All the things we keep, all the things we miss


So as is traditional on the last day of the year, I look back at the first day of the year and check how I did on my resolutions.. In 2013, I enjoyed about a 1 in 3 success rate. In 2014…

I didn’t run a marathon. I learned a bit more Spanish, but I felt rather stalled toward the end of the year. I didn’t touch my Hong Kong horror novel. I did read my daughter a bedtime story pretty much every night, but I never went line dancing (apart from one inept pirouette last Saturday, while walking with the stroller). So that’s the worst I’ve been in years: no better than a 20% success ratio.

That makes me feel a little bit glum as we exit this year. I should concentrate on the positives:

    La Serpiente Aquatica Negra is growing bigger and stronger, loves reading books (or at least pawing at them and then poring through them).
    Baby #2 is on the way.
    I’ve changed job to a new position in a different company, with plenty of new things to learn and people to learn from.
    I didn’t run a marathon, but I got my 5k time down below 20 minutes. Plus, I now have nice graphsto help track my progress and people to train with, which keeps me more honest.
    I took off almost exactly 3 kilograms between a year ago and now. (I lost another two about a month ago, but sickness, travel and Christmas meant I put those back on.)
    I wrote a bit of Gap Year, although not enough. I should spend some more time on that in 2015.
    I don’t always lose to my wife at crib. Still mostly, but not all the time.
    I’ve been to three different weddings, and to the quite surreal Bavarian-fakery of Leavenworth, WA, twice. I got to visit Costa Rica, Canada (twice), the UK (twice), and the US (more times than I remember). Basically, I accumulated frequent flyer points like a boss.

However, basically I dislike New Year. It strikes me as such a meaningless event to celebrate. It’s not like my wedding anniversary falls on the first of January, or any awe-inspiring event happened that I feel justifies fireworks. But perhaps I’m just a grumpy old man.

Worried that I wasn’t remembering enough good stuff, I thought I’d look back at my external memory, the archive of cushtie.com posts for the year.
January: Our daughter began to crawl. I was misdiagnosed with shingles, got hungover on crisps, flossed, and visited Hong Kong. Oh, and I made a short video about the Year of the Horse. Wish I’d done more of those in the next 11 months.
February: I spoke at a Big Data conference, got some compression socks and went to a ukulele concert.
March: Back pain and bloody nipples. I’ll say no more. We saw Neko Case in concert though.
April: I ruminated on time wasted. I also drank some sloe gin.
May: I bought more compression socks.
June: I went to Seattle, then my wife went to Canada and I went back to Singapore and felt quite sad.
July: “Error in establishing database connection” my website says. Who am I to argue? I seem to recall weeping while putting away my daughter’s clothes though.
August: I finished my old job and got very drunk, then started my new job. I also watched True Detective, quite drunkenly. Were these two things related? Who can say?
September: Agony, as a result of eating citrus fruit.
October: I started spinning classes, as well as attempting to begin the 80/20 training plan for running. Neither seem to be a solid part of my routine yet.
November: I got foot and mouth.
December: Got very drunk and had a silly picture taken of me wearing enormous glasses. Went on a possibly ill-advised weeklong holiday to Seattle and Vancouver. And came back to write this.

And so here we are, waiting for the end. Tomorrow I’ll have some new resolutions, and hopefully have some sleep too I suspect one resolution, given the hand foot and mouth and the ‘shingles’, would be to get less sick next year…


One response to “All the things we keep, all the things we miss”

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.