2022 → 2023

Well, that’s 2022 mostly wrapped, huh?

It’s been a heck of a year.

We’ve all moved into our third year of pandemic life, which I think many of us would characterize as, at best, “not fun,” while many others pretend it’s already over. For my part, I went into about the same number of buildings this year as last year, and the buildings of both years together can be counted on two hands, with fingers to spare. But I also think more of the cautious folks, like my household, seem to be mentally adjusting, maybe? Maybe we’re getting used to this, or working out new ways to cope? The only data I have to back up this assertion is that I visited with more people (outdoors, masked) this autumn than I had in all the time since mid-March of 2020, I think.

Although I stand by my assertion that I’m “adjusting,” I admit that I still find myself very tired, even allowing for the expected mid-winter energy slump. I miss the ocean; I miss novel experiences; I miss coffee shops and libraries and meals with people I love; I’m six months into my second job of this calendar year, and it’s not really a better fit than the first job was, though for wildly different reasons; the air quality in my area of Pittsburgh has been pretty consistently bad all year (but not the worst in the area, which is horrific). … I didn’t set out to make this post into a list of complaints, so I will leave off. I suppose my point, here, is that many (most?) of us are still having a rough time of things; I know I’m far from the only person who is existentially exhausted right now; and I hope 2023 brings us relief.

I’ll bullet-point my year in review, which I present in no particular order, as well as my 2023 plans/goals/aspirations.

Major projects of 2022:

• I picked up, stopped, and re-picked-up bullet journaling. I have to combine the written journal with an electronic calendar for it to really work for me, especially given my officemates’ propensity for eating paper, but taking the time to plan my year, month, week, and day is a useful habit that I’d like to, :cough: build and :cough:, maintain over the next year. (My officemates are Pumpkin and Phoebe, two cockatiels. Pumpkin also enjoys throwing pens off the desk.)
• Some good friends of mine got married and then moved to Australia, which wasn’t really my project, except in that I was one of their witnesses (outdoors, masked, and we were all quarantined in the two weeks leading up to the event), but it was still an important milestone in my year.
• I was viscerally reminded why I categorically do not work at start-ups unless they’re run by someone with both experience and empathy. (This sounds unreasonably mean, but it is not: I left voluntarily, for a whole slew of good reasons, but not even two months later something like half the company was laid off, with more to follow in a couple more months. Lots of really good people out of jobs because of one person’s inexperience and hubris.) I made some great friends and found a new favorite remote team-building tool, so, although I’ve (clearly!) still got a lot of snark in me, I can’t really be angry, at least on my own account.
• My gaming group finished—as in, there was an ending, a completed story!—the tabletop role-playing game (Mage: the Ascension, 20th anniversary edition) that we’ve been playing over Discord for the last 2+ years. We’ll be playing a heavily-customized version of D&D in 2023.
• I upped my coffee game, finally trying an Aeropress — I like it, especially with the Prismo attachment from Fellow!
• My arthritis meds were changed up. The new one has no quarterly blood test requirement (something I was not meeting for my old meds, even pre-pandemic — I am not an easy person to get blood from, but I’m polite/easygoing enough that they always have the least-experienced phlebotomist try first: truly the worst combination), no documented increase in cancers among people who take it, no feeling crappy the day after taking it, no prohibition against sunlight or alcohol—its only real down side, assuming it doesn’t create a new autoimmune condition for me (a possible, but rare, side effect) is that my immune system is somewhat more severely suppressed than it was on the previous medication. Well, that, and it costs on the order of $6k/month if I try to get it without insurance coverage, which I do not plan to do. I’m not arthritis-free, but I am in less pain these days.
• We had a retaining wall put in. The old one was about to fall down. The yard’s a lot nicer after having that done, and the deck that we had to have removed wasn’t in great shape—but I wonder if we’ll regret losing the deck when it comes time to sell the house (spoiler: soon).
• We acquired and put up a 12 foot skeleton. Their name is Sam, and they are spectacular. (They’re coming with us when we move.)
• In late spring through mid-autumn, Dale and I walked through the park by our house most days and counted turtles (four sliders who were pretty often visible and one snapper whom we only saw once), bullfrogs (one, but she was huge and pretty consistently in the same spot), eastern phoebes (at least one adult and three chicks), northern flickers (at least one pair), and other wildlife. “Our” groundhog had babies, and it was fun to watch them in the yard. “Our” pair of great horned owls is back at the park, this winter, too; we’ve even heard one of them hoot during the day!
• I learned to make two local treats that I had been missing: Coffee Buddha’s maple curry latte (they closed in 2019) and Mad Mex’s Gobblerito (they don’t do curbside).

