I haven’t done one of these in a while! But I am trying to be a more frequent blogger so it’s good to get back into this. This year was…crazy. So I’ll just get right to it.
Home Renovation Complete(ish)
In January of 2021, we started a massive home renovation. Ezra was 17 months old. Most people didn’t have access to COVID vaccines yet. We expected to be back in by the end of 2021. That didn’t happen. September 5, 2021 we were pretty far along when Hurricane Ida came through New Orleans. We were very fortunate in that we didn’t have the worst case damage but we still had serious roof damage which caused a lot of water damage inside. Two of the rooms that weren’t being renovated ended up taking the brunt of the damage, including a collapsed ceiling and lots of mold. Because of how bad the storm was in general, it wasn’t until the end of December that our contractor was able to get a roofer to repair the damage and then late January when his teams finally got back to work.
We finally got back in around the beginning of September this year but there was a lot of work left to do. But, finally, as of a couple weeks ago, everything is done other than my contractor coming back to touch up some paint. I would never do something like this again but the house came out beautifully and it was definitely worth it.
The next big thing will be to get my Home Automation completely up for the house. That should take a few months since I’ll need the electrician’s help with some of it. I expect to have all the wiring I need by the summer though.
Year in Sports
I did another Ironman this year, IMTX, which was both miserable and really great. I just love training for and doing these long events. I can’t explain it. I didn’t hit the times I was looking for as my overall time was a hair slower than IMWI but my overall performance compared to the field was actually better. I’m actually very proud of the race because we had absolutely insane wind on the bike (around 20mph) and the temperatures soared into the 90s. Even with conditions that are particularly bad for me, I still finished strong. My family loved the venue because of how spectator friendly, kid friendly, and easily traveled to it is. I expect to do it again every couple years. Overall I don’t think I had a great race year though. I did Waco 70.3 and had a fairly disappointing outcome.
I think my favorite race was actually the New Orleans Turkey Day race that I ran with the double BOB. I’m claiming the double stroller category win and I also managed to not run anyone over. Double win with a double stroller!
I didn’t really hit any of my goals this year in distance for swimming, biking, or running but having COVID over the summer really set me back. I’ll finish within 10 miles of my 3500 mile bike goal and I should have around 750 of my 800 miles running. I also hit the pool for 44 hours which is quite good for me in general. No real complaints!
Updating GTD
This will probably deserve its own post but I’ve been using Nirvana for many years to support my GTD practice. Ever since COVID hit, for various reasons, I’ve really struggled to maintain my processes and I’ve come to the realization that Nirvana no longer was good enough to help keep me on track. While it’s a great piece of software, the lack of calendar integration or any notifications what-so-ever meant that my GTD success would live or die by how often I opened up the software. While that’s actually how GTD is designed to work, we have technology that can remind me of things when I know I want to be reminded of it. So I’ve switched over to ToDoist and so far, it seems like a really successful change.