The year started off with the discussions about building our own house ramping up and starting to get pricing and such. I didn’t take much time off work over Christmas because I expected to need the leave for any meetings we’d have with the builder.

Early in January I went on a 25km bike ride with Jay - I got extremely sunburnt and I was pretty buggered by the time I was finished, I’d burnt about 2000 calories and kept my heart rate at over 190bpm for far too long. I picked up a lot of exercise activities during the first few months of the year and really pushed myself. I lost a lot of weight at the start of the year but I definitely started to plateau later on.

In February I started really pushing my goal setting and I completed the entire month of Figuary. I also picked up swimming again and it was great to get back in the pool and moving my body. I did find that I couldn’t put my head underwater much though so a lot of my swimming technique focused on holding my head above water. We had our first meeting with the builder in February, which helped us solidify some of the things we wanted. I had an MRI on my brain to confirm that my migraines weren’t caused by anything serious (they weren’t) and I was put on beta blockers which reduced my heart rate quite a bit. It really affected my capacity for exercise and that was hard at first.

In March, we decided to pull out of building our own home because of disagreements and inflexibility with the builder as well as finding a suitable pre-built house with a 4 car garage. Coincidentally, we’d looked at this house last year and thought it was perfect for our needs but didn’t have our finance sorted so would not have been able to buy it at the time. It came back up for significantly more but the market did move in the 8 months since it was last on the market. Our solicitor was fantastic with adapting to this and we managed to get it over the line, moving in during May.

June through to mid-August was a bit of a blur of getting stuff fixed around the house since there were a lot of hidden problems that we couldn’t pick up in the inspections. We got new desks and furniture and generally spent quite a bit of time settling in. We got a brand new 65” OLED TV during July and it was a huge upgrade from the 42” TV we’d been using.

I hit 30kg lost the week before my birthday which was very exciting but then we got thrown into lockdown as the delta strain of COVID-19 hit Canberra. I missed out on having a party for my 30th birthday, but thankfully I managed to buy a cake before everything shut down properly. The next 3 months disappeared in a blur of the working from home routine. Before lockdown hit, I’d started interviewing for a new position as I’d become very burnt out over June/July at work with being on-call every second week, not having had a proper break in months, being the technical lead on a project that was an absolute mess, and not feeling like I was equipped to do my job in general. During the lockdown, I was offered a position with a new company at $40,000pa more than I was being paid, as well as the promise of work that aligned more with my interests. I had to start my new job in lockdown in September, which was an interesting experience. I didn’t even get to go into the office and meet my co-workers until November when lockdown started to lift.

Finally, in December I was scrolling through Reddit and found an AskReddit thread that asked “What is something that changed your life so much that you wished you’d done it earlier?” and many people answered “septoplasty” and that being able to breathe through their nose was a revelation. I decided to go to an ENT to try and get answers as to why I’ve never felt particularly comfortable with breathing through my nose and why my nose always feels like it’s running or clogged lately. I got the news that I was born with a severely deviated septum and enlarged turbinates for which the only treatment is surgery. The surgery will cost around $6000 and I think I’ll be booking it in for March next year.

This year was a bit of a strange one — half of it disappeared in a haze of stress over house building and health problems and the other half disappeared to lockdown.

The goals I set last year were:

• Lose 30kg total by the time I’m 30. If I could lose a further 40kg from where I currently am over the next year or so while also building my fitness level, I would be very, very happy.

I did manage to lose 30kg just before my birthday but I put back on about 5kg between then and December due to lockdown and other stressors.

• Do some more online courses for art and draw more of the kind of stuff that really interests me, e.g. concept and environmental art.

I did a few Foundation Patreon tutorials this year and in October/November I really tried to push to draw more environmental art and I plan to continue to push for this next year.

• Continue to push my coding skills and build my Streakbot into a project that I could distribute to other people to run on their own servers.

Work on Streakbot faltered a little shortly before I moved house due to my users losing interest in the project. I did learn a lot about various concepts such as asynchronous program design before the project got put to the side.

• Gain at least one new certification for my career.

Most of the year I’ve been working on studying towards my RHCSA. It was a lot harder to find motivation for it before I changed jobs but I now use Linux every single day so I’ve really ramped up my study habits. I would like to sit for the exam in the first half of next year.

• Be in a house my partner and I own by Christmas next year.

This is the only one I can definitively say I achieved. We moved into our own home in mid-May, I don’t think we would’ve been in our house by Christmas if we’d gone ahead with the build as it is only just starting to get to lockup stage from the updates the builder has posted online. It does suck that we burned that bridge a little bit but we’re slowly bringing our house up to the level it should be.

I haven’t put much thought into goals for 2022 yet… I have a few weeks off over Christmas this year to really think about it and I might make a separate post for it. My plans for the first few months of 2022 involve going to my sister’s wedding in February and having septoplasty in March, which will definitely knock a lot of my goals back by a bit. I need to lose a bit of weight before my surgery because the more I lose, the safer the general anaesthetic will be.