dr_kromm | 30 Dec 2011

Welcome to my fourth "year in review" article since I opened this LJ account. It covers 2011, and as with the 2008, 2009, and 2010 incarnations, I tossed it together from memory and no doubt left something out for each hole in my aging brain. If I omitted a person or an event, it wasn't intentional! To the best of my recall. Some conditions may apply. Void where prohibited by law.

Milestones

July 2011 marked my 44th year on this rock, which is hardly the stuff of epics. July also saw me working for SJ Games for my 16th straight year, which is likewise just a number. Apropos of the latter item, the product line on which I work – GURPS – celebrated its 25th in 2011. Now that is impressive, at least for an old-school roleplaying game.

Far more important to me is the fact that Bonnie and I celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary in May and our 25th anniversary as a couple in November! The latter is the date we celebrate more vigorously. We respect the right of others to make a fuss over the time-honored institution of marriage, and even to send us tasteful (?) items in nickel and brass, but November 12, 1986 was when we bought mittens.

Travel

I've moved this section closer to the top because 2011 was an insane year for travel. Okay, jet-setters would mock my claim . . . for them, it would be a slow year. For Bonnie and me, though, it was busy.

Way back in January, I flew to Austin for my fifth set of SJ Games meetings since I started work as a remote employee. Phil (philreed) and Gina (gina_fischer) were kind enough to let me sleep under their roof and monopolize their cats, and I met my assistant, PK (peekitty), for the first time. We found time to play games, of course, and I experienced Texas barbecue at long last.

In August, Bonnie and I went to London to visit the Queen. No, wait, we went to visit my brother-in-law, Rob. We cunningly showed up without his knowledge in order to surprise him on his birthday. This worked out very well, and led to a week of dining, partying, and even tourism. I posted details earlier this year.

Then in September, Bonnie and I traveled to Ottawa to see my father receive the Order of Canada. This was a big deal for the whole family! This award actually means something, at least to Canadians. I first posted news about it this time last year, and mentioned the trip back in September (with links to photos and a video). Special thanks to our good friends Bao and Ti for letting us stay with them, which made the whole experience vastly more fun and relaxing.

Bonnie also traveled a lot on her own: Two trips to Nova Scotia to see her family while they were at Rob's vacation place in Paddy's Head, and then a jaunt to Sarasota, Florida to visit her parents. By the time of that last journey, fairly late in the year, Bonnie and I were just about done with jets for a while. I think we'll stay closer to home in 2012.

Social

I moved up the Travel section for other reasons, too: It sums up a lot of the year's socializing, much of which happened in other cities. Our London and Ottawa trips were blurs of social activity. For instance, our London trip enabled us to catch up with our good friend May for the first time in years and years, and finally meet her two girls (one of them born that month!). Which isn't to say that we did nothing at home . . .

Bonnie and I saw a lot of Éric, Dina, and their daughter Zola. Especially notable was our visit to Mont Saint-Hilaire in October. The ostensible goal was to pick apples, but we spent most of the day going 3-4 km up a 400-metre lump of rock . . . and then the same distance back down (nobody fell). Fun! We also got out to the Granby Zoo, where the beasties were a prelude to Zola pwning me in the wave pool.

We saw Alex, Judy-Anne, and their son Daniel. The Easter cake that looked like a chicken was especially memorable. We'll be seeing them again this coming weekend, too.

And just now over the vacation, we were reunited with Martin, Yoshie, and their daughter Angelique. They've been living in the U.S. of A. of late, for reasons related to Martin's career. Getting back together in December was just wonderful. We even hung out at our regular haunt, Nil Bleu.

The year 2011 also proved good for partying like it's 1999 (more like 1989 for a guy my age, but you get the drift). We survived not one, not two, but three parties that saw sunrise, or at least twilight, at the far end. The first was at Rainer & Mary's in January (I still have the toothbrush), the second was at Rob's in August (photographic evidence continues to surface), and the third was at Diane & Andi's in December (hopefully the photos won't make their way online). We'll try to keep it up in 2012.

Besides visits and parties, there were various kinds of shows. Early in the year, we hit La Khaïma for West African food and belly dancing. We attended several shows upstairs at Café Cleopatra (the downstairs of which is a strip club, so links would be NSFW), thanks to Velma Candyass, who runs Candyass Club; Bonnie sometimes helps out Velma with this stuff. We caught a few gigs by Swift Years, whom we met through Diane & Andi; these folks are talented. And we got to see the B-52s . . . I posted about that here.

Those interested on spying on me can poke me on Facebook. I'm not a mad updater, but I tend to post about social stuff there rather than here. That will probably be even more true in 2012, as my new phone handles quick FB updates more seamlessly.

