New Year’s Eve this year will be spent quietly, peacefully in avoidance of any sort of driving or partying outside of the home.
And that seems more than fitting, because 2011 is the year that we got our house back. It’s been a good year, a year of dressed wounds and repair and recovery, a year of sideshow dramas and long overdue catching up. And so in the usual R&K spirit of spilling the story before the calendar resets tonight, we present 2011 in review. Click through for more.
After 2009 (aka The Year of Hell), last year we began to stabilize and reconstruct. That process continued through this year, and with the help of steady and strong work from a couple of big clients, we managed to get our bills under control. The bulk of the credit cards were paid off, a few bills were eliminated, and with the help of a financial planner we started investing for the future. We also heavily invested in the business, buying new computers and assorted technology and dramatically upgrading our ability to keep up with the quickly growing workload.
Over the course of the year, the house got a lot of overdue investments as well. A new security system. A new driveway. A new wood rack (courtesy of my father-in-law Don). We hired a gardener, someone to clean the house, and a part time personal assistant. What in 2010 seemed expensive luxuries, by April 2011 had become dire necessities – in many cases, mathematically we simply couldn’t afford not to take these steps. So we did them and never looked back.
And the workload kept growing. We’ve been waiting for the “slow season” to arrive since the start of 2010, and it hasn’t come yet. Summer: busy. Holidays: busy. Kristi finally started insisting that we set aside time for breaks and vacations whether we were busy or not, which we finally did with a wonderful weeklong break in Big Sur in September and a few days in Mendocino for our anniversary.
We also learned this year that we couldn’t keep working from a 10’x10′ home office, not with this kind of workload. Too many distractions at home, from pets to gardener meltdowns to the simple growing annoyance of our chairs constantly bumping into each other. We realized that, if we planned to keep growing, soon we’d have to start talking about commercial space. In August we decided to take a leap of faith and start shopping around for a good location; with the excellent help of Tom Soloman over at COSOL, we got a good deal on a reasonably sized, three-room Art Deco-style office space in the heart of downtown Modesto. We moved in after returning from vacation in September, and let me tell you, it makes all the difference.
I never thought I’d be eager to no longer work from home, but after a decade, let me tell you – after a while, you do get done with it. It’s hard, never really being at work and never really being at home. Moving into an office meant now being able to say, “We’re done”, setting the alarm, locking the door and going home.. and actually wanting to enjoy time at home. In moving to an office, our home became a sanctuary of respite again.
We paid off the car in November. The last of my three-year dental work adventure was finished this year and we almost have THAT paid off. The last of our 2008 wedding has been paid off. So financially, we’re certainly not done yet – a lot more work to go – but we’re a lot more solid than a year ago.
True to our annual custom of a fall medical drama for Kristi (you may recall that last year’s involved stepping on a rose thorn, that led to two months of surgeries and medical boots), this October she got an ear infection that ultimately took two months to knock out for good. All while she worked to master singing the Bach Magnificat for MJC Masterworks.
The pets are all well. Last year at this time, we were still grieving Tuck’s loss and acclimating two new cats (Monkey and Zion) to their new inside-the-house states of being. They’re all now settled down and happy. (Strangely enough, lately Zion and Sam have actually been playing with each other. Cats and dogs, living together, mass hysteria..)
I could go on and on. You know, the thousand of little things that make up a year. The good books, movies, video games. The pointless and annoying melodramas that really don’t have anything to do with us but regardless insist on unfolding in our front yard. The sick, the well, the hurt; the born, the dying. Family frustrations. Politics. Church dramas. Client hilarity, deadlines and death march projects. Anxiety, relief, dreams, worries.. all lightly sprinkled with a gentle seasoning of what-the-fuck moments.
But what it comes down to is, 2011 was a very good year.
A few years ago, I came across a quote from writer James Kunstler, a line that over the last few years has wedged itself firmly in my brain: “Hope is not a consumer product.” It doesn’t come packaged with that new iPad, you can’t pick it up at Target, and it most certainly won’t be a ballot line item at the voting booth. Hope is made by hand, and it’s up to you to make it. And it’s hard work, a task taken on without guarantee of compensation or success. But it’s necessary and right, because the alternative sucks.
From my point of view at least, 2011 was a year of making hope by hand. We can’t predict what 2012 will look like, any more than we could have predicted the unfoldings of 2011. But we end this year with a strong sense of hope for the future, carved from the wood and stone and iron that we had lying around (or that others were willing to spot us). Because hope is not a consumer product.
So Happy New Years, everybody. We hope you had a good 2011 and that you’re making your own hope for 2012. Take care and try not to wrap your car around a telephone pole tonight, okay?