Year in Review: 2018
Once again, Happy New Year! ... And now for one last look to this year passed :)
I'm keeping the format from the previous review, so if it looks a little deja-vu - it's because I'm overwriting the old stuff with updates.
Work
So last year I mentioned the group I'd been working with for years being divvied up, moved around, and some expectations of being laid off. Since then I was moved upstairs to where most of my teammates had been moved (sometime in June I went up to the 25th floor, taking over the cube of Benz... who had just recently given his notice and moved to greener pastures). The org chart changed a bit, with me now reporting to both Christine and Howie (and that guy... it's a bit of a mixed package but I'm not really keen on him). Shortly thereafter we had our jokes of a mid-year review and Howie mentioned to me that he'd heard a rumor our group would be experiencing at least one lay-off probably within the next few months. So during this time I'm kinda torn between sorta hoping I'm let go (if you haven't really kept up with my job-saga, let's just say morale there these days sucks) and worry that if I am let go then finding a new job will suck worse. Fast forward to September and right after a big team meeting my co-worker who sits in the cube next to mine gets a meeting invite... a very cryptic one where it's a half hour long and just him and the higher level manager we never deal with. We suspect what it means and it turns out to be true, Shun comes back from his meeting and tells me he has been told he has fifteen minutes to clean out his desk and leave the building. While I'm chatting with him I notice another long-time co-worker of mine Glenn is filling a box with his belongings, I find out he was also let go. Then on top of that I find out that two other people in our group, Andreas and Beth, got the same news earlier in the day but they just took off without any good-byes. So it's a bit worse than the rumor I'd heard led me to believe... essentially it looks like they decided to cut down each of our tower responsibilities to one FD and one analyst/assistant - Beth worked along side me with the Excess business, Shun helped Yin-Yin with Primary... so although maybe they hoped to make us more efficient, it also means there are no backups. I find out about a month later that Marcello and Ioanna are also let go, and then find out that in September Mauricio had been let go as well (and him, from I what I was told, was in the process of organizing his 25th anniversary in the company when he got the news).
The news just gets worse from there though, I hear that another old co-worker of mine, Ju-an, her group is being planned to be moved to North Carolina in the next year or two... I asked her if she'll be doing the move too and was told that she plans to take the severance package when the time comes instead because she has no interest in leaving New York.
On top of all this, recently found out that the rumor floating around the past year or two that the company is planning to sell our building is likely coming to pass sometime next year. They'll move some of us to a new rented mid-town location and the rest to a close by rented downtown location which still has a few years on the lease. But this is so fucking short-sighted in my view, we're selling our headquarters building??? Too long to get into but I am not seeing much of a future with this company, either I'll end up leaving or the company will go under is how I'm feeling these days.
As mentioned last time, for the time being I'm still sticking around and going with the flow... but's getting harder and harder to justify inaction these days.
Conventions
I didn't attend any furry conventions last year so I made a point to attend Furpoc this year... can't say it really energized me to attend more furcons going forward but at least it was a reminder of what I'd been missing.
As a continuing tradition I was able to attend MoCCA Fest, NYC Comic Con, and PAX East again. All were along the same experiences as last year so I'll just note their attendance.
Also attended HelioSphere, a scifi/writer convention put together by some of the old guard from Lunacon, found out about this one from namfle and hung out with him for a bit after arriving. Not a lot going on here, debatable if I'll attend again though I may consider it just to try something a little different (and since 2018 was their second year they're probably still getting their feet wet with running things).
Entertainment
As usual still keeping my lists of books and movies that I watched for the first time.
