2018 in review
Well, I don't know how well thought out this all is, but I have already not posted it for about two weeks, so I should just bite the bullet at some point and let it go. :P
January: Mentally my year started with Arisia , as always, and I had a good time for the first about day of it, but came down with what I in retrospect now assume was norovirus, thus missed most of the last two days of it and ended up thinking I could go into work on Tuesday and abruptly finding out I was wrong. That was not good times. /:
I also started French cooking class, which was fun, and generally resulted in fairly tasty (if not generally healthy) things, and some amount of new vocabulary in French that I otherwise wouldn't know.
Saw The Last Jedi with
gaudior, one of maybe two movies I saw in 2018. Went to a work friend's game-specific white elephant, which is the best concept for white elephanting I've ever seen (you have at least some idea that what you're getting isn't totally awful), did some more album work for Stranger Ways stuff, and was happy just to see the band again. :)
February: Was lots of small party/gathering type things. Work winter party, hamentaschen party at
skygiants's with terrible Purim movie watching,
preraphaelite's book brunch thing, small soup party at Will's while Wednesday was in town. I also visited mom, helped her with renovation stuff since she couldn't do much of any physical work, took some time to also see Thomas. The book brunch thing was a fantastic idea, which I super loved, but I still haven't read that book I got. Bleh. I'm not sure if I've read any physical books this year, or they've all been ebooks, which is part of the reason for that.
March: Went to Montreal to visit
genarti where I found I had overestimated my cold tolerance, but had a good time anyhow, and took some random pictures of the city. Also went to Museum of Science with coworkers, which was nice. I do love the MOS.
April: Thought we were doing AWS zone move at work, prepared extensively for it, went to do it, it did not go as intended, had to roll it back, ended up walking home from work as I got to Lechmere as the last train rolled away. I will probably never walk home again because the route is *awful*, and I later tried finding another route and it was no better. I was pretty happy with having one of our directors of engineering grabbing me to organize test plan on the AWS move, and I was also pretty happy with the prep work I did for it... which someone else implemented later while I was on vacation. :D
In non-work news, saw a fun concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum with Jo, did a game jam with some coworkers one weekend with a very silly output - http://divorcetepus.bitballoon.com/, for which I used the photos I'd taken in Montreal, mostly. Oh, I also did the sounds mostly by having four of us sit in a sound isolation booth at work, make absolutely ridiculous noises and try not to laugh so quickly so that we couldn't use them. That was really fun, in a stupid way. :D
May: Went to the UK for a couple weeks, saw Bill Bailey, Shappi Khorsandi, Dara O'Briain, Sarah Millican, visited
tyopsqueene and we caught up on each other's life stuff, which was nice. Saw a couple classical concerts including an awesome percussion one that ended with a great Steve Reich piece, Variations for Vibes, Piano and Strings. Wandered around a ton. It was really lovely.
June: An old friend was in town, who I used to see all the time when I lived in DC, so grabbed dinner and frivolous ice cream together and caught up, which was lovely. Visited mom, started a French course that's actually on a normal learning track rather than one of the sort of one-off novelty courses. (Basically the advanced French set of courses, starting from class 1.) It was generally a good thing, except OMG the assumptions about grammar lessons we covered in prior things when my last formal French class was in 1998. O_O Also the assumptions about grammar lessons I covered in US schools such that I would have even recognized the named concept *in English*. >_<
More small party type stuff - went to boss' summer party, soup party at Will's, a coworker's taco Tuesday and gaming night, and spring Friendsgiving (IE bbq at old WFM friend, Jenn's). Saw Depeche Mode with
jothra, adored the crap out of it, was obnoxiously loud and enthusiastic about it.
July: French class finished up, saw a friend from the XKCD board while she was visiting from Australia, Thomas came up to visit, had another Museum of Science day, yay, went to sand castle festival with my coworker friend, J for the second year in a row. This year we planned transit at least slightly better and didn't get stuck in the sea of traffic for ages.
End of July is when I went to NYC for mom's surgery. That made for a very long and difficult couple of weeks for just about everyone. Thankfully mom is doing much better now.
