Jeez, if 2020 was a shit show of a year 2021 was the year of monumental change. I know a lot people are doing that right now. People have moved, made big career decisions, started families, and so I’m in the same boat as many other people. The year felt shorter than the last year and I don’t know why though. The pandemic just feels like it’s ongoing forever but at least I feel things are now moving forward in my own life.

Married Mel

The big highlight of the year was marrying Mel. She’s now officially (but not in all legal documents yet) Mel Dhaimade! We were actually going to do a courthouse wedding but they told us that courthouse wasn’t open and that it would be over zoom so we said fuck it and had a small ceremony at Lake Merritt. We exchanged garlands and had our friend Alex be our officiant. It was a beautiful time. We’re on track for having the full wedding next year in Boise. The wedding date is actually Easter Sunday mainly due to the confluence of the Hindu Calendar and the availability of the venue in Boise.

Bought a house

We purchased a house. It was a short search, only about 2 weeks of diligent searching. We got real lucky because the house we wanted had already sold but the buyer’s loan fell through so we actually knew the exact purchase price the owners wanted. So we didn’t have any issues with buying the place. Owning the house though has been a difficult experience. We had some flooding during some heavy rain in October and the flooring on the first floor had to be torn out. It was frustrating and hard because I really felt like I made a bad mistake or something but it’s just one of those frustrations of home ownership. I imagine we’re going have more lessons and costly mistakes in the future.

Got Promoted

I got promoted at work! Most engineers finish their career around senior engineer (this is the title that Lyft uses, but they go by different names depending on the company). It means you are an independent person who can lead a project and be responsible for themselves. The next level (at least at Lyft) is called Staff Engineer. It hasn’t felt too different though my expectations have risen and I’m basically going to be leading a team of 6 mobile engineers (including myself). We already have 2 Android, but I’m the only iOS engineer for 2022. The team will actually not be in SF but based in both CDMX and Kiev.

So much in 10 months

When looking back on this year I kind of felt like that I didn’t do that much. The year just felt like I didn’t accomplish anything but Mel keeps reminding me that we got married, bought a house, and are planning a wedding in approximately 10 months timeline. This is something that many people do over years and we just kind of did everything really quickly. Along with facing a ridiculously long rat situation in our last apartment.

Resolutions from 2021

Write an app

I never did this. I didn’t even get started on it because work has been hard. I no longer felt the energy to work on other things after work and honestly I think I would probably be able to build one if I could just really dedicate some time to start the basics of it. But I still don’t quite know what I want to do.

Running 365 miles

I was actually on pace for this until about April, doing about 30 miles a month. I kept the runs up for a while until about September/October when we moved into the house but the move and planning multiple trips like Christmas, family visits and even doing wedding planning just made everything else take a back seat. I haven’t been able to keep up the pace and it’s hard to just really dedicate my time. The increased rain during this timeline also didn’t help. I also started to gain weight after the house. I’m now at a much heavier weight than I used to be and running is harder again. My daily mileage has been dropping all throughout the year.

Find a new volunteer activity in Oakland

I didn’t end up finding anything. Volunteering in person is kind of hard to do when you’re in a pandemic that kept continuing. If it’s in person, I’m going to do VITA tax help volunteering again. Doing it virtually is too difficult but doing it in the office sounds super fun.

Stop using my phone in the bedroom

I actually accomplished this one partially. I do this at night, leaving my smartphone in another room and just leave things. The only downside is that I go and grab my phone in the mornings and sleep in and trying to replace that habit has to be my next goal.

Write One Blog Post a Month

I only ended up writing one blog post which was open sourcing my journal analysis which was a pretty large project on itself.

24 books

I actually got this one! I ended up picking a good habit for puzzles and listening to audio books and devoured tons of books this year. I got about 31 books this year including: Ancillary Justice trilogy, Star Wars Thrawn Books, Parable Series by Octavia Butler, and a bunch of other books that I’ve been meaning to read. It was a nice mix of fiction and non-fiction. I think the real important part of this was the puzzle and audiobook combination was the key part of this since I’m not a big kindle reader.

Conclusion

1.5/6 is pretty bad but I think given how many things I did this year I think this is pretty reasonable.

Resolutions 2022

Read 24 Books

I’m going to continue my book habit. I got a new dedicated space to work on puzzles and I’m going to build a puzzle board so that I can actually move things away when I need to. I have some audio books queued up for me to read over including the next trilogy in the First Law Universe. It’s going to be a lot of audio books and the occasionally written book.

If you have any recommendations for audio-books outside the fantasy/sci-fi genre. I would love recommendations. I’m pretty siloed in my fantasy/sci-fi genre so it’s good to branch out.

No electronics until after I go for a run

I want to start doing this everyday except weekends but to start my day without my phone. I tend to laze about in bed instead of drink coffee to wake up in the morning and I’d rather just try to do something else with my day. Maybe I’ll try to read a book or go over some notes or something else.

Hosting regular events

Trying to arrange things with friends has been so hard so I’m going to try out a different idea. I want to see if I can schedule something on one day every month and be ready to host. That means some people might come, some people might not come but it will be an open invite for a certain number of people that I can arrange. If you’re interested in playing a regular occurring board game night in the Bay, reach out and let me know and I can add you to my list.

Focusing on this year

I think this year I’m going to drop my usual resolution count. I’ve been bad about doing it in general over the past 2 years during the pandemic and we have so many big things this year. We have a wedding to plan, we have two destination weddings this year (East Coast in May, and Europe in July). Plus we want to do our international honeymoon in September and take some real time off. So I’m going to be focusing on a few specific events

The Wedding

I wanna spend my time and energy doing some silly and fun things at the wedding. In Indian weddings, it’s about the union of two families so there are games and other little things to get the two families to get to know each other. To kind of modify that theme, I’ve been wanting to have our two disparate friend groups to get to know each other. So the idea is to have some type of game that everybody can participate in. If you want to help me brainstorm and think of ideas, please message me! I would love some help on this.

The House

I need to really focus on the main structural things for the house. We need to replace the floors in the basement and fix a few other things in the house.

Sabbatical

I’m going to be taking a sabbatical this year taking 3 months off with Mel as our little honeymoon. The plan was to travel internationally but we’ll see how things go with everything and covid. Our original plan was Japan-Korea-China-Signapore-Australia-New Zealand but many of these countries require long quarantines or are just not allowing people in at all.