2014 Resolutions: How did I do?

Last year, I made a series of resolutions for 2014. So, how did it go?

• Ongoing gym work: Kept.
  
• Cutting body fat to 15%: cancelled in favour of muscle building.
  
• Additional workskills training: Ongoing and in progress.
  
• Seeing a career counsellor: Failed. There were higher priorities for limited disposable income.
  
• More massages, fewer all-nighters & working weekends: Total fail.
  
• Learning C3A square dance program: Cancelled for lost interest.
  
• Cutting back on square dance commitments: Kept
  
• Seeing a chiropractor: Cancelled for lack of need.
  
• New glasses: Kept.
  
• Cutting back on committee commitments: Kept.
  
• Household improvements: Ongoing and in progress.
  
• Saving $200/paycheck: Kept.
  
• Slaying the demon credit cards: Failed. Still too much out-of-control spending. More focus & restrain required.
  
• Updating wills, etc..: Kept.
  
• Sending xmas cards: Kept
  
• Finding my bliss: Some progress, but not enough.

Summary: 7 kept, 3 partially/ongoing kept, 3 cancelled, 3 failed. I'm counting this as 13 out of 16 good, so an 81% success rate. Not bad.

2014 In Review

2014 is over already? I really wasn't finished with the nineties yet either, but time marches on.

So, what do we make of this year?

2014 Health

I'm still alive... that has to count for something. In a nod to graceful aging and not dying (yet), I now have bifocal progressive lenses in my glasses. I have to admit they've made my life much easier.

I had two nasty bouts with kidney stones this summer, but that's been resolved and I'm working with my urologist to figure out some sort of long term plan to avoid them for (hopefully) the rest of my life. This was my eighth time at that particular party so I figure I've paid my dues and have earned a stone-free old age.

At some point this spring (I'm still not sure exactly when or how), I hurt my left shoulder. It wasn't incapacitating or required surgery, but it made some gym exercises impossible until mid-fall. Over the past three months, I've been slowly working that area again, trying to strengthen it against future injuries and generally returning to my previous routine. So far, so good.

My membership with LA Fitness expired in July, but I got a good deal on a three year renewal so I'm good until 2017.

The gym progress feels both good and bad these days.

On the good side, the weights I'm using have increased significantly from the beginning of the year. Squat weight has risen from 140lbs to 180lbs, leg press from 360lbs to 400lbs, chest press from 145lbs to 175lbs, dumbbell curls from 45lbs to 70lbs, etc.. Measurements of my chest, upper arm and forearm have all improved too, although not as much as I'd like –call that a 2015 goal.

On the bad side, after some progress on the percentage body fat, dropping from 20.4% in January to a low of 18.2% in November, it rebounded to 18.9% as of today. My BMI was stable at 26 until today's measurement of 26.6. My weight drifted down from 176lbs in January to a low of 172lbs in September, but is now back to approximately 180lbs. I'm less concerned about the weight gain as I believe much of that was muscle, but the percentage body fat is stubbornly high. That said, while I had originally planned to reduce it in 2014, I learned that it would be damn near impossible to make significant progress on that while also trying to add muscle: it's practically contradictory, so I chose muscle growth. Losing much of the summer to my shoulder injury didn't help.

Overall, I'm content with the improvements in my health & body, and hope to see further improvements in 2015.


2014 Home

This year, we had the front steps and front walkway rebuilt as the old mortar and cement were crumbling after 20 years of foot traffic.

We installed solar panels in the spring of 2014. While our solar productivity has nosedived in the fall thanks to cloudy days, lots of rain, shorter days and less intense sunlight, we're still in surplus territory thanks to some very bright & productive summer days. And the income from the solar renewable energy credits hasn't hurt either.

The couch and armchair in the living room were replaced this fall as well. The new ones are incredibly comfortable.

We've also been slowly divesting ourselves of a lot of the junk that has been cluttering the basement rec room and computer bunker. That's still a work in progress.

My 2001 Honda Civic passed away this December. The first clue was the transmission dying, but other expensive repairs were going to be needed to make it fully roadworthy again, an estimated price tag twice that the of the Kelly Blue Book value. In the end, the car was donated to the local county fire & rescue training facility for practice rescues. At this point, I'm not planning to replace the car: we'll see how long we can make do with the remaining two vehicles. I'd be perfectly happy to not have to spend extra money for another car.

One of the less romantic functions accomplished this year was the updating of the wills, medical powers-of-attorney, etc.. Kent and I had the paperwork done 10+ years ago, but we needed an updated set to include & protect Michael, not to mention reflect our own life changes.


2014 Travel

I've been to the San Francisco Bay area a couple of times this year on business, not to mention a couple of runs to our Secaucus, NJ, office. I love the sense of adventure and change of scenery, even if I do have to work extended hours on those visits. It also gives me a sense of purpose, direction and productivity which frequently evades me when I'm just working from home: I return to my hotel room feeling like I've done something useful, rather than just noting that I've worked a reasonable number of hours that day and clocking out.