Major projects of 2023, planned:

• Dale and I are moving to Maine over the next two months (that is, by the end of February, 2023). Yes, this is going to be a challenge (haha, I could stop the sentence there, but it continues) for two people who are both high-risk for one or more of the current pandemics, one of whom is also immunocompromised, and also it’s the dead of winter in Maine, and there are tiny, fragile pet birds to consider. But I am nothing if not Very Into Logistics, so it’ll be fine. Probably. And, hey, I’ll get to see the ocean again!
• Obviously, there are some sub-projects:
  • Pack — I’m hoping to do a lot of that before the year turns over.
  • Find a new place. Cross your fingers that we can buy in January, but we’ve got a backup plan that involves my renting, possibly alone, for a while before we buy.
  • Settle in: paint, if needed (our current favorite house does need it, at least in one very yellow bedroom :)), hang art and bird feeders, set up the kitchen the way I like, and all of that.
  • Unpack.
  • Find a new rheumatologist and primary care physician, ugh. I’m hoping my old rheumatology department will work with me until that happens.
  • Find a new exotics veterinarian (there’s one in Brunswick, ME, who looks promising); this isn’t all that disruptive, honestly, since our fantastic local avian vet retired in 2022, and Ella Chinchilla’s vet here is a bit of a drive.
  • Sell the Pittsburgh house, but possibly not until May? (The overlap between “people who might be interested in buying our place” and “people who read my blog” is probably zero, but if you are in that overlap, obviously please get in touch; we’ll sell to a development corporation if we have to, but we’d prefer to sell to a real person.)
• I’m going to ramp my activity in Code4Lib back up. I never really left—if nothing else, I’m usually lurking in the Slack, and code4lib.social is my home Mastodon instance—but 2023 will see me resubscribing to the email list and generally engaging more than I have been in the last few years. I’ll participate in the conference stream’s back channels and all that stuff I used to enjoy doing. Given the timing, I might not volunteer in any big way for the 2023 conference, but look for me to help more actively (but probably still virtually) in 2024.
• I’ll also pick up my reading in UX topics, which I’ve let slide for a while, and maybe also learn Angular?
• This one’s aspirational, rather than concrete, but I’d like to earn some kind of certification in accessible digital interface design, even if it’s just taking the W3C’s free online course. (OK, it isn’t free if you want the certificate.)
• I’m going to bullet journal and also journal-journal. For real this year. I may have to investigate electronic bullet journaling, though; we’ll see.
• Publish those half-written blog posts. There’s one in my head (so not even half written) about the really good romance books I read this year, and I’ve got one partially written about how to run a good meeting or workshop online. Actually, it starts with how to run a good meeting, full stop. There’s also a whole series I mostly finished writing, several years ago, but didn’t publish because I am a coward; it’s all about inclusive interviewing/hiring practices in academic libraries. We’ll see, we’ll see. The meeting one, though: that one has to be released into the world.

That’s probably more than enough to-do items for a year that’s already shaping up to contain major changes. I’ll do some crafting, but I’m not committing to what, exactly. I’ll learn to make a good V60 coffee brew, but I’m not committing to when, exactly. And so on. :)