Tag: year in review

Another year has ended. Hello, 2020!

On By StevenIn Life At Home16 Comments

As 2019 ends and we enter the roaring 20s, it’s time for my yearly wrap-up and review post. This was an eventful year for me, with the passage of my father and a significant job change that I haven’t really talked about on the blog.

It’s also the closing of a decade, and for me, that’s much more momentous-  at the start of 2010, I owned a condominium in South Florida, lived with my girlfriend and her adorable cat, and had been with the same company for eight years.   I stayed with that same company until they dissolved in 2016, but during that time, they sent me abroad, and I worked for them in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Bavaria.

At the start of the 2010s, K and I split up amicably and I short-sold my condo.  I moved into my brother’s spare room for a short while, then I began a string of moves that would take me to Germany and back.  I started this blog, visited twenty-seven new countries, and saw countless concerts and musicals.   I dated other people after K, and stayed with someone for about four years who ultimately wasn’t right for me.   I’ve been single since that relationship ended, and I have no interest in changing that status- I’m not entirely closed to the idea of love, but I’m not looking for it either.  As long as I have friends to go with me to concerts and cons and restaurants, I’m doing just fine.

At the end of 2010, my newest niece was a newborn, and now she’s an adorable nine-year-old lunatic-smartypants.  The lunacy runs in the family, and it’s entertaining as hell to watch my brother coping with fatherhood.  My sister and I have started an annual tradition of taking a trip every year during her summer break from teaching.  This started when I was overseas and we went to Rome and Venice together, but in recent years we’ve taken trips to other places we hadn’t been like Boston and Philadelphia.  The rest of my very large family has spread geographically, in interesting ways.  My sister’s branch of the family all moved up to Orlando before I moved back up, and various aunts and uncles all moved from northern climes down to Florida.  Some of my cousins are closer than ever before, and some are further away.

In the past ten years, I’ve strengthened and reinforced some of the deepest friendships of my life, and I’ve made many, many new friends all over the world.  I’ve traveled extensively, and I’ve seen things that have enriched my soul in ways I can’t even fully quantify.   I would call the past ten years a wildly successful part of my life.

theycantalk.com is really great! go there now!

Let’s get back to the regular year-in-review stuff.  I started doing goals instead of resolutions last year, after realizing that resolutions are kind of pointless and they never last the entire year anyway.    How did I do on last year’s goals?

2019 goal – Be healthier: Eat better, sleep more, and get some damn exercise.

I did ok on eating better, but my sleep and exercise habits are still basically rubbish.  I let my gym membership lapse this year, because when I do work out, it’s either in the apartment gym or at home.

For 2020, I obviously need to keep moving forward on this one.   Working from home warps my sense of what time and what day it is and getting out of the house regularly helps recalibrate that.

2019 goal – Travel more: I’ve decided on a try to make at least three out of state trips and at least one international trip for the year.

I didn’t make it out of the country this year, but I flew to New York three times, as well as trips to Dallas, Philadelphia,  Chicago, and Washington DC.  I’d call this one a success despite the lack of international travel.

For 2020, I still have no International travel on deck, but I already have plans for a few out-of-state trips.

  • My cousin is getting married in the mountains about forty miles from Portland, so I’m going to spend a few days in PDX before the wedding.  After the festivities, my sister and I will be taking our annual summer sibling trip by going to see Seattle.  (We’ll already be on the left coast, so it makes sense to try to fit that visit in while we’re already most of the way there.)
  • I’ve got tickets to a concert in Nashville later in the summer, so I’ll be checking out that city as well.
  • For the first time since 2003, I plan on going to DragonCon in Atlanta.
  • I almost pulled the trigger on airfare to the Waikiki Spam Jam (I’ve wanted to go for years,) but my Portland/Seattle trip will eat a lot of time and I don’t want to ridiculously overdo the time-off requests at my job.

2019 goal – Feed my inner introvert: Spend more time with books and less with little screens, whether they be my phone or my television.

This was a mixed bag.   I read enough books to meet my arbitrarily chosen Goodreads reading challenge goal.  I had a significant decrease in screen time,  but I still watch too much television.   I have spent lots of quality time on my own, though, and I definitely not let my inner introvert starve this year.

For 2020, I will set the same Goodreads goal and keep reading for pleasure.  I will try to clear some of the things loaded on my Kindle before acquiring new titles.   I will try to reduce the amount of television I watch.