We visited Cleveland for one daughter's baby shower. And baby Hunter arrived in September in good health. Hunter and his parents visited for xmas... he's a delightful little guy and it was wonderful to spend some time with the extended family.

The three of us went up to Toronto for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary at the end of June. We also went as tourists to Ottawa and Gananoque, enjoying Canada Day in the nation's capital, doing some sight-seeing and going on a 1000 Island boat cruise. We need to do more of that.

Our trailer in West Virginia continues to be our island of tranquility, now it its 10th year. We really need to find out how we can schedule more weekends there.


2014 Work & Geekdom

I'm still with Deem, Inc., my sixth year. I received two raises this year (one from a general organizational restructuring, the other merit) exceeding my income goals by a wide margin. And just before xmas, we finally got the new stock option numbers after being in limbo for over a year in capital restructuring. Now to wait for our IPO so those options might potentially be worth something...

Sadly, my team was severely downsized earlier in the year. In January, we were a team of six (me on th east coast, five in California); now we're just me and one guy in SF. We did have an open position being advertised, but I've recently learned the powers-that-be have trashed that position as well.

We've scaled back the workload and number of projects to match the reduced staffing, but I'm still fielding complaints from other teams: “When we asked for X last year, you guys gave us an instant response. Why do we need to wait three days for the same thing? WTF is wrong with you incompentent idiots?” At which point I explain sweetly we don't have the bandwidth so we're not entertaining last minute requests from people who are incapable of planning their projects or anticipating their own deadlines. I'm nothing if not sweetness & light.

I had some work-related projects suspended this year but some success in others. I had been hoping to rebuild entirely our array of LDAP, DNS and web servers, as well as retire some older RedHat Linux and Ubuntu operating systems, but the powers-that-be froze the requests for new hardware: the existing hardware is typically eight years old so I'm getting increasingly nervous about the hardware failure rates and the inability to get patches for older operating systems.

Speaking of which: Poodle, Heartbleed, Shellshock. A good time was had by none. In each case, I was able to get current patches from the vendors for our newer systems, but had to fetch & compile source code, then deploy fixes for our older ones. I lost too many hours dealing with this stuff in 2014; I want all older systems retired in 2015.

On a separate front, I'm learning R, OpenStack and Hadoop in my spare time, trying to keep my skills semi-relevant just in case I do get downsized or get a job offer so good I can't refuse. I'm not actively job hunting, but fortune favours the prepared.

I've tossed all of my old desktop machines in my home computer bunker. All of that equipment has been replaced with refurbished laptops I've purchased from eBay. For any new experiment or project, I just swap out a hard drive and have an entirely new bare metal sandbox. I could use VirtualBox, Xen or such to do emulation, but I've occasionally had occasional bad luck with those in the past, attempting to resolve an issue in my project only to find an unusual interaction with the container was actually the source of the error. Educational, but it interrupts my flow and my goals.


2014 Square Dancing

I've been cutting back my commitments and dance activities dramatically since the end of 2013. Frankly, I've been over-extended and have run out of fuel. I've left nearly every committee and board position I used to have. I've passed up a few square dance weekends and guest calling gigs in favour of sleeping at home or catching up on personal reading. I haven't attended or organized any caller schools, workshops, conventions or practice sessions this year and don't have any plans to do so in the near future. I'm also reconsidering the expense of my various caller association memberships.

That said, I'm still calling periodically for the DC Lambda Squares, Chesapeake Squares and our Wednesday C2 group, but not much more than that. I had been flirting with learning C3A in 2013, but have since abandoned those plans as it will take a huge amount of dedication to learn, not to mention even more hours of travel & practice to internalize it.

In all, it's still fun, but I have higher priorities which have been otherwise neglected the past few years.


2014 Other Projects, Activities & Surprises

I estimate I've read more books in the past year than I did in the prior five. This is a very, very good thing.

I lost my Samsung tablet in my last business trip to San Francisco: my suspicion was that I left it on the flight, or possibly on BART. Anyway, I contacted the lost & found offices, resigned myself to its loss and bought a low-end (read: disposable) Android-based tablet from Fry's Electronics for $50 which would be my cheap-ass ebook reader in future. And then the kind folks at Virgin Atlantic found my Samsung tablet and shipped it back to me! Yay!

I've reached that point in my life where serious retirement planning is a thing. It's been a theoretical activity over the past number of years, stuffing money away into my RRSP (Canada) and 401k/IRA (US) for a nebulous time in the far future when I might leave the workforce. I'm old enough now to force some clarification on that nebulous time: July 1, 2027, the July 1 after my 60th birthday. As of this writing, I have 4,564 days left to go. That said, I may defer my actual retirement: I just want to re-design my life to allow me the option of retirement at 60 if I chose. We've started some household renovations to make life easier for slower, clumsier, arthritic bodies, as well as reducing our operating costs, and there will be more in future.