found drama

Personal

• 50 “home days” with E. while he was in part time preschool. ¹
• Managed to ski 10 times between the bottom half of the 16/17 season and the start of the 17/18 season.
• Visited 2 National Parks that we’d never visited before. ²
• Read 36 books. ³
• Read 380 articles (blog posts, etc.) between September and December. But I only started tracking those midway through August, so it could easily be 1140. ⁴
• Ran in 2 × 5k races.
• Parted ways with 1 sweet cat.
• Between the phone calls, letters, and emails, probably been in touch with my Congressional rep and Senators over a hundred times.

Professional

• Despite those 50 home days (vide supra), my overall performance did not appear to suffer.
• Mentored a couple of people on leading technical teams. Arguably successfully.
• Switched out of a software engineering role into a user experience role.
• For the first time ever, negotiated on my compensation package, stood firm, and got the thing that was most important to me.
• Did not change careers and become a pro brewer.
• Did not change careers and become a vaunted novelist.

Exercise

According to RunKeeper…

• 297.1 miles of cycling over 20:51:59 — mostly in the gym.
• 914.8 equivalent miles on the elliptical over 97:38:00.
• 32.4 miles of hiking over 20:03:34 (13 total hikes). ⁵
• 159.5 miles of walks over 57:18:26 — many of these midday breaks at work.
• All of those, plus a few others? 397 activities over 207:38 (and some seconds) for about 140,986 calories. More active this year in terms of time and mileage, but fewer calories.

Homebrewing

• 21 brew days all together.
• 10 new-to-me styles; 18 different styles in total.
• 17 at home brew days.
• 4 with the crew brew days.
• At least 1 solo at-home brew day every month ⁶ (1.4 on average).
• 10 partial mash batches.
• 8 all-grain batches.
• 3 mead batches.
• 5 competition entries across three competitions.
• 3 ribbons brought home, including Mead Maker of the Year.
• Earned my BJCP Provisional Judge status and judged in my first competition.

Relatively productive year.

1. Not counting any sick days, school breaks, nor family vacation.[↩]
2. Great Smoky Mountains and Acadia; we started to plan out a trip to Yosemite but… the expense![↩]
3. I use the Fogus definition, so this 36 includes 6 abandoned books, 2 unfinished books, and the book I’m reading right now. Didn’t count the books I read to the kiddos though.[↩]
4. A note about method here: my typical article-reading workflow is to see something I want to read, drop it into Instapaper, read it later, and then an IFTTT recipe makes a note in Evernote; at the end of the month, I count up those notes. So if something doesn’t go into Instapaper first (which is probably about 10% of the time) then it doesn’t get counted.[↩]
5. But roughly twice as much as 2016 in all ways.[↩]
6. Technically Imposter Syndrome wasn’t at home unless you count Colchester’s Mead Hall as my “home away from home” and technically it wasn’t solo because I brewed in front of an audience but I was the sole brewer… so I’m counting it for August.[↩]

About Rob Friesel