Year in review, year in preview: 2016/2017

[chanaleh]

Apparently it usually does take me 3 weeks to get this posted, but down the line I won't care how belated it was, so here it is. :-)


10 goals from 2016 (cf original list: LJ | DW)

Family:
- Successfully nurture Aria's growth from a 5-month-old to a 17-month-old. Well, we're there! It's still mindblowing to imagine the qualitative changes that will take place in the *next* 12 months.
- Be a good partner to etrace. I don't always get a lot of feedback, but as far as I can tell, doing OK on this front. :-)

Financial:
- Continue to save money as aggressively as possible. Decent progress.
- Motivate some kind of change in the nephew-J, willfully-underemployed, living-on-our-couch-rent-free situation. Well, I had nothing to do with this in the end, but last spring he at least moved out of our living room into the back room off the garage (which has served as a bedroom in various eras of this house's life and a storage room the rest of the time). So now it's much more like he lives downstairs with his grandmother and not with us. Except he still turns up in the middle of the night raiding our refrigerator. Which irritates etrace even more in the winter (when J is holed up in his room playing videogames 20 hours a day) than in the summer (when he's out most days mowing lawns, including ours once a week or so). But, I don't know... no further real resolution in sight for that topic.

Creative:
- Expand my Zazzle (and CafePress) portfolios. My CafePress shop has stagnated (they make it, if possible, even more irritating than Zazzle to post new products), but the Zazzle thing has had some nice boosts, including the SCOTUS Angels (inspired by hammercock) and To Bigotry No Sanction buttons (inspired by 530nm330hz).
- Write journal entries (apart from the baby book) at least once a month. Not really, but at least I've been pretty consistent with the baby entries.

Body/self-care:
- Get more physically active/improve eating habits. Hahahaha no, really not much progress on either of these. I tackled a few short-term eating changes in the early months of 2016: first, no refined sugar; then, Intermittent Fasting (food intake only between 1pm and 8pm). Neither made a significant difference in how I felt after 5-6 weeks, so I kind of stopped bothering. But right now I'm up another 2-3lbs from where I started last year. Bleah. I don't foresee this changing significantly until such time as I have an extra hour a day to walk or do other physical activity. -- However, what I DID do this year was buy more clothes that fit my post-baby body, so that's a positive.

Experiential:
- Take Aria to visit my mom in California. Did not happen, but my mom and brother did visit here for Aria's birthday in July.
- Go to shul on Saturday morning at least once. We did this -- twice even. Plus I brought Aria to Rosh Hashanah Day 2, Yom Kippur evening/break-fast, and a Sunday afternoon sukkah party. She has made a little friend at shul who is a year and a half older, having just turned 3, but they're practically the same size so it's pretty adorable.
- Go to the Dunes and/or the nearby waterpark at least once. This, in fact, we did. No waterpark (maybe in 2017), but there were 3 separate trips to the Dunes. And a couple of swimming pools.


A bunch more things that happened in 2016:

