2022 was a year of home improvements! (and some other stuff, but fixing the house seems to have been the overarching theme.)

I was once again forced to scroll back through my photos and break out the bullet journal to figure out what the heck happened this year. (I also had to reread 2021 to confirm what happened when because Pandemic Time Dilation is a thing.)

So what happened this year?

The Big Stuff

Another wedding anniversary (woot!)
We had the power line rerouted from a pole where it attached to the chimney to a hurricane-safe underground connection (we had to move the junction box to the far side of the house and rerun the cable along the basement ceiling.)
Another road trip up to Maine with Mom (and corresponding soak in the awesomeness that is the cottage) ((Hubby also swung by for a bit this year!)) 🙌
We replaced the windows in the sunroom, finally bringing it up into a ‘protected from the elements’-room status!
Katsucon was once again a no-go for me, but went well and I’m looking forward to getting back into the trenches in 2023
We had the hardwood floors in the living room redone and the walls patched and painted.
It was my one-year work anniversary and I got three awards at work for being an awesome person! 🙌😭 (Darned but I love these folks– is nice to know they love me back! 🥰)
The fireplace repairs (and new insert) were ordered, but won’t be happening until 2023. 😭
The UCP Craft Fair resumed! I had some problems with my table layout, but I’ve got good ideas for next year and I had a blast. (I got some awesome jerky and a pumpkin-pecan pie that was weirdly awesome.)

The Everything Else

The road trip up to Maine was a blast and I have a whole new slew of photos (and videos) to replay when I need a little ocean in my life. Jasper-cat has decided I am an almost acceptable human now that I’ve served as his lap pillow provider twice and the amount of hissing has gone down dramatically.

I managed to startle a bald eagle at home and made him abandon his fish dinner (which I felt horrible about), but I got some cool photos while he glared at me from the tree.

Hubby put in a bunch of new trees in the backyard (and a few in the front) and then setup a giant mulch bed in the back so there’s no mowing between them. We had a great harvest of jujubes this year as well as a couple of hazelnuts!

I really need to move the blueberries in to the backyard and make them a proper brick enclosure. The older wooden one is starting to rot apart and a lot of the older bushes have died off. Woe. 😭

I did start in on removing the old bick circle and pseudo-bed that had been overgrown with trees in the backyard, but then paused to let the flowers grow in so I’d know what to dig up and move.

And then I didn’t dig it up… and now it’s back to chaos again. 🤦‍♀️

I annoyed my sciatic nerve enough that I went into the doc in September and now have a bunch of exercises I should be doing. Then I tripped coming down a staircase and spent a few days regretting that– so 2023 is going to be the year of ‘exercising more goldarnit.’

The trip up for Christmas was a wonderful mess of frozen kitchen pipes, water pipes bursting two townhouses down, and other craziness. But I had a lovely Italian dinner and got to see a play which helped smooth out my ‘crowds = flailing’ worries that I had about the upcoming convention.

I tried out a LOT of new games this year, thanks to splattercatgaming over on YouTube and am going to pick up both the new WoW expansion and Diablo IV in 2023. Right now I’m still addicted to Against the Storm and I’d highly recommend it.

Verizon decided to upgrade the network, so I had to get a new cellphone. The old one was starting to be a bit gremlinish, but it still worked… so I’m annoyed. The new one is only ‘supported’ by Google for three years, so I expect to be annoyed again in the near future. 😠

Artwork

Model Horse Modular Fencing Traditional Scale Two Sections Grass

This year was an explosion in props! Even with temporarily swapping it over into a mostly-work-desk in August, I got a heck of a lot done this year.

Thanks to two customers who requested a wide range of prop-things I really got into the woodworking side of the model horse hobby. I now have jigs and plans for fencing, bridges, water hazards, pole bending poles, and a few other things done for 1:64 all the way up to 1:9.

I also painted a small army of flat cat heads, did a bunch of scenic heart magnets, and started experimenting with simple colored resin magnet casts.

I started a bunch of model horses, but finished none of them… so there’s some 2023 WIPs already on the bench. 😅

I also got a new art bench in the last few days of 2021 and that kicked off a slow upgrade of the room. I’ve been adding/upgrading all of my storage and am looking forward to continuing this into 2023.

Writing

Saturday Story Prompts - Printable Prompt Books

I didn’t get a lot of writing done this year, but I did get a lot of formatting polished off!

I pulled all the 31 Days of ebooks from the Amazon-only program and spread them out across Smashwords, Google, as well as turning them into printables on Etsy. I didn’t end up making a ton more money, but it was enough to support the move.

I fell right off the wagon with posting new Saturday Story Prompts, driven by a handful of three-star ratings on Amazon. Sales and traffic to the SSPs has really dropped off over the years and I’ve embraced that they aren’t worth continuing.

2023 will see me finish filling in the missing gaps, polishing up the ebooks… and then let them sit for a bit. I’ll still be keeping up the social media posting (and the free ebook weekends) but there won’t be new prompts next year.

I lost every single one of the NaNoWriMo challenges this year, most with only 1k words in the attempts. So I will also be stepping back from those for 2023.

I did get in three responses to r/WritingPrompts challenges (We Are the Children, Footnotes, and For Glory) which is two more than last year, so yay!

I also finished a rewrite of Too Old for Neverland that I’m finally happy with and did a new drabble in the same ‘verse (Last Steps).

I created the 31 Days of Forests and Demons ebooks (and corresponding printables) and got all of the yearly collections up except for Book 1.

Health and Fitness

I had planned on doing all the NerdFitness challenges this year… and then ended up doing three (well, two and a half).

But I ended the year by subscribing to NerdFitness Prime which is a phone app that gives you all sorts of challenges (daily and ‘quests’). So we’ll see how that rolls into 2023. 🤔

Dog walking went decently enough, moving from lunchtime walks to early morning walks when it got hot– but got derailed by some minor back and hip issues. I’m only just now starting to work it back into things…

Health-wise I’m pretty much exactly where I was a year ago, so that’s not too horrible all things considered. Much better than where I was two years ago! 🙌

Da Blog

Google Analytics changed a bunch midyear, which means my tracking is a bit anemic for 2022… but I’ve come to embrace the fact that 98% of my traffic is just coming from Pinterest (and the plaster casting posts).

I am (as always) looking to improve the spread so it’s not so Pinterest heavy, but we’ll see.

Twitter imploded this year, so I’ve removed it from my links and have removed it from next year’s planning. I did get an account over on Mastodon but am still figuring out what I want to do with it.

Martha.net

Another Trip ‘Round the Sun