Lost in Daylight: 2018

6 Year Soberversary

Tunes:

Summary of the last year:

Got in the best shape of my life
Rode in a bunch of crazy awesome places on my bike
Got a knee injury and lost all my fitness
Passed the CCIE security lab
Got Married
Approaching a career crossroads
Kicked in the balls a little financially, but able to absorb the blows

It's been a roller coaster year. Started out unbelievably awesome. I actually started getting kind of fast on my bicycle. Stayed in the mountains in North Georgia for a month and it was so great. Riding on lightly trafficked mountain roads every day, working on my laptop at the kitchen table. Then I got to ride in Colorado, Oregon, and South Carolina and it was just ridiculous. Started making plans for Spain and Italy for the following year. So many good memories. I can close my eyes and flip through them at will and it's amazing.

But all the riding in the mountains on a bike that wasn't geared correctly for it took a toll on my left knee. I ignored the soreness because it always went away after a couple of days. Then one day instead of going away it got much worse. I had to stop riding for the first time since I quit drinking. It's been my one major anchor habit so that was weird.

I took advantage of the downtime to fully focus myself on my studies and after two attempts I passed the CCIE security exam.

Result of passing the lab has been a bit bittersweet thus far. It's not going to make a difference in my salary at work, and the expense both in terms of paying for travel and the exams, as well as lost income from working fewer hours, really took a financial toll.

Reality is the place I'm working at has shifted gears to cutting costs as much as possible without outright breaking shit (or even breaking things and watching to see how badly they break). This is a new thing, and I don't think that's going away. These "spend to fix the broken things, then cut costs until things fall apart again" cycles are common in businesses. So, yeah. It's the right of the owners to manage their assets as they see fit and I have no hard feelings about it whatsoever.

Bottom line is I'll have to make some changes to get a return on my investment, and doing that may mean my cozy life of sitting in my home office and looking out at the Lighthouse and the Ocean could be winding down.

Somewhere in there I got married. We've been together for a long time; both of us were married once before where things ended badly, so this was weird and we kept it low key.

I'm back on the bike but my knee is still not right. Rehabbing it and building fitness within the limits that I have. I don't know how that's going to turn out either. I might have to get it scoped, simply don't know at this point. But I am grateful for being able to ride

And for the kicker the spring has brought an avalanche of unplanned expenses. Between that, paying for CCIE, and the injury, we pretty much have zero plans for vacation this year now. I'll find some way to take some time to unplug this fall, but I'm knee deep getting shit done right now and don't even want to think about it.

Weird year. Ebb and flow of life.

Status of the quit

I had to use this blog to look up my quit date. That's how often I think about drinking now. One thing that's changed is I no longer pay attention to other people's drinking unless it's pretty clear it's affecting them or others adversely.

In summary:

I don't think about drinking
I don't think about the quit
I don't care about other people's drinking unless it's hurting the people around them
I fully trust myself to take on hard shit and not give up.

And that's it for year 6 I guess.