This year I started this tradition of taking a day to do a personal inventory on my birthday.
I made a timelapse video of the sunrise. The video lost more of the frames than I wanted. It was challenging to look straight ahead during the camera shots when I wanted to look at the squirrels and dogs and sunrays all around me. I hoped that a squirrel would come knock my phone off its precarious perch on the crest of the roof.
37 push-ups: fast, strict, chin touching the ground.
20 pull-ups: fast, no kipping, chin above bar.
I felt a bit nauseous after testing both of those maxes. At least this is something I should always be able to easily test, even if I don't have weights around in future years.
I walked, book in hand, a couple miles in the morning slanty sun up to get blood tests, longboarded back home, and later walked up a mile to meet Chloe for dinner and back.
I went for The Bone Doll's Twin this time, kicking off the whole Tamír Triad, against which I sway powerlessly once I start reading. This book is so good that the first time I read it, ten years ago, I finished it immediately--and then reread it again the next day. Then, when Hidden Warrior came out, I reread this one, then read that one. Then The Oracle's Queen? Reread them all. Now I'm at it again, my work suffers, and my heart sings.
I always like getting blood tests at this LabCorp; Leo and I banter. He always talks about app ideas his friends have.
My Vitamin D is still low at 59.8--last year it was 83.5. SHBG is finally within range at 53.0, down from 70.1 last year. Iron saturation is returning to sanity at 36%, down from 79% just two months ago. HDL 74 (76 last year), LDL 139 (134), triglycerides 57 (46). Free testosterone is only 11.0. Fibrinogen activity is low at 192, although I don't know what that means. C-reactive protein is 0.11. Other stuff looks fine. I should probably work on a better way to show trends in these levels and understand what they mean, but I hate researching this stuff.
I had to exorcise a dozen preciouses: clothes, cables, my magnet, two water bottles, etc. It was tough. I'm still at 99 things, which feels great.
Finances are sufficient and I have more than I need. I have given up trying to be frugal this past year, but it appears I still don't know how to spend much money.
(If you're me, you get to see stats here. Since you're not me, you see nothing.)
I started a monthly Aging battery on Quantified Mind, with the aim of tracking my horrifying and unstoppable cognitive decline. Next year I'll have some dismaying figures to report here. Exciting! (I can at least be curious about it.)
I had good conversations with Mom and Dad. Didn't talk to Bro yet, though.
I sat down with my journal and evaluated three areas: what went well, what didn't go well, and how my relationships are now.
Apart from my overwhelming love for Chloe, overall satisfaction with other relationships eluded me this year. I'm having good times with the people at hand, but most of my people are far. I seek deeper connections with friends and family. The acquaintance network suffices.
(The detailed list is me-only, too.)
This took many hours this year, as I was badly disorganized. I collected all my pictures and put them on Snapjoy, collected and organized all my videos, put all my large files in CrashPlan, organized all my small files in Dropbox, cleared off my desktop, upgraded to Mountain Lion, saved every important file in the Chloe folder, and deleted many tens of thousands of junk files.
Phew. Next year I hope this doesn't take very long.
Well, I did at that, up from zero last year!
I decided that my sleep experiments had to go. My sleep is always the same, so why experiment with eye masks and orange glasses and sun alarms in hope of picking up significant variance? There's no variance!
This year, I sat on Murphy Avenue and watched the sun set. Gorgeous. Then I had a romantic dinner at Rok Bistro with Chloe--can't believe I've never been there before. Ate lots of nearly raw meats, since I got to cook it. She also gave me a delicious caramel and salt macaroon and a dark chocolate custard mousse with strawberry.