So here we are again, I guess...
I had intended to do at least a little more of this than I had last year, but considering what I actually managed to get done in spite of everything else going on this year, I should really be satisfied.
The last six months, especially, have been a good deal rougher than I could have known coming into it. Quite a lot of it has come from some interesting goings on at my day job. I've still got the same job I've had for the last 20 years and change, which is good news, in a lot of ways. I'm just doing it in a different place now.
The story there is that at the end of 2019, a new owner bought the franchise I work for, and for the first year or year and a half, it didn't really change a whole lot. About this time last year, as memory serves, they announced that they were opening a new location on the east side of the city I live in, and it opened in July. That was a mess in and of itself, and as a result, the other two locations we had, and the one I work at especially, wound up short staffed because they needed to pull people from them to run the new place.. At about the same time, we found out that the owners were going to close the location I'd been working at all this time. The original plan was for that to happen around the end of the year, with most of the remaining staff, myself included, getting transferred to the other locations.
The news didn't really come as much of a surprise to anyone, especially those of us who had been there for any real length of time. The building was, after all, not in good shape at all, to put it mildly. The thing that came as more of a surprise is that the closing date got moved up to the end of October. That's something that shouldn't really have come as much of a surprise as it did. Back in July, again, we nearly had a big electrical issue on account of the big transformer unit serving the store failed in what was almost a catastrophic manner, from what I understand.
To say it was stressful is a bit of an understatement. I hadn't been in what one might call the best headspace for some of the social stuff I'd been doing in 2019, and dealing with what had been going on at my day job the last few months on top of the pandemic and the mess of an election we had in 2020 didn't help any. I'm not exactly going to apologize for my relatively sudden departure and longish absence from some of it because looking out for one's health and well being are not, in my mind, at least, not things that need to be apologized for. I will acknowledge that my handling of the situation has not been what anybody would call great. I'm grown up enough to admit that I am and have been in the wrong for awhile here, and that it's on me to go about fixing it.
The good news is that, after far too long, I'm finally, finally getting back to a place where I might actually be able to do that. I'm not there yet, and it's hard to say for sure when I will be. But I'm getting there, which is a good thing.
With that in mind, I gotta say, the first half of the year was really not all that bad, considering where we were at the time, and how things have gone since then. This is not to say that there weren't some hiccups along the way. There was one very major hiccup that happened almost a year to the day before this went up, and we're still working on getting that sorted in any meaningful way.
Other than that, I had been making some decent progress with my physical health the first half of the year. I'd actually managed to get my weight back down to within arm's reach of 300 pounds by July, and I might actually have managed to make it there if things hadn't started going bonkers at about that time. I'd lost most of the best progress towards that end in the immediate months thereafter, but since things have settled down a little, I think I might have managed to get at least some of the progress back as a result.
Looking forward to next year, well, I'm not sure what I want to say about that. I'm the sort who usually likes to be optimistic and hope for good and/or big things along the way. I'd like to do the same this year. I really would. Unfortunately, the last couple years have taught me to maybe not be so optimistic or ambitious about these things. I'm going to say I technically met my goals for writing and videos last year, even though I fell short by a dozen or so posts here. That's on account of having managed to get a few more videos up on YouTube than I had thought I would, and I got a few more subscribers there.
So, I suppose the best plan for 2022 is sort of a carbon copy of the plan I had for 2021. Keep working on getting my physical and mental health to a better place than it is now, because it's not doing me any good to stay where I am, and I don't want to go back. I also want to go for the 100 posts here and another dozen videos on YT. I've got plenty of material lined up to work with on both fronts. The biggest things I need now are the time and the mentality to actually make it happen. That's really all I'm hoping for this year: that it will, if nothing else, not be worse than last year.
Here's to hoping we all have a decent 2022. See you around.
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