The year started off with our basement getting flooded with sewage. This was just one of many home maintenance issues that needed our attention (and money) throughout the year, including the sump pump and furnace. We replaced some furniture too.
Our little dog Roxy had some expensive surgery that unfortunately was too late to stop cancer from claiming her. 🙁 But we do love our new pitbull Lady, who seems to be settling down a bit from her days of eating shoes, photo albums, books, TV remotes, automated aquarium feeders, and the like. She and Gretta are actually getting along really well now and playing nicely. If only we could prevent her from taking a running leap over the fence gate, and from smelling incredibly foul, that would be great.
My spouse has gotten into keeping blue neocaridina shrimp — tiny little gems of things — and after some initial difficulty that has been going pretty well. So I couldn’t really answer how many pets we have in the house now.
We stuck pretty well to our plan to cook at home more, breaking a years-long habit of eating mostly in restaurants. That no doubt has saved us some money, though my weight isn’t really any better for it. My spouse makes fantastic curry, and I’ve picked up a handful of acceptable recipes myself. I have spiralized more zucchini in 2018 than the previous years of my life combined!
I released five albums during the year. I’m generally pleased with what I have put out there.
When I first sold albums, they were intended for a particular small community and no real promotion was required. My most recent release had built-in appeal to the modular synth community, which helped it along, too. (Materials has been doing decently well so far and enticed a few people to look into my other music as well, which is gratifying.) But in between, it was just my weird music. With little to no effort dedicated to promotion, my first albums of the year didn’t get a lot of attention, and even expecting that, I admit I suffered a few pangs over it at first.
The release of Nereus hit about when my anxiety was starting to peak, and I was an emotional mess. I confronted that anxiety — particularly after realizing that there was a link with caffeine. I went from drinking two big cans of sugar-free Monster plus strong coffee plus a lot of Diet Coke in a typical workday, to avoiding even iced tea for a while. I read a few books on anxiety, and another called The Highly Sensitive Person which fit me surprisingly well. I started taking magnesium taurate supplements, which may help too (though I think the combination of greatly reduced caffeine, and being mindful of the anxiety, have been the most effective). Overall I was doing a lot better by summer than I was at the start of the year.
The US socio-political background certainly fed the anxiety and continues to be a nasty toxic mess. I’ve felt more hopeful about that since the midterms and some of the news coming from the Mueller investigations. I hope for both justice and long-term solutions.
Facebook’s bad behavior increasingly came to light this year, and little by little I disengaged from it. I cleaned up a bunch of stuff in my account. I went through my friends list and removed people I didn’t really interact with. I deleted it from my phone and only used it from my home PC. Eventually I nearly quit; my account still exists and I check notifications quickly a couple of times a week but I no longer have a Facebook habit. That has maybe helped my emotional state a bit too.
My music studio went through some technical changes. I upgraded to running a 64-bit build of Maschine, which meant abandoning some old favorite plugins I’d been using for 5, 10, 15 years — but I found some good replacements. I tried a bunch of sequencing solutions in my modular synth and I believe I’m closing in toward an ideal setup there; likewise for effects.
I also continued to learn the craft of electronic music; one of the things I love about it is that after doing it for so long there’s always more to discover and room for improvement. New patching techniques, new combinations of things, new compositional techniques and forms, new technical stuff (like mastering), plenty of the history and culture to learn.
We picked up a quadruple armload of acoustic instruments this year, toward a Gothic Applachian-ish musical project with my spouse. This hasn’t come a long way so far beyond some research and a little reorganizing of the house to have a better space to play. But I’ve learned a bit of mandolin and enjoy it, and am not as entirely horrible at the violin as I expected after decades without practice. The six-string guitar frustrates my attempts to grasp it intuitively, though. Anyway, maybe we’ll have more news about this project in the future.
I have no real conclusion to come to about the year. A lot to complain about, a lot to be grateful for. It is, as they say, what it is.