Books - Reading list has been averaging not a lot of books for the year, and this time around it feels like I've been sticking to sequels in series rather than unique stories (finished quite a few Repairman Jack books this year, starting to get close to the end... of course then I have to jump over to the Adversary Cycle to get the full story; I also finished the new Destroyermen book... though this one was a real chore, the author feels like he's just phoning it in these days). I will say that I really enjoyed Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn, think Oceans 11 with Han Solo and some other Star Wars favorites - Disney really needs to reach out to this author to write their next script. I'll also mention I enjoyed Strange Objects by Gary Crew, best described as... strange. Honorable mentions will go out to Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain (contains the short story that includes the one for the basis of a well known claymation sequence, though the story runs very long and I'm not sold on the extra details it offers); I have to also mention The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll, a book that I vaguely remember starting to read in a college class as part of an assignment in my Management Information Systems class (an unhelpful title of a class which taught how to use a computer and various business related programs such as Excel... it was mid-nineties, my computer experience at the time was close to zilch). Anyways that book was to help give context to earlier attempts at dealing with hackers, we were tested on various chapters... and I remember quite clearly that I never finished the book, so fastforward to this year and I finally went back and found a copy and read through it - interesting but far more tedious than I remember it.
Movies - If you look at my list of movies watched for the first time in 2018... it's a bit long. Let's start with, I started off the year with a fantastic movie that I now understand why so many love it, Memento. And I'll also say I absolutely loved Infinity War, I worried putting all those characters together would be a shit-show but Marvel pulled it off. Honorable mentions go out to Sheep and Wolves, a movie I'd seen an untranslated Russian trailer for like several years earlier and kept hoping to one day see the finished product (anthro characters and transformation - my kind of flick); I'll also point out that I decided to fill out with watching the Madagascar trilogy (plus Penguins) - I'd only seen the first Madagascar movie and I'll be honest avoided the sequels, but they really grew on me, I like the overall story arc they fit in with that crew of zoo animals; I also watched the third Despicable Me, which was pretty good.
Trips
I dunno, maybe I'm mis-remembering the year but it felt a little more low-key than previous years.
I took a cruise to Bermuda with my family, including my sister and her boyfriend and my nephew.
Another trip to Thousand Islands... though this one was mid-September, the weather could have been worse but it was not ideal and made it almost next to impossible to enjoy some things like swimming. And I took a trip with my parents (and dog) to Martha's Vineyard, they'd been there the past few years and my sister went at least once or twice so I figured I should go at least once. And the usual Lake George trip with Dave and Derek (I'm still the only one keeping in contact with Rick, he's been pretty much excommunicated by the other two).
All trips were fun but nothing really of a big impression, maybe I'm just getting jaded in things and need to spice things up more going forward... though always dreading coming back is a downer.
Health & Fitness
Nothing really good, though I got my yearly physical earlier this month and outside my usual elevated blood pressure nothing bad to report. But my weight is at the worst its ever been and I've been seriously stalling in attempts to fix that; this second half of December I've been doing better though, cut out soda and started going more regularly to the gym so hopefully early in the new year I'll see some improvement.
Foot still in a bit of agony most days... I really regret ever getting that bunion surgery.
Ah and speaking of the foot, a few months back I went for an MRI and now my current podiatrist thinks its scar tissue which is causing the pain, though the solution to that revelation still eludes. A couple days before I went in for the MRI I started feeling super sick, I thought I was catching the flu or something. I seriously went from hot to cold during the course of the day, having to pull out a sweater while at work and then later take it off because I was sweating, then back on and I still couldn't feel warm. Anyways long story short I skipped the City Challenge race I was signed up for (I was feeling so much like shit I didn't even bother to pick up the shirt) and the day of the race I instead went in for the MRI - gawd I was in pain that weekend. In hindsight I think I had pneumonia... or at least that's what I'm guessing based on web-md and that I was coughing up blood for a couple days. But anywho, it was a long weekend (or did I have a day scheduled off to make it a long weekend? Can't remember) and I was feeling loads better by the time I got back to work.
Ah lastly, I skipped the marathon this year. It overlapped with the Martha's Vineyard trip so rather than cut out a day from the trip I came to the conclusion I was even less prepared than I usually am for running that race and I really really did not want to go through the pain and then painful recuperation while on a trip. I've gone through the process to guarantee entry for 2019 so I'd better be far more prepared this year. And honestly, I'm tiring of running, my foot is a constant issue, my weight is an issue, I don't know if I'll be going for a guarantee entry for the following year, this might be it for me... or just a break of a year or two, who knows.
Friends & Family
Let's start off with the good...