1. Aria's first 2 funerals. :-/ My friend Sierra's stepdad in January, and my uncle Terry (who had been long divorced from my aunt, but we saw him as recently as last Christmas at my cousin's house) at the beginning of April.
2. Attended the first seder at our local Chabad (which I enjoyed way more than I expected to) and hosted our own 2nd seder.
3. My first Mother's Day and etrace's first Father's Day. :-)
4. Late June: etrace's sciatica became unbearable enough that he actually got treatment, including several weeks of supplemental childcare.
5. Sept 9: etrace's back surgery.
6. Sept. 21: Not my trip, but my mom and brother went to Italy for 2 weeks and met up with my niece (who is now 18 and has been living with her mother in Switzerland for several years). It was reportedly strenuous but wonderful.
7. Late Sept: My dad had two eye surgeries: one for a detached retina, but they had to do a cataract surgery first so they could see what they were doing on the retina. It has been a long and miserable recovery and his eyesight is still not back to "normal" almost 4 months later. :-/ We haven't seen him in all that time, since he feels too ill to get together (he also can't see to drive, of course, but I told him I'd be happy to come pick him up anytime).
8. End of Sept: Aria's first overnight trip. I had a work conference in St. Charles, IL, and they were able to come along. There were fun parts (I got to take her swimming in the hotel pool), but the sleeping or lack thereof was BRUTAL. Mercifully, they sent me home at the end of the 2nd day, so we all got back into our own beds.
9. Miscarriage, at the beginning of November. I didn't tell very many people about this (I never even mentioned it to my mom). But it was a thing, and then it wasn't (we only knew about it for 2 weeks). We're really OK about it.
10. Also at the beginning of November, my employer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. :-/ The company is now up for sale. If the existing creditors acquire our assets (the baseline plan), business will probably proceed as usual; but first we go up for auction, and if someone else chooses to buy the company, basically anything could happen. We won't know the results until at least February.
11. Also the election. Wow, November really did suck, huh?
12. Dec. 20: jessruth and her L got married!!
13. Relatedly: I teleported to NYC on a same-day shuttle flight to be there. It was surreal and exhausting and a joy. (And due to some shifts in schedule, I even got to drop in at Ramaz and see a couple people there.)
14. Work has continued to be awesome and fulfilling, but one of the best things is that I made or strengthened some work friendships -- particularly with one of our web developers, with whom I hope to socialize in real life in the coming year. I already invited him and his wife to come to our 2017 Passover seder and they're psyched. :-)
15. I also had some really nice freelance projects, including 2 website builds. I am sorely behind in blogging about them. I guess that's what happens when you're too busy actually doing the work?
16. I got the Hamilton soundtrack for my birthday in October, so I have (a) been listening to it continuously ever since, (b) watched the PBS HamilDoc, and (c) officially joined the fandom in the sense that I now get all the quotes and in-jokes. :-)
17. Social times:
    
    
    
    1. Visited Kay (& saw Sierra) in Rochester, IN, for Bill's funeral in January (see above).
    2. Dinner with my h.s. friend Theresa for her birthday in May.
    3. Andy G was here from Boston over Memorial Day weekend and we took Aria to the Dunes.
    4. My Brandeis friend Dara visited several times starting in May (she is a radiologist and happened to take a locum tenens position at the hospital where Aria was born, 15 minutes from our house... so she was here 2x a month for the rest of the year!)
    5. ablock came the 2nd weekend of June and actually stayed over at our house. :-)
    6. jesse_in_boston & jedilora came the 3rd weekend in June & we drove to Indy to have brunch with them, then visited some old friends of etrace for the rest of the day.
    7. cycon visited midweek in late June and came for dinner.
    8. Spent (not enough) time with my friend Lisa and her 2 teenage girls due to emergency babysitting in June/July (see above).
    9. My mom & my brother Rick visited in July for Aria's 1st birthday!
    10. in late August, drove with Aria 90 mins to the north side of Chicago to visit cynara_linnaea & her B and got to see shirei_shibolim and family, all of which was awesome (and even with crazy traffic, it was a beautiful day to drive up Lake Shore Drive).
    11. cycon actually moved to Chicago at the beginning of September and came out to see us soon thereafter, as well as for Thanksgiving dinner.
    12. Early Dec. family holiday party with etrace's cousin's family. I think it was the only time we saw them all year, but I hope we see more of them in 2017.
        
    13. Got to see jessruth and family -- and new apartment! -- in December (see above).

10 goals for 2017:

1. Read Torah at CBI. This is kind of cheating because I actually did this yesterday. :-) It was the annual Sisterhood Shabbat and they recruited me to leyn Torah and the Haftarah for that day (Parshat Shemot). Having acquitted myself well, however, I suspect that they will call on me again soon now.
2. Keep my job, please please please. (There have been occasional noises made in the past year about moving me into our IT department, so I hope very much that that's a possible side route even if Creative Services somehow gets shut down.)
3. Get a PCP for each of us and have ALL the overdue routine medical appointments. (You know, while we still have health insurance.)
4. Start Aria in a Montessori program.
5. Invest in at least one modest house improvement (insulated garage door, energy-efficient refrigerator).
6. Start decrufting all the outgrown baby stuff (if we don't need it by the end of this year, we're not going to need it at all).
7. Visit California (my brother proposed a visit this spring; we're targeting my mom's birthday in late April).
8. Write 12 posts (not counting the 2 I still intend to backdate to Nov and Dec 2016) in the pro blog, a.k.a. eschultz72, and 12 non-baby posts in my own LJ/DW.
9. Have social time with my own actual friends an average of once a month (12 times).
10. Do whatever I can to support the Resistance.

N.B.: Cross-posted from Dreamwidth; click to view or comment on original post.