This isn’t a general “year in review” thing – it’s basically just a summary of what happened to me this year. If you’re not interested in that sort of thing, there’s nothing here worth reading.

1.) Last year’s new year’s resolutions: 2/3 ain’t bad, but the one that I missed is one that regards my personal health, which sort of sucks. The two I succeeded in were: get design input at work, and undertake a large creative project outside of work. The one I failed was: lose 14 lbs.

2.) House: There have been a *lot* of incremental improvements to the house this year, including finishing two rooms (the two rightmost rooms in the upstairs), upending the front yard (though that’s still incomplete), different housemates (a very, very good, very compatible combination), major reorg of the house (we moved upstairs again), and a lot of relatively minor organizational issues that got solved. Feels like progress. There are still water leaks in the front of the house, but that problem has been apparently traced pretty definitively to the roof, which is the single biggest piece of progress we’ve seen on the issue since the beginning. It looks like two of the windows downstairs have stopped leaking, while the one that I would have “expected” not to have been fixed was indeed not fixed. Last night, two upstairs windows sprung leaks, but that wasn’t entirely out of the realm of reasonability, given the fixes to the roof last year, and the utter insanity of the rain last night.

Still, overall, it looks like that problem is down to the home stretch, and if that gets fixed, the level of stress in my life during the winter will decrease so dramatically as to have felt like a physical thing.

3.) Physical Fitness: Hoo boy. This, as noted above, was the resolution last year I didn’t hold to, and it’s becoming a serious issue. I’m now ~230lbs, and that’s probably 20 lbs above where I look reasonable, and 30 over where I “should” be. This year, I’m going to try a different approach. Reasonably, it’s not likely I’ll be getting substantially more exercise (though that will be a focal point) – the major focus is going to be on eating less. Portion control, plain and simple. Lunch, for instance, always consists of X amount of food, which is invariably more than I need for lunch, but I eat it anyway because I don’t want it to go to waste. Which is stupid, since I have a fridge at work, and I can just refrigerate what I don’t eat, and eat it the next day. So, I’m writing down a list of things to do, and printing it up, and posting it at my desk, so that I just see a visible reminder of it on a daily basis.

4.) Hobbies: I’d gotten a bit too videogame-focused in my hobbies over the last couple years, and hadn’t really done anything creative outside of that, except for a few paintings. This year, I did a painting of a good friend, for her wedding gift, and participated in the National Novel Writing Month, which resulted in a 50K word story, that was based on a concept that a couple of us had been developing as the plot for an RPG. Turned out much better than I’d expected (we’re NOT talking “good” by any stretch, just better than I’d thought), and showed me that writing is both an accessible, and really entertaining thing to do. Definitely participating next year, if for no other reason than to finish up the story I started this year. Also learned I can sort of sing & play guitar at the same time, which I thought previously was more or less impossible. Again, not well, but enough to know that it’s an entertaining process.

5.) Work: It looks like I’m officially a ‘game designer’ now, and not a hybrid. My credit on Sims 2 was ‘game designer,’ so when management switched over to the new team, that seems to have been what stuck. Which is quite good, for me. It looks like this year’s going to be a rough process. People are, by and large, frustrated, and the new management really failed to make the transition properly. As a result, a lot of people’s feelings got hurt, or screwed outright, and the team’s basically almost falling apart. We’ll see how things shake out, but it’s not a promising start. Still, it looked to be on the upswing at the end of the year, and hopefully, things start on the same vector.

6.) Other stuff: I think this year, I really learned a lot about dealing with people, understanding conflicts, and being able to look at personal and personality issues with a bit of a better understanding as to what’s going on, and where the conflict comes from. It’s been a process that I’ve had to develop both in work, and out of it, and I think I’m getting reasonably good at it, which is strange, because thinking back, I *was* really good at it in high school, when I needed to be, then for years, it was simply not a skill I spent any time developing. Sort of like most of my skills, once I got to college. Alas.

7.) Friends, Family, Etc.: This has been a pretty substantial year, due to (6), and it’s fundamentally altered my understanding of what I want out of a long-term relationship, and also, how I relate to a lot of other people in my life. Not in a bad way, for the most part, though I do realize that my tolerance for things I don’t like is very, very low, simply because I have *so much* in my life that is literally perfect – I wouldn’t change a thing about 95% of my daily experience with people outside of work. So, I get really irritable about small crap that makes no difference, simply because I’m not used to being irritated by it. Hopefully, that understanding turns into a little bit more acceptance and forgiveness of the things that do bother me, but that’s an active process I need to work on.

8.) Health: Found I’m suceptible to asthmatic bronchitis, in the midst of hayfever season. Nothing like a cough that’s so intense it keeps you from sleeping properly for a week, and sends you to the emergency room twice in the span of a week. Drugs, fortunately, helped quite a bit, but I worry it’ll be a consistent, sort of annual event. I hope not, but we’ll find out this year. Definitely one of the reasons I’ve spent so much time mauling the front yard in recent months.

9.) Death: This year, for the first time, a good friend of mine died. I’ve had friends of the family, and people I’ve known die, but no one I’ve been as close to as Kevin. The event put a lot of things into perspective for me – brought back the feelings of, “what do I want to have contributed to the world, once I’m gone,” sort of feelings that I had often as a child, but much less so, now that I’m in the day-to-day groove of adult life. Kevin was a artist, though I only ever knew him as a hacker, but his art was stunning, and really forced a change in perspective for me. At work, I’ve been essentially designing what’s been “needed,” but what I want to do is design something that changes the way people think about games. Something that shakes them up, and makes them look at their life in a different way. I don’t know what that is, yet, but if I find it, I’ve got Kevin to thank for lighting the way.

Hrm. I’m sure there’s a crapload of stuff I’m forgetting, but it’s become sort of uninteresting to most people enough, for now. 😀