2022 Retrospective
Well, 2022 is now over and done with, and I don't feel like much has changed.
Looking Back at 2022
Not much of anything of note really happened in 2022. It's not a bad thing, boring can be good. It's just that there's really not all that much to say about it.
Since Lauren and I were both vaccinated and boosted, we cautiously re-entered the world a little more. We ended up spending a week at the end of March in Cape May for Lauren's birthday. Spent a long weekend in New York City in June for my birthday, and then our week-long vacation in Cape May again in September.
Side Projects
Digital Family Cookbook - Brought this to near completion. I have a few loose ends to tie up, and I'm probably going to really clean up the UI design. I only spent so much time during the creation on its rough edges. It was also the first project I got real, working integration tests going. Since it uses Entity Framework, I was able to use an In-Memory database to handle the tests. I even caught a bug or two I would've introduced to the code from running the tests.
I have the domain for it and I'm considering trying out Eleventy to build the homepage.
Fitness Tracker (Name TBD) - I ended up restarting this from scratch after working through some of the challenges I had building Digital Family Cookbook. I had chosen MUI for my first version and while it was fine, I decided to switch over to Ant Design like I've been using at work and for Digital Family Cookbook. I've become more familiar with it and figure it would help improve my ability to meet the challenges I face at work.
Fitness
Hockey - I played a lot of hockey in 2022. I'm currently on 3 teams. Goalie in the lower league, and a skater in the more competitive leagues. I'm hoping that as I play more in net, I can start to become a decent option between the pipes in the upper leagues.
Running - I unfortunately was unable to run the marathon this year as my legs weren't cooperating. I deferred my registration for 2023, so I'm hoping to get some long(ish) runs in during the spring and early summer months to get myself ready to start training again. I did end up running 375 miles in 2022, so not shabby.
Biking - I never ended up doing much biking. Stationary setup I have can get boring and when I wanted to do something outside, I just ended up going for a run.
Lifting - I got soooo close to the 1,000 lbs. club this year. I maxed out at 985 lbs. (235 on bench, 365 on squats, & 385 on deadlifts). Either way, I felt like I was able to get stronger. My marathon training sort of reset my progress, but I started working my way back up.
PC Gaming
In July I ended up rebuilding my PC. The old desktop just wasn't cutting it anymore for gaming so I ended up building a new one. I still had a semi-decent graphics card (GTX 1060) in it, so I kept that. But I now have a brand new PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core 3.8GHz CPU with 32GB of RAM. I've ended up playing a lot of World of Warcraft Classic on it, but am planning on hitting up my massive backlog of games over the next year.
Visiting my 2022 Goals
I didn't do a fantastic job of reaching my goals this past year. And while I wish I had hit all of them, I'm actually not that upset about missing them as I got pretty close to a lot of them.
Goal #1: Run More & Start Biking More
My goal to start biking more never got off the ground. I have the stationary bike converter kit for my actual road bike, but it's kind of annoying to set up and it's boring to ride. I often just ended up skipping it in favor of either a run or lifting.
In terms of running, didn't quite hit my goal of 400 miles. I topped off at 375 miles so I missed it by 25. Did increase my yearly miles from 2021 by 50.
Goal #2: Bench Press, Squat & Deadlift PRs
I managed to surpass my squats goal by 15 lbs. maxing out at 365. Deadlifts and bench press I missed by 15 lbs. Still a new PR for deadlifts. Getting COVID at the end of May messed my rhythm up and then having to lessen my strength training in favor of marathon training was the final nail in the coffin.
Goal #3: Max Out My Retirement Accounts
I got so darned close to this one. I had my IRA maxed out in June, but was just under $1,000 left on my 401k.
Goal #4: Read 30 Books
I got 2/3 of the way through my reading goal having read 20 books, 16 of them being non-fiction. For the last few months of the year I've been spending late nights after hockey reading. My adrenaline levels after hockey games are too high to go to sleep, so I've been sitting out on the couch for 30 minutes to an hour reading to be in a better place for sleep. It's allowed me to read more and solves the tossing and turning problem after hockey games.
Goal #5: Write 10 Technical Blog Posts
I'm always worried about sounding stupid with my writing as I don't want to say something that ends up being completely wrong. I was able to put the fear aside a little bit more this year and managed to write 7 posts of a technical nature. Not quite the 10 I was aiming for though.
2023 Goals
Goal #1 - Learn (Re-Learn?) Guitar
Back in high school I got an electric guitar and took some lessons but didn't have the fortitude to stick with it. I'm hoping to find some YouTube videos or lessons from somewhere else to get back into playing. I'm not quite sure how to quantify this as a goal, but would love to start playing more.
Goal #2 - Read 30 Books
Same as last year. I'm hoping to use the post-hockey-pre-sleep time to read more of my reading list. My reading list is currently sitting at 74 and is always growing.
Goal #3 - Write 12 Technical Posts
I know I didn't hit my goal of 10 last year, but I'm hoping to increase this as I do more work with my fitness tracker app and any tutorials I do to learn other languages and frameworks.
Goal #4 - Hit the 1,000 lbs. Club
The 1,000 lbs. club is for those who can lift a total of 1,000 lbs. across bench press, squats, & deadlifts. It doesn't matter what weights each of them are at so long as the total equals 1,000 lbs. I was 15 lbs. shy last year and am hoping to finally surpass it.
Goal #5 - Bike & Run 400 Miles Each
Running shouldn't be an issue here given how close I was last year and that I'm going to attempt a marathon again. With biking, I just need to kill the excuses and see if I can't find a better way to make stationary biking a little more tolerable. I do have a large podcast episode backlog that could help.
Goal #6 - Take More Photos
I haven't taken my 60D out in a long while. In 2023, I would like to do more photography. My goal is to get in 5 good photo shoots. I'm not sure where. Maybe Cape May, Valley Forge, or anywhere else that might be interesting. Maybe it will help me find a good workflow for my photograph processing as well.
Here's hoping that I can make some good progress on them. You can view my progress here.