Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit

Hippo Gnu Deer

Done last year (20121224Su - 31Su)

Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit. Hippo, Gnu, Deer. Or something like that. It's time for the last dregs eight days of 2017 to finally show up. And year we are.

The week opened with an actual white Christmas, which was kind of amazing. Colleen had never had one, though we've had snow close to Christmas since coming to Washington. We had the entire family, including G and the kids. (We'd planned on having the YD and her outlaws, but between illness and the snow, we didn't. Fortunately we'd had them over the previous Wednesday.)

I made a standing rib roast, which went over very well even though it came out a little rarer than I'd wanted. We never did put up a tree -- we would have had to suspend it from the ceiling, because cats -- but I did put a lighted fake-pine garland along the kitchen/dining room counter. Gifting was not affected, though; there were comparatively few gifts, but all were good ones. We decided that maybe next year we could decorate one of the trees outside, where they would be safe from cats (though not necessarily cows).

G had been planning to go home in (van) Rosie. Yeah, right. She ended up inches away from falling off the bottom of the driveway. N managed to get (Bolt) Molly up to the street, but only with the aid of g wielding a shovel. I decided to buy an actual snow shovel at the first opportunity. N drove G to the ferry, whence he went home by public transit.

I did a fair amount of reading; the most interesting, I think, was about Elm, a functional language that compiles into Javascript and benchmarks really well against the most popular JS frameworks. Apparently you can also get Haskell and Clojure. Hmm. There's more good stuff in the links, as usual.

I did not get nearly as much done over the week as I had hoped; that is probably a Good Thing.

See also: mdlbear | River: That Was the Year That Was, which is the year-end summary, slightly out of order. We finished the year by toasting the New Year on East Coast time, so that we could all get to bed close to our usual bedtimes.

( Notes & links, as usual )

River: Onward to 2018

Last year, as you may recall, I titled my New Year's Day post "This had better work...". Last month I went back over it, in "That Was the Year That Was". I shorted myself some, by only reviewing my actual goals and not any other notable accomplishments along the way. Wait -- were there any?

Probably the biggest was simply living through it. It's not clear that anything else was that major.

Anyway, onward! Here are the goals for 2018:

1. Find the money for 2016 taxes and the garage room remodel. This will almost certainly involve a loan, rather than pulling it out of my retirement savings, because of the tax hit.
2. Get the garage sufficiently cleared out to serve as a workshop. Work some wood.
3. Do some real programming. Find an interesting open-source project and get involved, maybe. Write a DW client that works the way I want it to.
4. Learn Wordpress and Joomla. Maybe Drupal. Build the website that N is going to need for her business.
5. Do a lot more music. Continue lessons, play at some open mics and farmers' markets, record a CD or three.
6. Do a lot more writing. I wrote a book once; it's not impossible for me to do it again.
7. Attend Worldcon in San Jose. There are a lot of people in the Bay Area who we haven't seen since we left.
8. Take care of myself Self-care is still my weakest point. Walk. Find a therapist. Eat more green stuff.
9. Do things that get me out among people. I'm still something of a loner, and very much an introvert, but I need this.

There were also a bunch of WIBNIFs, none of which actually got done. Three of them, "Get back into recording", "Do a lot more writing", and "Do a little woodworking", are included above. That pretty much leaves:

• Record an album, either Amethyst Rose, Lookingglass Folk, or preferably both. Last year's version of this, "do some recording", is included in "do a lot more music". See above.
• Do something that will bring in a little money. I'm not sure I'm up for contracting again, but writing could do it. So could an album or two. And maybe I could start a patreon.