In the middle of 2021 I saw a simple cartoon which was two calendar’s talking to each other. The first calendar, 2020, says “I’m the worst year ever”, the second calendar, 2021, says “Hold my beer”.

In reality it is hard to tell if 2021 was really worse than 2020. In many ways it was the same, in some ways it was better and in others it certainly was worse.

To start with the good, in Australia, we had a decent run from February to May of near normal lifestyles. Early in the year I moved house and, for the first time in over ten years, I have a backyard where I can spend a lot of time gardening and talking to the birds, lizards and spiders. Furthermore, in the later half of the year, we were all able to get vaccines and to travel interstate again.

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Groundhog Day. That is how we began to describe each day of 2020 on video calls with work. Every day the same, you get out of bed, have breakfast, login to the work laptop, sit in the same spot all day, log off, eat dinner, watch tv, sleep and repeat. 

On one hand one could wonder why it is even worthwhile writing a review of a year in which almost nothing happened because everyone was at home all year. On the other, plenty of unusual things and changes to usual ways of living and working did happen, and it is good to document just what a utterly crazy year it has been. 

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At the start of this year I set myself four goals:

Read 12 Books

I read 20 books! This is twice as many as 2018

Make a 5% return on savings and investments

I made a 5.2% average return (unweighted, includes investments held for less than 6 months) on my investments. Savings accounts much less as repeated rate cuts hurt my savings growth.

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2018 has been a great year. I changed career, set up a new apartment and celebrated good times with friends.

I have also posted very few blog posts (only 4!), I’m well over a year behind in editing photos from trips. However, life has been busy and I’m being slightly more restrained in what I chose to post online.

Some of the highlights from the year are shown below.

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2017 has been a roller coaster of a year, there have been some big highs but also some huge lows. At the start of this year I set myself some goals which I mostly achieved:

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