Hobbies

The Company – my GURPS campaign – celebrated its second anniversary in May, which makes it closer to three years old as of this writing. I'm really happy with it! I find it interesting that a campaign designed to let people create a few characters each and assemble the best team for each job has turned into an action-soap opera, with players quite attached to specific characters and characters hooking up with other characters.

Torsten's The Steel Hummingbird campaign, in which I am a player, celebrated its first anniversary in 2011 and will turn two in 2012. It, too, has taken a soap-operatic turn, although all the hooking up has been by Martin's character, Bishop. My character, Valentina Volkova, managed to go to prison, go mad, and see Reptoids pretty much everywhere. There are aliens in the setting (in fact, their existence is a huge story element), but they're definitely not Reptoids.

Bonnie and I continued to play Left 4 Dead 2 together and with good online friends Bentagon, Guy, and Siren. We also did a fair bit of Borderlands – especially with Martin and Torsten over the recent holidays. And we played Dead Island, which I'd sum up as follows: "Fun enough for one playthrough, but short on both replay value and sense of humor." My guilty single-player pleasures were Fallout: New Vegas (which I played to death, including all the DLC) and Portal 2 (which is plain awesome, and which Bonnie and I tried co-op as well).

My remaining hobbies involve demon drink. I have no thrilling wine news this year – we had lots of good wine, but none of it merits a year-end note all of its own. To make up for that, 2011 was a great year for mixing. I discovered Ungava Dry Gin, was introduced to Żubrówka, and found a reliable source of Sagatiba Pura. I learned about the caipiroska and szarlotka. And at one party in London, I must have mixed over 100 drinks, mostly mojitos and caipirinhas (many with maracujá).

And though it isn't my hobby, Bonnie is an avid gardener. Thus, I think it bears mention that she got a piece in the Mirror. That right there is awesome.

Health

The doc gave me a clean bill in July, and I managed to go a whole year without any kind of surgery, even the dental kind. I had just one illness of note – the cold I caught last week and that I'm still paying for this week. I kept the cardio going and the weight down; in fact, even with holiday food and a two-week break from exercise to recover from this dratted cough, I'm not getting heavier. I plan to ramp up the cardio in 2012.

I guess "I got new eyeglasses" counts as a health note. As usual, my eyes are terrible and my correction cost me a small fortune. However, much of the expense was a full battery of tests – including funky photos of the insides of my eyes – so that I'll have a reference point as I age. That proved wise, as I've been beset by rapidly worsening presbyopia since mid-spring. Yay for getting old, bringing both foresight and farsightedness!

Work

I got three GURPS items published this year: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 14: Psi, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1, and GURPS Power-Ups 3: Talents. I also finished writing on yet another GURPS Dungeon Fantasy volume and a second GURPS Power-Ups project. Oh, and I wrote several pieces for Pyramid, only some of which have been published so far.

Editing-wise, I tackled GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 13: Loadouts, GURPS Psi-Tech, and GURPS Low-Tech: Instant Armor. That wasn't a lot of editing – which wasn't entirely because I was writing five items at the same time. It was primarily because GURPS support these days consists mainly of many, many e23 releases each year, which means that I'm dedicating the overwhelming majority of my time to reviewing first drafts, final drafts, and prerelease PDFs. Which is to say, I was more manager than editor in 2011.

This seems like a good spot to shout a big "Thank you!" to my boss, Steve Jackson. It's thanks to him trusting me with GURPS that I've been able to get away from the tedium of i-dotting, t-crossing copyediting, allowing me to devote myself to the big picture and to writing. I also want to thank him for two paid weeks off, one in June and the other in December, and for generous bonuses. The RPG business is not big business; all of these things are well out of the norm, however standard they might be in other lines of work, meaning that SJ Games stands out among its peers in a good way.

Economics

This year wasn't as bad as 2010 for money. I never did find a way to set aside cash for large RSP contributions in the spring, but I managed to swing significant tax refunds from Ottawa and Québec. While the greenback remained weak against the loonie, the exchange rate wasn't as bad in 2011 as it was in 2010. All told, if I can finesse my 2011 taxes, I may just be able to make 2012 black. We'll see how it goes. As noted above, the RPG business isn't big business . . . a lot is contingent on how stable my work situation proves to be.

Since I don't believe in sitting around moping, I spent money despite money being tight. Our Visa bill is paid in full and we have cash enough to pay for everything, so I think I did okay. The major purchases were those new eyeglasses, the trip to London (duh!), and a couple of new phones. We retired our venerable iPhone 3G for a Samsung Galaxy S II LTE for each of us (at about the same price that one less-capable iPhone 4S would've cost, which tells me that Apple aren't the people to see for good deals).