell everyone I memorized the entire dictionary, and when they ask, I start reading off that one page and everyone thinks I’m a goddamn genius.
9. Be in an emergency situation where someone asks if there’s a doctor because someone collapsed or something, and say “yes, I’m a doctor”, and when they ask me to do CPR or something, tell them I actually have a Doctor of Divinity degree and tell that dead guy to suck it.
10. Keep hand-shaking to a minimum.

I should actually make one of those giant 101 goals lists and put it on here, but these guys are doing a much better job at that idea.