Thursday, December 28, 2017

The Year in Review: 2017

It is time for my annual year in review post. (Here's last year's post if you want details... you can click through and read earlier years from there.)

I don't think I wrote enough this year to pick my usual two to three posts per month. So instead, I'll just summarize the year and share a few posts.

Obviously, the political situation in the US was a big part of my year. The post I wrote the day before Trump's inauguration summarized how I felt at the start of the year, and it is still accurate. January also featured the release day for Caresaway.

In February, I ranted a bit about how angry all the lies in our political discussions make me.

In March, I wrote about why I don't think we should worry about immigrants "assimilating." And I found a great recipe for pizza dough. It is easy enough to mix together in the morning that I think we can continue our Friday night pizza dinners even when I am no longer working from home on Fridays!

I found 2016 and the ugliness around the election to be much harder on me as a woman than 2017 was, but I know that for many women, 2017 was the year when the anger about all the extra crap we've had to deal with broke out. I do have at least one post relevant to that: some thoughts I had after having lunch with an old friend in April. I also wrote about our spring break trip up the coast to Santa Barbara.

The headwinds I was feeling in May eventually combined with some other factors to make me decide to go back to "regular employee" status... which led to all the drama I've been posting about recently (and will summarize below).  I also wondered how much further down we'd go in terms of bad behavior by political leaders. I'm sad to say, I don't think we have found the bottom yet. But I had a good birthday!

June brought the release day for Hemmed In, which is my best performing Taster Flight to date. I also wrote about trying to figure out how to keep Pumpkin challenged and happy at school, and got some good suggestions in the comments.

We took our vacation at the end of June and beginning of July. It was a road trip around some Western states, and it was wonderful. We saw many wonderful things, and you can go click around to find all the posts about them. I also wrote about some political observations from our time in Utah.

I didn't post much in August, partly because I had a week solo with the kids as Mr. Snarky flew to New Zealand to surprise his father for his birthday.

In September, I wrote about what I learned from my mid-life crisis. A lot of those lessons figured into my eventual decision to go back to being a full time employee. I also released Water into Wine.

I finally finished up my posts about our summer vacation in October: here's the last post. And I wrote about my theory for why we have mid-life crises.

November brought the release day for The Burning, and since I was struggling with a cold and then follow on illnesses that in the end wiped out my entire month, my announcement about my decision to go back to being a regular employee came as part of a Weekend Reading post.

And that brings us to December. There was a release day for Both Sides of My Skin, and then I lost the old new job and got the new new job.

All in all, 2017 was a tough year, but one that my country came through better than I feared we would at the start. There were some great times for me and my family, and some tough personal decisions. I felt like I reaped the benefits of the some hard personal work I'd done in the previous few years, so I guess that's a plug for not putting off that personal work. I had no way of knowing that in sorting through some of my old buried issues in 2015 and 2016 I was making it easier for me to get through 2017... but this year, I was really, really glad I'd dealt with those old issues when I  did!

So in that spirit, I plan to spend some time over the next few days thinking about how to be ready for the challenges I think 2018 will bring, both in terms of the wider political situation and in terms of my own personal situation. I may write about that, but that will need to wait until another night. For now, I'll just thank you all for reading in 2017!

1 comment:

Sorry for the CAPTCHA, folks. The spammers were stealing too much of my time.