Year of Junk 2022
I suppose it’s a good practice to review what has come to pass…
Our existence on Earth is a puzzle.
Carmela Soprano
Rummaging through the drawer
The biggest item around these parts is this site, launched in July of 2022. I’ve published 17 posts since then, including this one (and now 18 with a last minute entry!). The five most visited posts were:
This site started mostly as an experiment for using WordPress as a headless content management system with Eleventy. But also to give myself a fresh space to write about things other than web dev. So far, so good!
Over at my web dev site I wrote a two part series on using WordPress with Eleventy if you’re interested in the particulars…
- Part one: Setting up WordPress
- Part two: Setting up Eleventy
I do year in review there, but on the anniversary of the site launch, which is in September (the most recent edition).
I’m hoping to keep the momentum going here, and to include more posts about odd ephemera and involuntary memories. I’m going to participate in the January 2023 Bring Back Blogging experiment and have committed to publish three posts in January. We’ll see what I can come up with. You can join in too!
I also have a few ideas for reworking the homepage and adding a blurby microblog, more on that later.
Channel surfing
I’ve mentioned here, and elsewhere, that one of my biggest “hobbies” is watching non-American crime drama series. I’ll be posting a “what I watched in 2022” post in a few days. Until then, here are some stats from my 2022 viewing consumption…
- 44 series watched in total
- 6 films watched in total
- 19 different countries of origin
- 6 not previously watched countries of origin (France, Kazakhstan, Luxembourg, South Africa, Spain, Turkey)
England dominated with 20 series and one film, Scotland and Sweden were a second place tie with four series each.
I also started to write about things I’ve watched…
- Tour de France with Engrenages (August)
- Engrenages and other endings (December)
- Skipping to the end (December)
- Tale of the Tiger (December)
Hoping to continue this trend as well.
Grab bag
The main theme of the year around here has been reorganizing. Perhaps creating a digital junk drawer was an unconscious motivation, but I did a lot of rooting around, moving things, discarding things and finding things. It was a combo platter of reorganizing the deck chairs and acknowledging that entropy eventually wins.
Another factor is that over the last three years my Mom has moved from a house to an apartment to assisted living, downsizing all along the way. I absorbed some of it, all manageable, but it was a good reminder that eventually you can’t take it with you.
- Moved my files from iCloud back to Dropbox, and spent some time improving the high level organization, it’s a work in progress.
- Reorganized most of my main “junk closet” (pictured below with my helper). This was an exercise in getting rid of old junk to make room for new junk.
- Today I’m working on the final task of the year, reorganizing my clothes (and secondary junk) closet.
- Upgraded my work station, including a new desk and computer set-up. Carrying the new desk up four flights of stairs fulfilled my non-existent workout goals.
The new computer and desk update has been happening over the last month. I’m sad to stop using to my beloved 2017 27″ iMac as a primary work machine, but the new set-up, a 14″ Macbook Pro and VESA mount studio display, is working out well (with the exception of the all the Ventura oddities).
In fact this is my inaugural post with the new set-up! I’ve got my notes on the laptop screen and am writing on the monitor screen. A nice upgrade, albeit angry-making to have to buy two pieces of equipment to replace one.
All of this feels like a nice reset for whatever is next, not that I have anything in particular planned.
Update
In my haste to publish this post I forgot to include the thing that made me happiest in 2022. I’ve rectified that with a post about how Frieda, our reactive dog, made a dog friend.