2022 Recap

Greetings from Disney’s overpriced, kid-friendly resort.

Thanks 2022, I almost forgot what it was like to do normal things like hang out with friends, go on vacation, eat at a restaurant, etc. The change has been great for my physical and mental health, as a consequence I made more progress on my goals than I did the year before.

Successes

Take a break. After the last few years, I was running on fumes. I took a three-month break in March and had the chance to go on some great trips. I hiked the Chelan Lakeshore Trail with Cas and mountain biked around the north rim of the Grand Canyon with Walter for his 40th birthday. In between, I spent a lot of time doing nothing. Doing nothing is underrated. I strongly recommend doing nothing.   Cat also organized a friend trip to Hawaii for my 40th birthday. It’s the first vacation we’ve taken as a family. We had babysitters and nice hotel rooms and over 30 people joined us. It was a blast.

Cas setting up our tent at the windiest spot in Lake Chelan.

• Read 26 books. I read 27 books this year, including a lot of science fiction and fantasy. The Mars Trilogy is great if you want to understand why tech billionaires want to leave earth. Pick up Brandon Sanderson if you like large expansive worlds with interesting magic systems. Blue Highways is a great travel memoir written an interesting time in America’s history.
• Spread dad’s ashes. At the beginning of my break, I met up with my mom and Amee’s family in North Carolina to spread my dad’s ashes on the beach, which he loved. He had driven from Monroe to North Myrtle Beach hundreds of times, and it was a special moment for our family to hop into a minivan and take him there one last time.
• Two family trips to visit folks. I took three family trips this year — twice to North Carolina and once to Dallas. Dallas was long overdue, I hadn’t visited since Arun was born. It was just me and Pravin, and we had a great time. The Perot museum was a highlight. It’s one of the best designed museums I’ve been to.

Partial Success

• 4 hours of circus every week for at least 8 weeks. During my three month break, I started taking private circus classes and going to open gym. I averaged 2 to 2.5 hours a week for about two months. Whenever I tried to increase my time, non-circus related injuries got in the way and I had to start over. Once I returned to work, it was impossible to keep up the practice.
• Address recurring knee and shoulder pain. I went to over 40 physical therapy appointments to address recurring knee and shoulder pain, but I didn’t have much success. It’s hard to know if I’m dealing with permanent damage to my joints or if my lifestyle is causing new injuries that prevent me from addressing the old ones. Either way, I need to try something new.
• Create something just because it’s beautiful. My photo wall contains pictures of important people and important memories from my life. It’s a physical representation of my autobiographical memory. I made the wall when I was on paternity leave after Pravin was born. Since then many things have happened, including the birth of a second child. The photo wall needed an update.   I spent a long time reflecting on the pictures, creating an insanely detailed spreadsheet, and picking pictures to remove and add. I’m almost done, but I still have a few more pictures to choose before I’m happy with the changes.

I’m ashamed-proud of this spreadsheet.

• Move into my house. We’ve made progress on moving into our house by cleaning up objects in storage, cleaning out the garage, making trips to the dump and Goodwill, and starting to organize the upstairs space. However, there is still a lot to do and the system is unstable. The kids add to the chaos with new objects and clothes, so I may be pushing this rock up a hill for a long time.

Failures

• Log food for 6m. I didn’t log my food for 6 months as I had intended. Keeping a log is just another thing to do and I ended up quitting after a few months.
• Organize clothing. I didn’t make progress on reducing and organizing my clothes. I still have a lot of clothes that I don’t wear and I need to find a better system for organizing them.
• Pravin can bike on a pedal bike. I just got around to setting up Pravin’s bike for pedals. I also planned to enroll him in Pedalheads, a group that teaches kids how to ride a bike, but the timing never seemed right and the spots fill up quickly. I did borrow a baby Peleton from a friend — does that count for something? I’ll try again next year.

A scence that is both horrifying and hilarious.

• Create something that makes my life better. I have an idea of what this would be, but I haven’t gotten around to executing on it. I feel like I should do this soon.
• 100 simple observations. One-line journaling is something I still do, but adding another reflection task was too much. I wasn’t able to find the motivation or time to work on the simple observations journal