The networks have been helping me out by not making too many new shows that I actually want to see.  And also by making shorter seasons for the things I DO want to see. The Mandalorian’s first season was only eight episodes.  Watchmen wrapped up with nine episodes.  I feel a lot less guilty about a show that only eats eight or nine hours out of the year than one which runs 24 episodes, with a third of that being filler.

2019 goal – Write more in this blog.

This was an utter failure.   I only wrote four blog posts all year, despite having plenty to talk about.

For 2020, I have a more specific blog goal than just saying “write more.”  I am setting myself a goal to do a minimum of 52 blog posts- that’s one per week, with this post serving as my first one.  If I have a busy week and can’t get a post out the door, I will have to double up the following week so that I don’t fall behind.  If I manage to do better than 52 posts, then that’s groovy too.

2019 goal – Listen to more music, live or otherwise.

I did really well on this-  I started the year off with Hamilton on their Orlando tour stop, and I followed that up with the Boston Pops, the Fixx, Waitress twice, Fiddler on the Roof, Aurora, Muse, Alice Merton, Tom Jones, Weird Al, Information Society, Hugh Jackman, Howard Jones, Men Without Hats, A Flock of Seagulls, Carly Rae Jepsen, Queen + Adam Lambert, Billy Joel, Bishop Briggs, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, Alice Cooper, Dennis DeYoung, Night Ranger, King Princess, Sara Bareilles, and Beetlejuice on Broadway.  And that’s just the live stuff- I also listened to hours of recorded music.

For 2020, I realized that I don’t need to set a goal for something that I am already compelled to do.   I’ve already purchased tickets for ten or eleven shows through this summer, and I’ve got another eight or so on my radar with loose plans to go to them.    Music is as vital to me as breathing, and I don’t really need to set a conscious goal to do either one.  I plan on buying a new gadget or two sometime soon to improve the soundscape in my apartment as well.

2019 goal – Let go of rage.

I am much improved in this area, although I still find it challenging at times.  The passage of time helps a lot- the things that were a source of anger for me in 2018 are all well into my rear-view at the close of 2019, and I had a few perspective-setting events throughout the middle of the year, like the death of my father.  I also made a change this year from a frustrating and unsatisfying job into one which is much more challenging and enjoyable.

For 2020, I just need to continue on my path toward being centered and easygoing.  I’ve kept an active social life with local friends this year, and that has helped me enormously-  being around people I like helps to keep me happy.

Aside from the other goals I’ve listed for 2020, there are a few more things I want to accomplish:

  • I want to see more live Shakespeare.  I used to love watching the Bard’s plays, but I haven’t seen one in ages and I miss it.
  • I need to make a firm decision about my geolocation by the start of this summer.  I’ve been saying for a while that I hate the heat in Florida and that I’d like to go further north, but I am not decisive on this point.  Inertia is real, and it’s hard to move again now that I’ve been in one place for a while.   I have family and friends and a social life here in Orlando, and it’s difficult to think about what my life might look like in another place.  I was capable of making friends and gaining a social life when I moved to Germany though, and I’m sure I could do the same somewhere else in the US.  My Aunt thinks that DC is where I should go, and it’s on the short list if I decide to relocate after all.  My lease here is up at the end of the summer, so a decision needs to be made with enough time to set a move into motion if that is my choice.
  • I have long felt that I own too much “stuff” and I’ve been going through cycles of decluttering and offloading things I don’t use for years, and I want 2020 to be the year that I finally get rid of all the extra crap.   I don’t own a lot of stuff, but somehow it still feels like too much.  Then again, I might be a little psychotic on this front-  this photo looks too cluttered to me:

Do you have any goals for the new year?  How do you feel about entering the roaring 20s?

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That’s a wrap, 2018!

On By StevenIn Life At Home12 Comments
fireworks display
Photo by ViTalko on Pexels.com

As the year winds down to a close, I wanted to look back at last year’s wrap-up post in which I set some goals for 2018.  I realized a few years back that I need to set goals, and not resolutions.  Resolutions get dumped after thirty days like a CBS All-Access trial, but goals tend to stick more because I get annoyed with myself when I fail.

How did I do on last year’s goals?  Let’s find out.

