Youch, 2018 has been an exhausting year. There’s been some intensely bad stuff and some extremely good stuff, and all of it on the background of the political/social chaos everything else is kinda falling into.
Last winter we lost Norton, unexpectedly, to something the vet couldn’t diagnose.Only a couple of months later we lost Rugose, our youngest too; just as suddenly and just as mysteriously. It hit everyone in the house hard. We miss them both terribly.
But we also added a couple of members to the house this year! We got Samson, in the late summer, and Zevon just before Christmas. They brought a lot of chaos with them, but that’s fine. It nice to have the house full of life again :)

My overall mental health has taken a bit of dive in recent years, due to unrelenting stress from one source or another, but I think I made pretty good progress in tackling that this year.
I got out of a contract that was giving me all kinds of PTSD problems, and throwing up all kinds of red flags. I was able to get out of that early on and land a contract that let me work from home 90% of the time. Which was awesome! Working from home has been really good for my mental health, I really hope I can carry on with that in 2019 too.
There’s still plenty to work on but it’s been a good start.

I guess the biggest thing of the year for me has been my surgical trip to India. One way or another a lot of what i’ve been up to has been leading up to that. If nothing else it’s the closest thing i’ve had to a holiday in about 10 years (yes, I know that’s kinda messed up).
The whole surgery thing was... intense. More so when factoring is all the lead up to it and wrangling it took to get the time off for it. Honestly I didn’t have much of a plan; last January I just thought “fuck it. Book it all in and we’ll figure it out”. So I did, and I did (i’ve always been better at improvising than planning).
The lead up was stressful and the recovery took a lot more out of me than I expected. But i’m sooooooo glad I did it. I’m super happy with the results so far and it only seems to get better each day :)
PriyaMED is totally amazing; can’t recommend them enough

2018 has been “a lot”. I’m exhausted by it all but also kinda hopeful for 2019.
I’m hoping to get some more stability this year, and build on the things i’ve been working so hard to secure over the last few years.
Resolutions? I dunno, the usual “drink less”, “work out more”, “lose weight” etc etc. But I also want to get out more; try to be a bit more social again. I’ve been kind of a workaholic (“kind of” meaning “it’s a definite problem) for years now, and I really need to change that. There’s a better balance to be found, I think.

Here’s hoping 2019 will be a good year :)