2016 Recap

My girls at Universal Studios

As I do every year, I like to recap how I did on my resolutions from the previous year.  I’ll get to that in a minute, but I wanted to touch on 2016 for a bit.

2016, in general, was a shitshow.  The election had us more divided than ever, Brexit did the same.  And it seemed that in both, common sense and decency lost.  More icons died than you can count. Many of them profoundly influential to me.  Prince was probably the hardest one for me.  My mother got cancer and my Dad had back problems that resulted in surgery.  Wars, refugees, and pussy grabbing.  It was all kinds of surreal and depressing.

The good news is that it’s almost over.  My mother is cancer free, my Dad’s surgery went fantastically and he’s without pain and those two things are huge.  So 2016 sucked, but at least my parents kicked its ass.

As for my resolutions, let’s see how it went.

Maintain or Lose Weight.   It went well until the summer.  We got really busy and stopped cooking at home as much, ate out more, and I gained weight when I was supposed to lose.  I was trending down again, but then, you know, the holidays arrived.  I *WILL* do it this coming year, because after my parents health scares, and every childhood icon dying, I have a renewed urge to get healthier.  I want to be here writing these for several decades to come.

Focus on Photography.  This was okay.  Once again, earlier in the year I did really well, and had a wonderful time taking pictures on our vacation at Universal Studios.  I also did clean up some stuff in the photo library, and got everything organized on Google Photos.  I even took one of my favorite pictures of all time.  So I did okay.  I could still do better.

Work/Life Balance.  This went wonderfully.  Since I now have a CIO running the show and another director on the team, we’ve split up a lot of the duties that were solely mine in the past.  This has meant less travel and less stress overall.  It was a hard transition from owning the whole team, and now being a part of the team, but for me personally, it’s been good.

Read More.  I did actually read more than last year.  That isn’t saying I did a ton, but I did enjoy reading several full length novels, a bunch of magazines, and comics.  I do need to continue on this upward trajectory because I really do love to do it.

Clean Up My Stuff.  This one I knocked out of the park.  I redid my office and it looks fantastic, I redid the Man Cave and I really like how it turned out, and we redid furniture in our bedroom that totally cleaned things up.  It also allowed me to get rid of a bunch of clothes that we donated.  On the digital side I cleaned up a lot of duplicate pictures and deleted photos that I really didn’t need to keep.  So this was my biggest success of the year.  And having it all clean has been very calming as well.  Really glad I did this.

Continue Kindness.  This was hard.  Everything was so divisive this year.  I tried my best to be kind, but I also fell into the traps of arguments over politics and everything of that nature.  It was frustrating, and hard.  That said, moving forward I’ll keep the kindness going in real life.  And I’m going to try to avoid the drama online as much as possible.

In general, the world sucked in 2016, but my family and I are healthy and here, and that’s what I’m going to focus on.  Let’s end this, and start off on the right foot.  Here’s to 2017.