August: Still in NYC for mom's surgery, got to see my sister and the nephews, and stayed with Thomas for the latter half of this, all of which was helpful and much needed bright spots in the middle of a trying time. Got back, saw
genarti before she went back to Montreal for fall semester, hung out with coworker J a couple times, including going to a concert of great Russian classical orchestral stuff (Festive Overture, Tchaik 5, and my personal favorite, Polovetsian Dances).
This month I also auditioned for a chorus, but didn't make it. Regardless of outcome, I'm still proud of myself a) for putting myself out there and trying, and b) for having prepped a song from start to finish entirely on my own and I think doing a quite credible job of it. I'm still fond of the piece I chose and think I may want to use it for things in the future. (Les Berceaux by Fauré)
September: started watching a kdrama, Chicago Typewriter, with
skygiants - we are almost, but not quite done yet. I think we'll be done by next month. Started Advanced French Conversation class, which turned out to be rather a popular class (was in two halves, first half had I think 7 people in it, second half had 9 or 10?). Most classes I've done at the Alliance Française have been 6 or fewer. Also, it was really nice being in a class where *everyone* could hold up a reasonably sophisticated discussion, and we talked through topics like social activism, abortion, street art, music and film, among others, at a reasonably engaging level for conversation in general, if somewhat less fluid since we're all doing it in a second language. I'd consider taking that class again, though sometimes it felt like a real mental strain from sort of a social energy standpoint.
Also this month went to friends' wedding, which was nonstandard and relaxed and very them, and managed to make conversation with people I hadn't met before without basically self-immolating, so that's a good thing. Went apple picking with Jenn, actually used all the apples before they went bad, score! Had a pretty impromptu trip down to NYC to see one of my favorite comedians, James Acaster, and hung out with Thomas (and dragged him with me to the show).
At some point in here, I also started doing German on Duolingo. Duolingo is not a good way to learn a language. Thus far I feel like most of what I have in German is some reasonable vocabulary. I have no handle on the grammar *at all* and my accent is atrocious. At some point I'll want to take a legit class so I can concentrate on fixing what I don't have, but I don't think it's going to be in 2019, because I bought a membership for the Alliance Française, so I'm going to be taking French courses every season again, I expect.
October: Coworker's "Snazz and Jazz" party including some performances (I sang and did a flute piece), in which I had to do more talking with people I didn't know at all and didn't totally fall on my face in doing so.
This month I also auditioned for (and got) a solo part in Bach Magnificat that my chorus did, the second movement, Et Exultavit. From this point on, since I'd been doing some practicing in the office after hours, one of our VPs has occasionally asked me "how's that golden voice doing?" or equivalent, and I spend a lot of time ducking my head and looking awkward. I think this is a general theme of my life when it comes to my voice. I feel way better about my flute playing, but have fewer opportunities where that comes up.
Visited
genarti in Montreal again, and this time was *overprepared* for cold and just ended up with excess clothing I didn't need. I'll get it right some time! :P
Saw PMRP do Dracula (was terrified of
skygiants' housemate), went out for a fun friends dinner at Halloween, managed to sew my own costume again this year, yay (I was a sort of sorcerer). It was a nice set of Halloweenish things. :)
This was also concert month. Saw Florence and the Machine, the Decemberists and CHVRCHES. I enjoyed them all, but OMG, I loved CHVRCHES in concert *so much*.
Did some volunteering with the Yes on 3 campaign, learned a new way to volunteer that I actually want to do more of in the future, huzzah. This was most of my political activism for the year, and I'm very happy with this versus some of the other stuff that's come up in the past few years.
November:
sotto_voce and
shati's slightly post-Halloween party was a nice, low key end to Halloweeny type things. Then it was always thinking-about-politics-time. I did some more volunteering before the election, and for the week or two after the election was just continually looking at news stories about the results long past when I'd've assumed I'd be done doing that.
In social stuff, I saw a coworker's chorus concert (it was great!), did a coding event which I didn't really enjoy, but at least got some stuff out of. Also did a bunch of organization/prep for a work potluck that went really nicely and I was super excited about.
