2012 retrospective

[wshaffer]

Hi all! Welcome to 2013! I hope the year is getting off to a good start for you. I celebrated the turn of the year by going to an excellent party, coming home before midnight, and staying up until the wee hours reading a book. Which in a "start as you mean to go on" sense, was about right.

I was looking back, and 2012 was actually a heck of a year for me. That seemed worth commemorating somehow, so I made a list of the coolest things I did this year. In roughly chronological order:

• Learning to climb. I took the belay class at Planet Granite in mid-January, and have been finding climbing a great way to work out, spend time with friends (and meet new friends), and laugh at my fear of heights ever since.



• Seeing Louise Jameson's one woman show, "Pulling Faces," at the Gallifrey convention. A both funny and frank look at the pressures on women to stay ever-youthful as they age. I would go see more theater if I knew how to find more theater like this.



• Running the consuite at FOGcon 2. It was like throwing a 3 day party for 200+ of your closest friends. I've taken on other roles for FOGcon 3, but I'm pretty sure that it will make the list of the coolest things I do in 2013.



• Visiting Paris. What can I say? It's Paris.



• Giving my first conference presentation. And getting it written up in the Bulgarian edition of ComputerWorld.



• Visiting Koprivshtitsa in Bulgaria. Sofia was a wonderful place to visit, and I really want to go back and see some more of it. But Koprivshtista combined beautiful scenery with a huge amount of history.



• Writing my first instructional videos. In the space of about a year, our department went from people saying to us, "Wait. Why is Tech Pubs producing video?" to "Can we play some of your videos in the booth at VMworld?" It took a ton of hard work by a lot of people to do that, but I'm proud of the tiny part I played.



• Rediscovering live music. Before this September, it had been some years since I'd been to a concert. I'd kind of burned out on a combination of venues with crappy sound or where you could barely see the band, high ticket prices, and a few lackluster performances. This year I discovered that I can still have a whale of a time seeing a band that I love. (Or indeed, if circumstances are right, I can have a whale of a time seeing a band that I'm lukewarm about.)



• Running the Warrior Dash. Ah, the challenge! The cameraderie! The mud! The bruises that I was awkwardly explaining for weeks afterwards! I definitely want to do more obstacle races in 2013.



• My grandfather's 90th birthday party. If, when I'm 90, I have half as many people who want to come celebrate my birthday with me, I'll count myself lucky.