My goal from last year: Write more.
How I actually did:  Just terrible.  I managed all of five posts in twelve months, not including this one.   I need to do better.  I even fell behind on travel posts in 2018.  I still haven’t written about most of my trips from this year.

My goal from last year: Traveling more.  At the very least, I wanted to see local places I haven’t seen like Bok Tower Gardens, the Citrus Tower, or the Orlando Cat Cafe.
How I actually did:  I failed to see any of the places around Central Florida that I listed above, but I did see Boston and Hartford for the first time, and Washington DC for the third-ish time.  I had some in-state travel, including a family wedding in Naples and visits to friends in Sarasota, Tampa, and South Florida.  I also took a longish trip back to Germany and Austria near the end of the summer, including a quick detour to a city I had never seen before.

I went out of state a total of four times this year, so I’m calling this a definite win.  Now I just need to post blog entries about all of the trips!

My goal from last year: Reading more. I set a Goodreads Challenge in 2018 to try to read at least 52 books-  one a week.
How I actually did:  Success!  Sort of.  About two thirds of the way through the year, I realized I was going to fall horribly short, so I changed my goal from 52 to 24.  Instead of one a week, I shot for two a month.   And I hit the middle-  a total of 34 books read this year.    It’s more than double the number I read in 2017, so I’m counting this as a win despite my dodgy adjustment of the goal.

My goal from last year:   Change my concert-going selections to be more about quality than quantity.
How I actually did:  Well, this has just been the longest year ever.  Looking back at my ticket stubs, I am astonished to realize that some of these were this year when I thought they were actually last year.

In 2018, I saw Book of Love, They Might Be Giants, Vice President Joe Biden, Randy Rainbow, Erasure, Owl City, 4U: A Symphonic Celebration of Prince, VNV Nation, and Mannheim Steamroller.  Five of those I had seen before and enjoyed enough to repeat.

On the musicals front, I saw the 30th anniversary celebration of Rent, a Central Florida local production of Xanadu, and the Washington DC preview of Beetlejuice: The Musical.   All of these were really great.

All in all, this was a slower year for concerts but I definitely boosted the quality, mostly.  I say mostly, because Mannheim Steamroller was kind of disappointing- Chip Davis doesn’t tour with the group any more, and the whole thing just kind of felt like a  Mannheim Steamroller cover band made up of indentured slave musicians.  There was no interaction with the audience, and no joy on the stage.

Beetlejuice: The Musical made up for that by being amazing and I’m considering trying to see it again after it opens on Broadway in late March.

My goal from last year:   Work out more regularly.  More time on the treadmill, especially.
How I actually did:  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  I am terrible at getting to the gym!   It’s much easier to get to the gym from my new apartment than it was from the old one, but it’s also much easier to justify just sitting on the couch with the remote control and a bowl of Chocolate Moose Tracks ice cream.

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My goal from last year:  Get better sleep.  Turn off the screens a little earlier each night.
How I actually did:  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  My sleep is… not good.  According to the sleep tracking that I get from my FitBit,  I usually get somewhere between six and seven hours of sleep per night, and the quality of that sleep is just so-so.   Getting more than eight hours of restful sleep is really uncommon for me.  I know many of the reasons for my poor sleep, and I’m trying to fix them.

My goal from last year:  Eat fewer cookies and less sweets in general!
How I actually did: My results on this one are mixed.  I do keep fewer sweets in the house, and I’ve been eating better overall, but I could still improve this.   Right after I eat this chocolate chip cookie dough.

To sum up,  I did terribly on meeting my 2018 goals.   For 2019, my goals are more or less the same as they were last year, with a few simplifications, and a few significant additions.

The 2019 Goals-

Be healthier:  Eat better, sleep more, and get some damn exercise.  This isn’t complicated, I just have to pay attention to it and put in the effort.

Travel more:  I’ve decided on a try to make at least three out of state trips and at least one International trip for the year.  If I can do more, that’s awesome.

Feed my inner introvert:  Spend more time with books and less with little screens, whether they be my phone or my television.  And, contradicting the little screens rule, write more in this blog.  I used to be so prolific, and it’s been nearly dead for a while.

…but also see friends more often.   I also mentioned in my year end recap last year that I wasn’t very good at feeding my friendships, and I’ve tried to improve that this year.  This is actually a pretty big deal, because I work from home and I can easily go for four or five days at a stretch without leaving the apartment.  I did well, though- I definitely spent more time around other people this year.  I even made a lot of new friends, and I’ve kept a regular social schedule that gets me out of the house at least a couple of times a week.