Thanksgiving at mom's went better than I would have imagined - I've avoided doing that for about 15 years after the last time, which was memorably unpleasant. This time it was mom, her upstairs neighbors (a lovely family with two charming kids), and me. Mom bought some appetizers and I think a chicken and I made a bunch of sides and a vegetarian main, and all of it went over well, and talk was mostly pleasant, and the most political we got was actually on the topic of tensions between Korea and Japan historically, so y'know, not the usual scary politics one thinks of when one considers Thanksgiving at home.
December: Chorus concert, solo and trio... I had a bunch of anxiety about this, particularly because in the trio one of the people singing is this absolutely fantastic singer with an amazing voice and fantastic musicianship and I was like, "I'm going to be bringing us down!" Everything went fine, and in general the concert went well, which with this group I think it basically always does, but I always have anxiety about it anyhow. When it was done I was just so relieved to be at a point where there was no possible future where I screwed things up. :P
The worst thing about this month was that I pulled a calf muscle relatively severely, and couldn't walk normally for two to three weeks. On the day that I did it I couldn't even sit or lie down without pain, and I ended up cancelling a couple of social engagements because I didn't think I could physically make it there, which is fairly rare for me. "How did you screw yourself up so badly?" you might ask. "Playing ping pong, of course," I would reply, with shame. Yeah, I have a problem, I know.
Also in December, I saw my oldest friend (meaning longest duration, not most elderly) and her sister and husband. It was really lovely catching up. My friend lives in Taipei, so I don't exactly bump into her often. Christmas Eve boardgaming at
preraphaelite's was lovely as always, and the annual Yankee Swap at
skygiants' house was fun. At work the social and volunteer committee I'm on did a thank you dinner at the end of the year, and it was lovely and a really nice chance to kick back and be social with coworkers who aren't directly on my team/in my department. Also, Thomas came up just before New Year's and there was some hanging out, and we saw the only other movie I can recall seeing this year - the quite silly Nutcracker in the Four Realms, which Thomas totally hated, and which
genarti,
skygiants and I were completely happy to have seen and ridiculed a bit.
General stuff for the year:
OMG, I am not good at medical anything. I did my best with trying to follow the problems and attempts at correction for my mom while she was in the CTICU for a week and a half, and I could deal with just the knowledge sorts of parts of it, though I didn't have context sufficient to totally follow some of it, but all the social bits of it were *awful*, and the emotional load was double awful.
I think what I did effectively during that stretch was a) generally make sure mom wasn't alone for too long, b) write up updates to send to mom's friends for what was going on, and c) after it all ended actually catch mom up on what happened for the first week and a half when she was mostly sort of delirious and really didn't even know how much time passed.
That whole experience was so difficult and was just a week and a half of me feeling like I wasn't doing work from a logical standpoint, but from a mental overhead and emotional standpoint feeling like I was running a marathon. The point where she hadn't shown any real signs of awareness for the fourth day I was completely having a breakdown and terrified the next step was going to be having to deal with all of my mom's business for her for the rest of my life. I am so, so glad she is herself again.
Over the year I read, according to goodreads, 159 books. I'd argue, though, that many of those were novellas and not full books. Also, the vast majority I read in the first six months, and I sort of stopped reading after mom's surgery. Nonetheless, I did a ton of reading, and I wish I hadn't sort of stopped so abruptly, while also totally feeling the reason I did is totally fair. Basically when I headed down to NYC I was in the middle of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, which I had been enjoying, but also sort of fighting because you can see the problems coming, and suddenly my brain said, "no, we're all full up on difficult, heavy things to handle right now thank you." and the only thing I read while I was in NYC was slowly fighting my way through Harry Potter à L'école des Sorciers, because that was the level of tension I was able to take at that point. I think I could start up reading again (and should), but have ended up doing more frivolous things instead lately (like trying to play Mass Effect and failing).
I did sort of prioritize going to music things this year, and I think that went well and made me happy, so I'm going to try to keep doing that. I'm not entirely sure how to usefully *find* them consistently, though. I think a lot of the time I was sort of just stumbling across things. Happy to take suggestions here. I have already gotten tickets for Walk the Moon next month, which I'm excited for.