My nephew turned one this year, woohoo! And... I think it was this year that I found out my sister has set a date for her to finally get married to Chris - she wants to do a Halloween wedding in 2020 (one more reason for me to get working on shedding my weight).
I guess one other good thing to report, an ex-coworker of mine, James, is set to get married in May 2019 and I've been invited - should be fun; though again, gotta lose the weight... and probably need to buy a new suit, and fuck I have no idea what kind of wedding gift to give...
My friend Derek's sister gave birth to a daughter. So now all my friends from my home town who I still keep in touch with are uncles... and depressingly none of us are fathers, or for that matter married.
I've mostly stalled out on updating my family tree on Ancestry.com. I haven't canceled or paused the membership yet, there are some further out relatives that are living that I'm just trying to figure out how to connect to the tree, then I'd like to print out all the details I've got before stopping my payments to that site. It's been an interesting experience - I hope the information I've gathered is mostly accurate :P
My great-aunt Betty passed away this year... it's sad to see her go but also seeing her body wither these past couple years, my family and I agree we are not surprised by her passing this year.
Oh I found out my friend Dave's brother Glenn is getting a divorce - which isn't really bad news (except she's making the divorce rather difficult) because it makes us all happy, all of Dave's family and any friends who have met the woman. She... was really not a nice person, I won't share any of those stories here but the few times I'd seen her over the years you could tell she was pretty narcissistic.
So there's my year in summary, sucks I know... I kinda half-assed this one but I may want to a sketchy outline of what was going on in my life someday to look back on ;)
Hope everyone else had better 2018's... and hopefully all of us have a better 2019.
One last thing, resolutions!
So off the top of my head I didn't really accomplish anything. However I did put together a photo album which I gave to my parents, added it to the pictures displayed during their Christms Party. Not the usual type of album thing, more of a standing photo album, it took something like sixty photos so I'm still gonna count this as a completed resolution!
For this new year... let's just say the usual: lose weight, exercise more, write more, travel more, etc. And make at least a passing attempt to getting a bucket list item done (like skydiving or a really awesome trip or something...). Keep it simple and vague and you have a better shot of doing something which qualifies as a win I'd say ;)
I'm keeping the format from the previous review, so if it looks a little deja-vu - it's because I'm overwriting the old stuff with updates.
Work
So last year I mentioned the group I'd been working with for years being divvied up, moved around, and some expectations of being laid off. Since then I was moved upstairs to where most of my teammates had been moved (sometime in June I went up to the 25th floor, taking over the cube of Benz... who had just recently given his notice and moved to greener pastures). The org chart changed a bit, with me now reporting to both Christine and Howie (and that guy... it's a bit of a mixed package but I'm not really keen on him). Shortly thereafter we had our jokes of a mid-year review and Howie mentioned to me that he'd heard a rumor our group would be experiencing at least one lay-off probably within the next few months. So during this time I'm kinda torn between sorta hoping I'm let go (if you haven't really kept up with my job-saga, let's just say morale there these days sucks) and worry that if I am let go then finding a new job will suck worse. Fast forward to September and right after a big team meeting my co-worker who sits in the cube next to mine gets a meeting invite... a very cryptic one where it's a half hour long and just him and the higher level manager we never deal with. We suspect what it means and it turns out to be true, Shun comes back from his meeting and tells me he has been told he has fifteen minutes to clean out his desk and leave the building. While I'm chatting with him I notice another long-time co-worker of mine Glenn is filling a box with his belongings, I find out he was also let go. Then on top of that I find out that two other people in our group, Andreas and Beth, got the same news earlier in the day but they just took off without any good-byes. So it's a bit worse than the rumor I'd heard led me to believe... essentially it looks like they decided to cut down each of our tower responsibilities to one FD and one analyst/assistant - Beth worked along side me with the Excess business, Shun helped Yin-Yin with Primary... so although maybe they hoped to make us more efficient, it also means there are no backups. I find out about a month later that Marcello and Ioanna are also let go, and then find out that in September Mauricio had been let go as well (and him, from I what I was told, was in the process of organizing his 25th anniversary in the company when he got the news).