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Listen to more music,  live or otherwise:  I figured out a long time ago that if I don’t listen to music, I get cranky.  It changes my mood, it lowers my stress, and it’s as vital to me as breathing.    I hadn’t been able to listen to music as much as I like to for a variety of unimportant reasons.

To fix this, I went out a few weeks ago and bought myself a new sound system for my apartment.  The new speaker integrates with streaming services like Spotify and Pandora, and it’s the best purchase I’ve made literally all year.  I even figured out how to stream Antenne Bayern to it, which is wonderful because it’s better than any local radio.  (Sorry, WOMX, I’ll always cherish my time with you guys but German radio is just better.)

Let go of rage.  Here’s something that most people who know me will probably be surprised by-  I am full of anger.   I am Steven’s livid inner monologue.

I have been carrying more stress and anger this past year than any in recent memory.    Carrying this stress, resentment, and bile into the new year would be the least healthy thing I could possibly do.   I am trying to follow the sage words of Elsa, to just let the damn thing go.   I am trying to forgive and mellow, to chillax and be more zen.  It ain’t easy, but I’m trying to let go of rage and negativity in the new year.

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I am trying to incorporate three things into the way I react to stress and conflict:

  1. The Polish phrase, “Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy.”  Translated to English, it means “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”  I’ve been trying to stop myself from butting into other people’s stuff. My tendency is to try to correct people’s errors.  In short, I have become a buttinski.  I can’t even begin to quantify how often I start to write a comment on social media, then pull back because I realize there’s nothing to be gained by injecting myself into the conversation.  Not my circus…
  2. You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.  During my last relationship,  I changed a great deal of who I am in order to better suit my partner. While she never explicitly asked me to do this, I noticed pretty quickly that she was happier when I behaved in certain ways. Subconsciously, I started to act differently in order to feed the relationship.  It started small, but it built up to massive changes in me over time.  It was subtle, and I didn’t notice myself changing at first.  By the end of the relationship, I barely recognized myself.  Changing who you are to make another person happy is incredibly unhealthy, and I hate how long it took me to recognize what was happening.
  3. Not everything needs to be fixed.  I scraped up my car a while back in the parking garage of my old apartment-  the right rear quarter panel is bent and is starting to rust.  I spent months thinking that I either needed to fix it or replace the car.   Because of crappy design decisions by Mazda, the estimate for repairing this one tiny blemish is more than half the remaining loan on the car.   The damage doesn’t affect how the car runs and it doesn’t make it any less functional.  Once I realized that the car is perfectly fine, I let go of the notion that I need to fix or replace it, and that obsession stopped spinning out in my mind.

A lot of the things that have caused me stress and anger this year are things that I have brought on myself.   While I need to accept that some of my stressors must be endured, I realize now that I can cut many of them loose.

You’re allowed to take back a little of your own time, and a new year is a great time to take stock of your life and make those changes for the better.

I wish all of you a happy and healthy new year.  And, because this joke never, ever gets old for me, I’ll see you next year!  Do you have any goals for 2019?

So long, 2017. Hello, 2018!

On By StevenIn Life At Home8 Comments

My friend Jade posted her year in review  a few days ago, and it made me realize that my year has actually been quite a bit less busy than some of my previous years.    Some things haven’t changed at all-  things are still great with Amelie, and nothing major has changed for either my family or hers.

I only had two major life changes this year-  We moved to Orlando in May, and I spent the last two months of the year completely unemployed and job hunting like a fiend.  I should have a job starting on 08 January, assuming nothing goes wrong with the paperwork, so I’m looking forward to that.

I don’t do “resolutions” any more, because they fall through way too quickly, but I will give myself a list of suggested “goals” based on the areas that I feel like I was a little bit stagnant this year.

I wrote 21 blog posts in 2017, not counting this one.  If not for my travel posts, it would have been far fewer.    Goal for 2018: Write more.  Even if it’s only one post a week, that’d be better than this year.

I read fourteen books in 2017.  Goal for 2018:  I plan on doing a Goodreads Challenge in 2018 to drastically increase that number.  I’m thinking 52 books is a good goal-  one a week.