I am a little worried the continued living on my own is making me weirder and less tolerant of things I used to habitually deal with, but I'm also still not unhappy with being alone, so I'm sort of unclear on my end conclusion here. I do think I did a better job of making sure I was being social throughout the year, and didn't hit a sort of drought, the way I felt I did in 2017.
One thing I couldn't fit in a monthly format, but which definitely shaped this year was oddness at work with some unfortunate hires of toxic people in power, which eventually resolved itself and we got rid of them, but caused um. A lot of strife and contributed to losing some coworkers I really miss. I'm reasonably happy with where we are now, but had been considering leaving for a while in there. On the positive side, if I had to leave at this point, I feel like I have a much more solid skillset and no detractors on my resume, like I was afraid of a couple years back.
Semi-relatedly, I think over 2018 one thing I did consistently improve on is technical skills at my job. I look at queries I write now with no pausing for looking at reference information, etc, versus what I was doing in January and it's a quite significant improvement. I also explicitly went out of my way to get more comfortable with rails console, and I'm happy about that.
I'm also happy about the places I put myself forward, musically, even when it didn't pay off. I don't consider myself a singer, but most of my opportunities now are there, since being a classical flutist doesn't allow for a lot of opportunities, so I'm putting in some work on that, and I'm happy that I'm doing so.
Oh, and I'm super happy to have found a way to volunteer for political causes that doesn't involve a lot of talking to strangers - data entry is apparently a constant need for campaigns, and is 100% in my skill set and doesn't make me hate life. I am absolutely doing that again in the future.
I also finally starting hanging artwork in my place, and got a print done of my favorite pic from vacation, taken from Blackfriar's bridge, looking over the Thames at sunset. I'm pretty happy with it. :)
On the whole... I dunno, I guess it was a reasonable year, and I definitely made sure to get enough experience type things I enjoy into it. I am still sucking at balancing how busy I am versus not seeing people enough. Some weeks are just "AUGH, what is free time??" and some are "well, I have three nights free, so I guess I'll play some more BS video games this week..." and I never end up in what feels like quite the right place for long.
Well, belatedly, that was my 2018. Here's hoping 2019 is good to all of us.
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January: Mentally my year started with Arisia , as always, and I had a good time for the first about day of it, but came down with what I in retrospect now assume was norovirus, thus missed most of the last two days of it and ended up thinking I could go into work on Tuesday and abruptly finding out I was wrong. That was not good times. /:
I also started French cooking class, which was fun, and generally resulted in fairly tasty (if not generally healthy) things, and some amount of new vocabulary in French that I otherwise wouldn't know.
Saw The Last Jedi with
gaudior, one of maybe two movies I saw in 2018. Went to a work friend's game-specific white elephant, which is the best concept for white elephanting I've ever seen (you have at least some idea that what you're getting isn't totally awful), did some more album work for Stranger Ways stuff, and was happy just to see the band again. :)
February: Was lots of small party/gathering type things. Work winter party, hamentaschen party at
skygiants's with terrible Purim movie watching,
preraphaelite's book brunch thing, small soup party at Will's while Wednesday was in town. I also visited mom, helped her with renovation stuff since she couldn't do much of any physical work, took some time to also see Thomas. The book brunch thing was a fantastic idea, which I super loved, but I still haven't read that book I got. Bleh. I'm not sure if I've read any physical books this year, or they've all been ebooks, which is part of the reason for that.
March: Went to Montreal to visit
genarti where I found I had overestimated my cold tolerance, but had a good time anyhow, and took some random pictures of the city. Also went to Museum of Science with coworkers, which was nice. I do love the MOS.
