2016 recap

Another year over. And a new one just begun... well, a month and a half ago now.

I'm not a particularly political person, but I feel like something needs to be said. The election results in 2016 were upsetting and eye-opening. I didn't think Trump had a chance of winning and look what happened. I used to think any one in the role of president would elicit a certain amount of respect, but I have none for him. He's treats the majority of the population he represents as an enemy, not to mention the rest of the world. Rather than lead our country into the future, he aims for some version of the rose-tinted past. He is a bully and the wrong person for the job. End of political rant.

Looking at the year from a more personal perspective, it was a positive one. We made a major decision as a family for me to scale back my career. It has been in the works since we moved to Minnesota in 2013, when we set ourselves up to live on one income. We wanted somebody to be home with the kids--with Omri the whole day and with both of them after 3:30 and during summer vacations. It is a big step toward living less hurried, less stressful lives. Originally, we figured R would be the one to quit, but in the end it made more sense for me to do it.

The thing is, I haven't fully quit yet. I walked into my boss's office last May to give her two months notice, but instead we came to an agreement in which I continue to work a very flexible part-time. I did a few months at 10 hours a week and then bumped it up to 20 hours a week, and I'm going back down to 10 again soon. The biggest downside is that it keeps me from throwing myself into to my other goals. I have ideas about doing something with photography or attempting to write a middle school novel, but when I'm not focused on the kids, much of my free time still goes toward work. On the positive side, I'm making a lot more money part-time as a software engineer than I would pursuing the other options. I intend to put some of my unexpected income toward my own business in the future. It's just a question of when to make the leap.

Yet, I have had a little more time than usual to dedicate to creative outlets. Here's a list of notable projects from the year:

• I held 6 or 7 semi-professional photo shoots for families and volunteer events. The results haven't appeared online yet, but there's a lot of work I'm proud of in those sets. I'm also beginning to understand some of the challenges associated with this type of work, especially posing people and finding optimum lighting conditions.
• I had a photo accepted into the Minnesota State Fair fine arts competition. It gave me a lot of exposure and I was excited about the whole thing, although, admittedly, not a lot came out of it.
• I finished a short film into which I poured a lot of attention and passion. I don't know if the masses will ever appreciate it, but it stands as some of my best work and something I'll treasure for myself.
• I revived my ragged comedy series known as Cottage Cheese, knocking out about one new clip a month during the second half of the year. This is something I intend to continue, just for fun.
• As mentioned above, I started writing a novel for middle school kids, the kind I would have liked to have read at that age. I'm not much of a storyteller--with my video projects I usually prefer to capture a mood than to tell a standard story--but this story was flowing out of me so quickly even I was interested to see where it would go. It's meant to be the first in a series (books 2 and 3 are the ones I'm really excited about), so let's hope I can find to motivation to follow through and finish this project.

The kids are doing great. Veronica is in kindergarten, still at the same Montessori school. Her reading is taking off. She has been driven to master new skills like swimming without a life jacket and ice skating, and once she sets her mind to something, she gets it done.

Omri's is such a happy little boy, and he has been talking up a storm since he turned 2. I get to see a lot of him these days. Once in a while he'll come over to give me a big hug and call me his "best friend." It doesn't get much sweeter than that.

We traveled to Santa Barbara again in the spring and to the east coast in the fall. There are some concerns that we need to cut back on the travel now that we're mostly living on one income and we still have a child in private school, but it hasn't come to that yet.

I think that's all I wanted to cover from 2016. I'm still posting family photos on the Four Peas blog and still somewhat active on Twitter and Instagram, in case you want to follow along. I've been meaning to start up the old hand-written journal again too. Call me old-fashioned.

Have a good year, everybody.