Looks like I’m a few days late on my 2022 break down, no reason for the delay other than I started it, saved the draft, then went about my life oblivious to the fact I never finished writing.  2022 was a year of beginnings and a couple endings for me.  February saw my wife going back to the office due to the Governor wanting good press for himself, where she was promptly infected with covid, which I then caught.  At this point we had both of the main shots and I believe a booster, so while it sucked, it sucked much less than it could have.  I’ll still hold a grudge against the idiot governor though, he was reckless in ordering so many people back into a shared office environment and he’s personally responsible for me getting the virus.

It was about a month after the infection that we did one more round of IVF, which failed to produce any results, so we’ve given up on having children.  It’s tough to write that, but it is what it is.  Right after we got this news we decided that it was time to start re-entering the general public because we had all the boosters, we had been infected, and honestly we were just done with being safe or smart about the viral situation, so caution was thrown to the wind and we went to a Chinese buffet.  It was a good meal, but a very weird sensation, being in public and eating without any kind of mask on for the first time in nearly 2 years.

In May, one of my cats passed after a slow decline, so while it wasn’t an unexpected situation, it still sucked.  It was right around that time too that we had another foster cat (Nyx!) who had six kittens, but only had three survive (one of whom had a odd coughing problem due to malformed lungs…we foster failed with her, so now she’s part of the cat colony forever).

The sense of not having control of my life was compounded by my employer making some business consolidations, with hundreds of people being severanced in the prior year or so, and looking at the labor market made me made some decision about making some educational efforts.  I never did finish my degree back when I was in college the first time around back in 1999-2002, so Summer 2022 I started online courses, which I’m about half way through at this point, with classes starting back up next week.  I’m planning on being done by the end of summer 2023, but ultimately it’s going to be an expensive piece of paper that won’t inform or guaranty a job, but at least I feel like I’m doing something about my situation instead of just being a backseat rider to all the crazy stuff going on in my personal life or with the American economy in general.

Over that summer, I finally have nickeled and dimed myself to having a pretty decent twitch streaming setup, then got my first few payments from the twitch too! It was like $50 for a year’s worth of streaming, but it made me feel great about putting a fish tank on the twitch.

In July, I reorganized my home office, hiding all my comic long boxes behind a bookshelf in my closet, so you can’t see all the cardboard, but I know they’re still there. I looks so much better now, I’m considering doing the same thing to the other side of the closet, so it’ll look like it’s just one big bookcase on that wall.

In 2021 I thought I’d start putting some grass in my front yard, which the first step was raking all the leaves and detritus that had accumulated in the prior ten years since I last raked it. I finished that project and actually put down some seed, most of which was washed away in the rain, but some of it stayed and now it’s actually growing and it’s actually green! I need to get back out there and rake again, but I’m impressed that it was that easy in what I actually had to do. Bagging all that stuff up into 40+ bags was really not much fun, but the end result is great. Now maybe I’ll do the same thing for my bag yard?

Media consumption by the numbers

Via