April: Thought we were doing AWS zone move at work, prepared extensively for it, went to do it, it did not go as intended, had to roll it back, ended up walking home from work as I got to Lechmere as the last train rolled away. I will probably never walk home again because the route is *awful*, and I later tried finding another route and it was no better. I was pretty happy with having one of our directors of engineering grabbing me to organize test plan on the AWS move, and I was also pretty happy with the prep work I did for it... which someone else implemented later while I was on vacation. :D
In non-work news, saw a fun concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum with Jo, did a game jam with some coworkers one weekend with a very silly output - http://divorcetepus.bitballoon.com/, for which I used the photos I'd taken in Montreal, mostly. Oh, I also did the sounds mostly by having four of us sit in a sound isolation booth at work, make absolutely ridiculous noises and try not to laugh so quickly so that we couldn't use them. That was really fun, in a stupid way. :D
May: Went to the UK for a couple weeks, saw Bill Bailey, Shappi Khorsandi, Dara O'Briain, Sarah Millican, visited
tyopsqueene and we caught up on each other's life stuff, which was nice. Saw a couple classical concerts including an awesome percussion one that ended with a great Steve Reich piece, Variations for Vibes, Piano and Strings. Wandered around a ton. It was really lovely.
June: An old friend was in town, who I used to see all the time when I lived in DC, so grabbed dinner and frivolous ice cream together and caught up, which was lovely. Visited mom, started a French course that's actually on a normal learning track rather than one of the sort of one-off novelty courses. (Basically the advanced French set of courses, starting from class 1.) It was generally a good thing, except OMG the assumptions about grammar lessons we covered in prior things when my last formal French class was in 1998. O_O Also the assumptions about grammar lessons I covered in US schools such that I would have even recognized the named concept *in English*. >_<
More small party type stuff - went to boss' summer party, soup party at Will's, a coworker's taco Tuesday and gaming night, and spring Friendsgiving (IE bbq at old WFM friend, Jenn's). Saw Depeche Mode with
jothra, adored the crap out of it, was obnoxiously loud and enthusiastic about it.
July: French class finished up, saw a friend from the XKCD board while she was visiting from Australia, Thomas came up to visit, had another Museum of Science day, yay, went to sand castle festival with my coworker friend, J for the second year in a row. This year we planned transit at least slightly better and didn't get stuck in the sea of traffic for ages.
End of July is when I went to NYC for mom's surgery. That made for a very long and difficult couple of weeks for just about everyone. Thankfully mom is doing much better now.
August: Still in NYC for mom's surgery, got to see my sister and the nephews, and stayed with Thomas for the latter half of this, all of which was helpful and much needed bright spots in the middle of a trying time. Got back, saw
genarti before she went back to Montreal for fall semester, hung out with coworker J a couple times, including going to a concert of great Russian classical orchestral stuff (Festive Overture, Tchaik 5, and my personal favorite, Polovetsian Dances).
This month I also auditioned for a chorus, but didn't make it. Regardless of outcome, I'm still proud of myself a) for putting myself out there and trying, and b) for having prepped a song from start to finish entirely on my own and I think doing a quite credible job of it. I'm still fond of the piece I chose and think I may want to use it for things in the future. (Les Berceaux by Fauré)
September: started watching a kdrama, Chicago Typewriter, with
skygiants - we are almost, but not quite done yet. I think we'll be done by next month. Started Advanced French Conversation class, which turned out to be rather a popular class (was in two halves, first half had I think 7 people in it, second half had 9 or 10?). Most classes I've done at the Alliance Française have been 6 or fewer. Also, it was really nice being in a class where *everyone* could hold up a reasonably sophisticated discussion, and we talked through topics like social activism, abortion, street art, music and film, among others, at a reasonably engaging level for conversation in general, if somewhat less fluid since we're all doing it in a second language. I'd consider taking that class again, though sometimes it felt like a real mental strain from sort of a social energy standpoint.
Also this month went to friends' wedding, which was nonstandard and relaxed and very them, and managed to make conversation with people I hadn't met before without basically self-immolating, so that's a good thing. Went apple picking with Jenn, actually used all the apples before they went bad, score! Had a pretty impromptu trip down to NYC to see one of my favorite comedians, James Acaster, and hung out with Thomas (and dragged him with me to the show).
At some point in here, I also started doing German on Duolingo. Duolingo is not a good way to learn a language. Thus far I feel like most of what I have in German is some reasonable vocabulary. I have no handle on the grammar *at all* and my accent is atrocious. At some point I'll want to take a legit class so I can concentrate on fixing what I don't have, but I don't think it's going to be in 2019, because I bought a membership for the Alliance Française, so I'm going to be taking French courses every season again, I expect.