We only took two trips out of Florida this year- Los Angeles in June, and New York City in July.  I can’t do much on this one for a little while, because first I need a regular paycheck and the accrual of vacation days.  I’d like to travel some more, but time and money are at a premium.   Goal for 2018:  At the very least, we should do some little trips around here on weekends.  For example, I’ve never been to Bok Tower Gardens, the Citrus Tower, or the Orlando Cat Cafe.  These are all places that I’d like to see, and that don’t require an overnight stay somewhere.

The one area where I feel like we did a lot in 2017 was concerts and show attendance.  During this calendar year, we saw all of the following:   Cabaret, Alan Cumming, The Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience featuring Ramin Djawadi, The Flaming Lips, Panic! At the Disco, Neil Diamond, Bastille, The Head and the Heart, The Birthday Massacre, Bob’s Burgers Live In Concert, Queen with Adam Lambert, Kinky Boots, Green Day, Arcade Fire, An Evening with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Love Never Dies, La Nouba, and The Blue Man Group.   Goal for 2018:   Change my concert-going methodology to be more about quality than quantity.  Last year, we grabbed a bunch of show tickets that we didn’t end up using because the event came up and we realized we just didn’t care enough to deal with the crowds-  concerts should be a delight and a treat, not a chore to get through.  I forgot that at some point.

I was crappy at going to the gym this year.  I was strong early in the year, but then we came to Orlando, and I never wanted to leave the apartment.  My parking space is on the sixth floor of the parking structure, and leaving the apartment means I have to loop down all six levels.  It takes a minimum of five minutes just to go from my parking space to the street, and I hate it!  Goal for 2018:   Work out more regularly.  More time on the treadmill, especially.   I’ll be moving to a new apartment in May, so I’ll keep the parking lot nuisance in mind as I search for the next place.

I also slept really poorly in 2017.   I have lost all sense of what day it is, or what time it is.  My apartment has poor sound insulation, so every emergency vehicle, every small-dicked jackhole with more engine noise than brains, every drunken sidewalk fight-  they all keep me awake.  Goal for 2018:  Get better sleep.  Turn off the screens a little earlier each night.  If I do well with the exercise goal, that will help with the sleep goal.

I’ve been trying to eat healthier overall, and I’m better than I used to be.  However, I am terrible about cookies.  If they’re in my house, they’re in my mouth.  The leftover Halloween candy was especially bad-  I ultimately had to put it in a sealed box on a high shelf in the closet, because I would just grab a handful any time I walked past the bowl on the counter.  It’s too easy to snack.  Even worse,   I’ve noticed a definite trend between my sweet tooth and my mood.  It turns out this is not just me- there were lots of articles this year about how there is a link between sugar and depression in men.  This tracks from my own experience- if I have a lot of sugary stuff, such as cookies or candy, then I feel terrible later.  Emotionally, too, not just physically.  Goal for 2018:  Eat fewer cookies and less sweets in general!  I’ve started this already by simply not purchasing them in large amounts.  I try to keep them out of my kitchen, so the temptation isn’t there.

While this isn’t a goal as such, I need to spend more time on my friends.  I have more friends in Orlando than I had in South Florida, but we never see each other because most of them are incredibly busy.  Friendships need to be fed!   Some of my Orlando friends haven’t even met Amelie because the busyness has taken hold.   This shall not stand!

That’s all of the things that I can think of for a general recap of 2017.   I wish all of you a happy and healthy new year.  And, because this joke never, ever gets old for me, I’ll see you next year!

Do you want to change anything in the new year?  What goals have you set for yourself to do so?

At The Closing Of The Year

On By StevenIn International Travel - Europe7 Comments

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, or Silvester to the locals. They’re not directly analogous. Silvester is a religious holiday, the Feast Day of Pope Sylvester I. They both fall on December 31st, though. It’s traditional at this time of year to take a look back and see what you’ve accomplished over the last twelve months.

I visited these places that were new to me:

I repeat visited a few places:

  • Frankfurt a bunch of times.
  • Mannheim
  • The United States twice, once in March and once in November.
  • London twice.
  • Nuremberg and Munich countless times because they’re the closest large cities and neat stuff happens here.

I saw some great concerts and shows:

I had some new experiences:

I had some other things happen that were interesting:

Did you have a good year? What’s the most memorable thing you did this year?