2022

The shape of the year

2022 was really defined for me by Jeremy being gone for 6 months and being with my mother for five. Everyone who's an expat is starting to do last year the big trip home to see the family who they haven't seen since it's before Covid and mine happened then too.  I got to spend 5 weeks in the US and meet Dorothy who was born after I left and see everyone. This was the first break I'd taken since I started working too. So got my mind actually out of the work zone for the first time in two years.  

And then my mum got to come live with me for 4 months and be in my life here. And she gave me a whole lease on life too. You know it would be a random part of the afternoon and then all the sudden we'd have to take a look at the sky break because it was turning some magical shade of scarlet or there had been an amazing cloud or the moon was visible. That kind of enthusiasm for the beauty and wonder of my life helped me to reconnect to it. And then we were cooking all the time too doing these recipe projects. I think having projects in general. Me and Jeremy have like computer games and walks and trips. But we don't really have projects. We set up our lives so that there's not a whole lot of things that we like should do. But some of what I like about going to the US is getting into those life improvement projects going through stuff for appearing houses or organising lives.  Plus we went to Vanuatu and read Middlemarch you know classic life of beauty and wonder stuff.

And then also Jeremy going and I had to cope both with like basic taking care of myself, life management, kind of things which I did better than expected on. And a positive side effect of being on my own is I really put some energy into building my social life which now I feel like actually exists again.

New Year's resolutions

1.  Apply for a new job. This one was set for me by Jeremy and the idea is to alter my way of thinking about my job. The plan is to really get to know what's out there and disconnect the idea of doing good work for society and my identity from the job I'm currently in. I can save the world with people I love at Micah but that's not the only way I can.  In classic me style. I've already done that one. There was some real serendipity and a really interesting role doing capacity building for the housing providers came across my desk with an organisation I'd looked at as an alternative. A lot of roles I see are like what I'm doing but less awesome, but this one is a truly different thing with different skills. I spent like 6 hours January 6th ish updating my resume and writing to the selection criteria which is a lot of work but also transferable if I were to see something else that excited me.

This whole idea is in response to what was maybe the biggest challenge of 2022, which is a bit of loss of innocence around my job. I still love it but Ryan at my work always talked about me as having drunk the Micah Kool-Aid and I really really had. There's been some stuff going on minor in the scheme of things but just the kind of politics that stymie you from doing the work. I still have infinite energy for doing the work so I don't feel burnt out but I wonder also if that's a bit of it. People are expected to turn over in crisis work about every 3 years and I've been there two and a half. I don't feel tired of doing what I'm doing but I wonder if the sense of nothing's getting better is grinding me down and then the things I'm getting pissed at that seem to be stopping me from making it better is like a side effect of that.

2. Something diet related. This one's still in the workshopping phase. I've looked at options like having soup or salad for dinner while Jeremy is gone which is most of the year. Or not having beer or wine in the house. Or not having snacks, chips or candy in the house.  I'm not sure what I want to do with this. Jeremy thinks calorie tracking is beyond the pale of the effort I want to put into it but this comes out of getting the sleep apnoea diagnosis and seeing the ear, nose and throat guy. The ear nose and throat specialist talked about what he could do but basically said he could not cure it. And that what does cure it is going to be dying and exercise such that I am less heavy and more toned. And I know there's some stupid and idea things that would be low hanging fruit in sort of improving health and wellness in my current lifestyle.  I'm also going to the regular doctor next week to look at my blood work and see how all that health and wellness crap is going in general.

3. Getting the total mortgage under 100,000. This is a little ambitious but not as ambitious as this year's target which I did not hit. In 2022 I changed my superannuation to be contributing basically the maximum that you can get a tax benefit on as voluntary contributions. This is good news for my retirement and creams off some money out of my pay but it does lower how much I've got in my take-home pay to be paying down the mortgage. It was basically my answer to diversifying what's happening with my money. Because my superannuation is stocks so it's sort of like having stocks as well as property.  We're still twiddling our thumbs a bit as far as if we want to buy the place we're living and if we want to buy something else period. But at the moment the mortgage is still there and we can just watch it come down so it's not urgent. I'm not sure what I want to do long-term as far as that and we haven't found a product we can't refuse yet. We've talked about buying where we are living which has the benefit of not paying our two grand a month in rent. And we love it. And we've talked about getting one of the other apartments I looked at when I was shopping hard, which is perhaps a bit better value for money proposition, but it's no longer where we're passionate about living. And we've talked about looking in the US or property prices are lower and we've got my mom and harmony to help with management and repair. 

4. This one's still being workshopped as well but something along the lines of don't put off for a week which you could do and literally 2 minutes. It's not well defined, but I feel like there's a lot of things like in the nature of a dirty shirt in the middle of the floor that I just get annoyed with every time I walk by but do not take the 5 seconds to put into the laundry basket. And that's just not me.