October: Coworker's "Snazz and Jazz" party including some performances (I sang and did a flute piece), in which I had to do more talking with people I didn't know at all and didn't totally fall on my face in doing so.
This month I also auditioned for (and got) a solo part in Bach Magnificat that my chorus did, the second movement, Et Exultavit. From this point on, since I'd been doing some practicing in the office after hours, one of our VPs has occasionally asked me "how's that golden voice doing?" or equivalent, and I spend a lot of time ducking my head and looking awkward. I think this is a general theme of my life when it comes to my voice. I feel way better about my flute playing, but have fewer opportunities where that comes up.
Visited
genarti in Montreal again, and this time was *overprepared* for cold and just ended up with excess clothing I didn't need. I'll get it right some time! :P
Saw PMRP do Dracula (was terrified of
skygiants' housemate), went out for a fun friends dinner at Halloween, managed to sew my own costume again this year, yay (I was a sort of sorcerer). It was a nice set of Halloweenish things. :)
This was also concert month. Saw Florence and the Machine, the Decemberists and CHVRCHES. I enjoyed them all, but OMG, I loved CHVRCHES in concert *so much*.
Did some volunteering with the Yes on 3 campaign, learned a new way to volunteer that I actually want to do more of in the future, huzzah. This was most of my political activism for the year, and I'm very happy with this versus some of the other stuff that's come up in the past few years.
November:
sotto_voce and
shati's slightly post-Halloween party was a nice, low key end to Halloweeny type things. Then it was always thinking-about-politics-time. I did some more volunteering before the election, and for the week or two after the election was just continually looking at news stories about the results long past when I'd've assumed I'd be done doing that.
In social stuff, I saw a coworker's chorus concert (it was great!), did a coding event which I didn't really enjoy, but at least got some stuff out of. Also did a bunch of organization/prep for a work potluck that went really nicely and I was super excited about.
Thanksgiving at mom's went better than I would have imagined - I've avoided doing that for about 15 years after the last time, which was memorably unpleasant. This time it was mom, her upstairs neighbors (a lovely family with two charming kids), and me. Mom bought some appetizers and I think a chicken and I made a bunch of sides and a vegetarian main, and all of it went over well, and talk was mostly pleasant, and the most political we got was actually on the topic of tensions between Korea and Japan historically, so y'know, not the usual scary politics one thinks of when one considers Thanksgiving at home.
December: Chorus concert, solo and trio... I had a bunch of anxiety about this, particularly because in the trio one of the people singing is this absolutely fantastic singer with an amazing voice and fantastic musicianship and I was like, "I'm going to be bringing us down!" Everything went fine, and in general the concert went well, which with this group I think it basically always does, but I always have anxiety about it anyhow. When it was done I was just so relieved to be at a point where there was no possible future where I screwed things up. :P
The worst thing about this month was that I pulled a calf muscle relatively severely, and couldn't walk normally for two to three weeks. On the day that I did it I couldn't even sit or lie down without pain, and I ended up cancelling a couple of social engagements because I didn't think I could physically make it there, which is fairly rare for me. "How did you screw yourself up so badly?" you might ask. "Playing ping pong, of course," I would reply, with shame. Yeah, I have a problem, I know.
Also in December, I saw my oldest friend (meaning longest duration, not most elderly) and her sister and husband. It was really lovely catching up. My friend lives in Taipei, so I don't exactly bump into her often. Christmas Eve boardgaming at
preraphaelite's was lovely as always, and the annual Yankee Swap at
skygiants' house was fun. At work the social and volunteer committee I'm on did a thank you dinner at the end of the year, and it was lovely and a really nice chance to kick back and be social with coworkers who aren't directly on my team/in my department. Also, Thomas came up just before New Year's and there was some hanging out, and we saw the only other movie I can recall seeing this year - the quite silly Nutcracker in the Four Realms, which Thomas totally hated, and which
genarti,
skygiants and I were completely happy to have seen and ridiculed a bit.