The news just gets worse from there though, I hear that another old co-worker of mine, Ju-an, her group is being planned to be moved to North Carolina in the next year or two... I asked her if she'll be doing the move too and was told that she plans to take the severance package when the time comes instead because she has no interest in leaving New York.
On top of all this, recently found out that the rumor floating around the past year or two that the company is planning to sell our building is likely coming to pass sometime next year. They'll move some of us to a new rented mid-town location and the rest to a close by rented downtown location which still has a few years on the lease. But this is so fucking short-sighted in my view, we're selling our headquarters building??? Too long to get into but I am not seeing much of a future with this company, either I'll end up leaving or the company will go under is how I'm feeling these days.
As mentioned last time, for the time being I'm still sticking around and going with the flow... but's getting harder and harder to justify inaction these days.
Conventions
I didn't attend any furry conventions last year so I made a point to attend Furpoc this year... can't say it really energized me to attend more furcons going forward but at least it was a reminder of what I'd been missing.
As a continuing tradition I was able to attend MoCCA Fest, NYC Comic Con, and PAX East again. All were along the same experiences as last year so I'll just note their attendance.
Also attended HelioSphere, a scifi/writer convention put together by some of the old guard from Lunacon, found out about this one from namfle and hung out with him for a bit after arriving. Not a lot going on here, debatable if I'll attend again though I may consider it just to try something a little different (and since 2018 was their second year they're probably still getting their feet wet with running things).
Entertainment
As usual still keeping my lists of books and movies that I watched for the first time.
Books - Reading list has been averaging not a lot of books for the year, and this time around it feels like I've been sticking to sequels in series rather than unique stories (finished quite a few Repairman Jack books this year, starting to get close to the end... of course then I have to jump over to the Adversary Cycle to get the full story; I also finished the new Destroyermen book... though this one was a real chore, the author feels like he's just phoning it in these days). I will say that I really enjoyed Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn, think Oceans 11 with Han Solo and some other Star Wars favorites - Disney really needs to reach out to this author to write their next script. I'll also mention I enjoyed Strange Objects by Gary Crew, best described as... strange. Honorable mentions will go out to Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain (contains the short story that includes the one for the basis of a well known claymation sequence, though the story runs very long and I'm not sold on the extra details it offers); I have to also mention The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll, a book that I vaguely remember starting to read in a college class as part of an assignment in my Management Information Systems class (an unhelpful title of a class which taught how to use a computer and various business related programs such as Excel... it was mid-nineties, my computer experience at the time was close to zilch). Anyways that book was to help give context to earlier attempts at dealing with hackers, we were tested on various chapters... and I remember quite clearly that I never finished the book, so fastforward to this year and I finally went back and found a copy and read through it - interesting but far more tedious than I remember it.
Movies - If you look at my list of movies watched for the first time in 2018... it's a bit long. Let's start with, I started off the year with a fantastic movie that I now understand why so many love it, Memento. And I'll also say I absolutely loved Infinity War, I worried putting all those characters together would be a shit-show but Marvel pulled it off. Honorable mentions go out to Sheep and Wolves, a movie I'd seen an untranslated Russian trailer for like several years earlier and kept hoping to one day see the finished product (anthro characters and transformation - my kind of flick); I'll also point out that I decided to fill out with watching the Madagascar trilogy (plus Penguins) - I'd only seen the first Madagascar movie and I'll be honest avoided the sequels, but they really grew on me, I like the overall story arc they fit in with that crew of zoo animals; I also watched the third Despicable Me, which was pretty good.
Trips
I dunno, maybe I'm mis-remembering the year but it felt a little more low-key than previous years.
I took a cruise to Bermuda with my family, including my sister and her boyfriend and my nephew.
Another trip to Thousand Islands... though this one was mid-September, the weather could have been worse but it was not ideal and made it almost next to impossible to enjoy some things like swimming. And I took a trip with my parents (and dog) to Martha's Vineyard, they'd been there the past few years and my sister went at least once or twice so I figured I should go at least once. And the usual Lake George trip with Dave and Derek (I'm still the only one keeping in contact with Rick, he's been pretty much excommunicated by the other two).
