The year has come to an end as as usual here is a look back at some of my highlights:
Reading:
I looked back on my January post and see I set a reading goal of 45. Well halfway through this year I upped it to 60... I read those and then some. A lot of the books I read towards the end of the year were short books so I could virtually read one a day. So my tally for the year is 111 books. I don't think I have ever read as much!
Scrapping:
At the start of the year I talked about the CT teams I would be on for the year... well some of those of still continuing into 2024 but some are not.
So this year I have made layouts for ninigoesdigi, Rachel Etrog and Gina Miller at The Lilypad, at Gingerscraps for MissFish and Adrienne Skelton, and then for Marisa Lerin at Digital Scrapbook as well as BuzzBee Scraps. I did layouts for both Cornelia Designs and Micheline Lincoln till mid year when they both took a break from designing kits for personal reasons. I also did a guest spot for Tracie Stroud at Sweet Shoppe.
I finally managed to print three photo books this year... for 2020, 2021 and 2022. I still have a few pages to finish to be able to print 2018 and 2019. Hopefully I will get to finish 2023 next year too.
In summary I did 476 single page layouts this year. Not nearly as many as I did in 2022 but it's still more than a page a day which has always been my goal.
Family:
Keith finally retired at the end of March. He has enjoyed being home since then tackling lots of gardening as well as a few projects around the house that have been piling up,
Aaron changed jobs in April... from Kumon Bryanston East to Kumon Boskruin. He is working more hours and 4 days a week and loving it. Another bonus is that it is much closer to home so he doesn't have to contend with too much traffic.
He also continued with his flying this year too. Aaron changed flight schools in January... signed up at Aeronav Academy and proceeded to do his Night Rating... ie learning to fly at night in good weather. What we had hoped would take him 3 months ended up taking 10. He managed to do his final exam at the end of October. There were weather delays (perfectly normal), plane delays (some normal, some frustrating) and instructor delays (out of our hands), but at the end it all came together. Aeronav also held an awards day at the beginning of December and we were able to join Aaron there and see him get his certificate.
The other exciting development of the year for Aaron was that he got a girlfriend. Aaron met Karla through the Young Adults at New Harvest Church earlier this year. They started going out in July. She is a lovely girl and they are very sweet together.
Mom has had an up and down year with her eyes. At the beginning of the year she had a bleed in her right eye and needing a series of injections to halt that. Now at the end of the year her eye is improving and she is in a treat-and-extend program.... ie inject then prolong the time between injections so each cycle gets further apart. It seems to be working so far.
For me it's been a year of the normal work routine, lots of scrapping and reading and not too much else. I did manage to get quite a bit of private drawing work to do to which has brought in some extra money and kept me pretty busy.
We managed to do a few holidays this year too. Mom and I went to Wyndford in March, the four of us went to Hazyview for a week in May (our last timeshare holiday ever!) and Keith went to Ramsgate to see his friend Bruce in October.
Loadshedding:
This was the other buzzword for the year... we had more hours of no electricity this year than any previous year since loadshedding started back in 2007. We've had continuous loadshedding for months on end with a two week break in October (for the rugby world cup of all things!) and now a three week break over Christmas.
In February Mom bought a huge invertor to run her fridge. This has been very helpful for her as where she stays gets lots of breakdowns as well as the loadshedding outages. The machine however had to go get fixed in September and now again in December... hopefully it will still work okay when loadshedding returns (which I am sure it will in January!).
One of Keith's projects for his retirement was to put together an inverter for our house... he had bought the bits through work a few years back. He did eventually get it all assembled and plugged in... just has a bit of an issue with charging the batteries (trips our house!) but in general it is working and is definitely better than the noisy generator. We really only use it to run the tv at night. I bought a ups for our wifi so that is on permanently unless the loadshedding is for 4 or more hours as it's battery only lasts about 3.5 hours.
And with that we bid farewell to the year that was 2023.
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