General stuff for the year:
OMG, I am not good at medical anything. I did my best with trying to follow the problems and attempts at correction for my mom while she was in the CTICU for a week and a half, and I could deal with just the knowledge sorts of parts of it, though I didn't have context sufficient to totally follow some of it, but all the social bits of it were *awful*, and the emotional load was double awful.
I think what I did effectively during that stretch was a) generally make sure mom wasn't alone for too long, b) write up updates to send to mom's friends for what was going on, and c) after it all ended actually catch mom up on what happened for the first week and a half when she was mostly sort of delirious and really didn't even know how much time passed.
That whole experience was so difficult and was just a week and a half of me feeling like I wasn't doing work from a logical standpoint, but from a mental overhead and emotional standpoint feeling like I was running a marathon. The point where she hadn't shown any real signs of awareness for the fourth day I was completely having a breakdown and terrified the next step was going to be having to deal with all of my mom's business for her for the rest of my life. I am so, so glad she is herself again.
Over the year I read, according to goodreads, 159 books. I'd argue, though, that many of those were novellas and not full books. Also, the vast majority I read in the first six months, and I sort of stopped reading after mom's surgery. Nonetheless, I did a ton of reading, and I wish I hadn't sort of stopped so abruptly, while also totally feeling the reason I did is totally fair. Basically when I headed down to NYC I was in the middle of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, which I had been enjoying, but also sort of fighting because you can see the problems coming, and suddenly my brain said, "no, we're all full up on difficult, heavy things to handle right now thank you." and the only thing I read while I was in NYC was slowly fighting my way through Harry Potter à L'école des Sorciers, because that was the level of tension I was able to take at that point. I think I could start up reading again (and should), but have ended up doing more frivolous things instead lately (like trying to play Mass Effect and failing).
I did sort of prioritize going to music things this year, and I think that went well and made me happy, so I'm going to try to keep doing that. I'm not entirely sure how to usefully *find* them consistently, though. I think a lot of the time I was sort of just stumbling across things. Happy to take suggestions here. I have already gotten tickets for Walk the Moon next month, which I'm excited for.
I am a little worried the continued living on my own is making me weirder and less tolerant of things I used to habitually deal with, but I'm also still not unhappy with being alone, so I'm sort of unclear on my end conclusion here. I do think I did a better job of making sure I was being social throughout the year, and didn't hit a sort of drought, the way I felt I did in 2017.
One thing I couldn't fit in a monthly format, but which definitely shaped this year was oddness at work with some unfortunate hires of toxic people in power, which eventually resolved itself and we got rid of them, but caused um. A lot of strife and contributed to losing some coworkers I really miss. I'm reasonably happy with where we are now, but had been considering leaving for a while in there. On the positive side, if I had to leave at this point, I feel like I have a much more solid skillset and no detractors on my resume, like I was afraid of a couple years back.
Semi-relatedly, I think over 2018 one thing I did consistently improve on is technical skills at my job. I look at queries I write now with no pausing for looking at reference information, etc, versus what I was doing in January and it's a quite significant improvement. I also explicitly went out of my way to get more comfortable with rails console, and I'm happy about that.
I'm also happy about the places I put myself forward, musically, even when it didn't pay off. I don't consider myself a singer, but most of my opportunities now are there, since being a classical flutist doesn't allow for a lot of opportunities, so I'm putting in some work on that, and I'm happy that I'm doing so.
Oh, and I'm super happy to have found a way to volunteer for political causes that doesn't involve a lot of talking to strangers - data entry is apparently a constant need for campaigns, and is 100% in my skill set and doesn't make me hate life. I am absolutely doing that again in the future.
I also finally starting hanging artwork in my place, and got a print done of my favorite pic from vacation, taken from Blackfriar's bridge, looking over the Thames at sunset. I'm pretty happy with it. :)
On the whole... I dunno, I guess it was a reasonable year, and I definitely made sure to get enough experience type things I enjoy into it. I am still sucking at balancing how busy I am versus not seeing people enough. Some weeks are just "AUGH, what is free time??" and some are "well, I have three nights free, so I guess I'll play some more BS video games this week..." and I never end up in what feels like quite the right place for long.
Well, belatedly, that was my 2018. Here's hoping 2019 is good to all of us.
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