All trips were fun but nothing really of a big impression, maybe I'm just getting jaded in things and need to spice things up more going forward... though always dreading coming back is a downer.
Health & Fitness
Nothing really good, though I got my yearly physical earlier this month and outside my usual elevated blood pressure nothing bad to report. But my weight is at the worst its ever been and I've been seriously stalling in attempts to fix that; this second half of December I've been doing better though, cut out soda and started going more regularly to the gym so hopefully early in the new year I'll see some improvement.
Foot still in a bit of agony most days... I really regret ever getting that bunion surgery.
Ah and speaking of the foot, a few months back I went for an MRI and now my current podiatrist thinks its scar tissue which is causing the pain, though the solution to that revelation still eludes. A couple days before I went in for the MRI I started feeling super sick, I thought I was catching the flu or something. I seriously went from hot to cold during the course of the day, having to pull out a sweater while at work and then later take it off because I was sweating, then back on and I still couldn't feel warm. Anyways long story short I skipped the City Challenge race I was signed up for (I was feeling so much like shit I didn't even bother to pick up the shirt) and the day of the race I instead went in for the MRI - gawd I was in pain that weekend. In hindsight I think I had pneumonia... or at least that's what I'm guessing based on web-md and that I was coughing up blood for a couple days. But anywho, it was a long weekend (or did I have a day scheduled off to make it a long weekend? Can't remember) and I was feeling loads better by the time I got back to work.
Ah lastly, I skipped the marathon this year. It overlapped with the Martha's Vineyard trip so rather than cut out a day from the trip I came to the conclusion I was even less prepared than I usually am for running that race and I really really did not want to go through the pain and then painful recuperation while on a trip. I've gone through the process to guarantee entry for 2019 so I'd better be far more prepared this year. And honestly, I'm tiring of running, my foot is a constant issue, my weight is an issue, I don't know if I'll be going for a guarantee entry for the following year, this might be it for me... or just a break of a year or two, who knows.
Friends & Family
Let's start off with the good...
My nephew turned one this year, woohoo! And... I think it was this year that I found out my sister has set a date for her to finally get married to Chris - she wants to do a Halloween wedding in 2020 (one more reason for me to get working on shedding my weight).
I guess one other good thing to report, an ex-coworker of mine, James, is set to get married in May 2019 and I've been invited - should be fun; though again, gotta lose the weight... and probably need to buy a new suit, and fuck I have no idea what kind of wedding gift to give...
My friend Derek's sister gave birth to a daughter. So now all my friends from my home town who I still keep in touch with are uncles... and depressingly none of us are fathers, or for that matter married.
I've mostly stalled out on updating my family tree on Ancestry.com. I haven't canceled or paused the membership yet, there are some further out relatives that are living that I'm just trying to figure out how to connect to the tree, then I'd like to print out all the details I've got before stopping my payments to that site. It's been an interesting experience - I hope the information I've gathered is mostly accurate :P
My great-aunt Betty passed away this year... it's sad to see her go but also seeing her body wither these past couple years, my family and I agree we are not surprised by her passing this year.
Oh I found out my friend Dave's brother Glenn is getting a divorce - which isn't really bad news (except she's making the divorce rather difficult) because it makes us all happy, all of Dave's family and any friends who have met the woman. She... was really not a nice person, I won't share any of those stories here but the few times I'd seen her over the years you could tell she was pretty narcissistic.
So there's my year in summary, sucks I know... I kinda half-assed this one but I may want to a sketchy outline of what was going on in my life someday to look back on ;)
Hope everyone else had better 2018's... and hopefully all of us have a better 2019.
One last thing, resolutions!
So off the top of my head I didn't really accomplish anything. However I did put together a photo album which I gave to my parents, added it to the pictures displayed during their Christms Party. Not the usual type of album thing, more of a standing photo album, it took something like sixty photos so I'm still gonna count this as a completed resolution!
For this new year... let's just say the usual: lose weight, exercise more, write more, travel more, etc. And make at least a passing attempt to getting a bucket list item done (like skydiving or a really awesome trip or something...). Keep it simple and vague and you have a better shot of doing something which qualifies as a win I'd say ;)