River: That Was the Year (2019) That Was

It's that time of year -- the time when I look back over my goals for the year that was, and cringe. Actually, I did better this year than last. But that's a very low bar.

1. Okay, then. The number one goal is simply getting through the damned year, alive and with one or more roofs over our heads...
   90% -- always nice to start out with something easy. Only it wasn't particularly. And the "alive" part involved more close calls than I like to think about. And there were losses outside the immediate family.
2. There are two bucket-list events coming up; the first is my 50th college reunion. I don't want a repeat of the my high school reunion debacle. I'm going.
   100% -- and I had a blast.
3. The second is Mom's 99th birthday celebration.
   100% -- Same as above. I sang two songs: Get Up and Go, and The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of, and pretty much nailed them.
4. There's a lot of yard work that needs to get done in order to make the apartment over the garage attractive as a vacation rental. Weeding, mowing, and fixing the driveway are the high-order bits.
   I'm going to say 40% for this one. Most of the weeding and mowing has been done, and not terribly expensively. The rest is waiting on the weather, but it'll happen. Fixing the driveway, weeding the gravel paths, and making the garden usable again... not so much.
5. There's also a huge amount of paperwork associated with setting up a vacation rental as well -- business license, tax stuff, all that. Not to mention putting (some fraction of) the associated remodeling on our taxes. Lots of figuring-out to do. Just the sort of thing I hate.
   5%? The only thing I did about setting up a vacation rental was deciding to postpone or cancel it. :P
6. I have to either get a job (which is unlikely and largely out of my control, but I have to at least crank out the applications) or start a business.
   50%? I applied for quite a few jobs, and didn't get any of them. That's probably a good thing. I didn't file any paperwork, but I set up the Computer Curmudgeon website, but didn't promote it. I got a small writing gig as well, though it appears to have been a one-shot, so I don't think it qualifies as starting a business.
7. I have to put in an amended tax return for 2017; that means finding the rest of the receipts for work done on the house. Mostly that's yard, deck, bathroom, studio, and the stairlifts.
   0% -- punt to next year.
8. Having just found out that my posting software hasn't been passing the Music: header up to DW, I'm putting writing a good command-line DW client on the list. Most likely written in Perl, Python, or Go. Of course, it needs to be able to upload as well as post, in order to backfill the music.
   Maybe 30%. The posting software has been vastly improved, and even partly documented, but I never wrote a new client, just improved the wrapper.
9. Speaking of music, we're working toward a concert at Conflikt in 2020. That means not only picking our setlist and rehearsing the heck out of it, but having CDs to sell. This is a huge stretch -- recording new CDs has been on my to-do list for over a decade now (CC&S came out in 2007).
   10% maybe? Maybe. I'm only giving myself credit for that much because the failure really wasn't something I had any control over. We'll aim for something next year.
   Add an extra 5% for getting back to singing lessons and singing at Mom's party.
10. And then there's writing. No particular target, but definitely more curmudgeon and s4s posts.
    100% -- 9 curmudgeon, 19 s4s posts, 5 FAWM songs, and one piece of professional technical writing. (In contrast, 2018 saw 35 curmudgeon posts, but only 13 s4s posts and no songs. I originally had 120%, but I'm taking off 20% because of the poor showing in curmudgeon posts. It would have been more like 75 except for the songs and the tutorial.)

All-in-all, 480% out of a possible 1000, for an average of 48%. Considering that 2018's tally was 45.3 out of 1100, or 4.1%, I'd say I did pretty well by comparison. Of course, I'd set myself a lower bar.

In terms of posting stats, I didn't do as well. In 2018 I wrote 147384 words in 161 posts, for an average of 915/post. I made more posts this year, but wrote considerably fewer words and nearly 2/3 as many words per post on average.

Posting: all of 2019 by month (through 12/30):
   9346 words in 23 posts	 in 2019/01 (average 406/post)
   8891 words in 16 posts	 in 2019/02 (average 555/post)
  14298 words in 19 posts	 in 2019/03 (average 752/post)
   8430 words in 15 posts	 in 2019/04 (average 562/post)
   7851 words in 13 posts	 in 2019/05 (average 603/post)
   9207 words in 13 posts	 in 2019/06 (average 708/post)
   9320 words in 14 posts	 in 2019/07 (average 665/post)
   8133 words in 13 posts	 in 2019/08 (average 625/post)
  10772 words in 11 posts	 in 2019/09 (average 979/post)
   6320 words in 10 posts	 in 2019/10 (average 632/post)
  16056 words in 30 posts	 in 2019/11 (average 535/post)
  11039 words in 13 posts	 in 2019/12 (average 849/post)
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 119663 words in 190 posts total in 2019 (average 629/post)

I should make "summary of the year" and maybe "summary of the decade" posts. Or maybe "The Last 20 Years". I don't think I will just yet. You'll find some of that in my next "State of the Bear" post (which I haven't finished, but have at least started). For now, let's just say that 2019 sucked in many ways. So did a lot of 2018. So did...

I'd love to see 2020 turn things around and be a great year, but I'm not going to count on it. See you tomorrow next year!