So last year I didn’t do a year in review because I was sitting in the hospital with one serious thought back in January: I was probably a few days away from the year in review not mattering anymore.
How do you sum up this year. Usually I pour through a pile of things from Social Media to Work to just life in general. This year all those things have taken a back seat to more pressing things like “Not Dying” and “Hey I’m not Dead”. To sum up for people just reading this with no idea of what I’m talking about: I thought I had covid. Turns out it was heart failure (not caused by covid) which resulted in 12 hours of surgery and months of recovery. Am I perfect? No. Will I ever be? No. I did live though it and I’ve heard enough tales of people not living through that operation that I am extremely grateful. I spent close to a month in the hospital. Coupled with 3 or 4 months pre-hospital of not being able to function well and 3 to 4 months post-hospital of trying to get back on my feet, it’s been humbling.
I was sitting in the hospital post surgery wondering “What am I doing?”. I run a small business. My stress points are clients and deadlines. My tech stack is comfortably behind the curve. Things are changing fast in this industry though. It is tiring. I have been more tired by geo this year than I ever have. Some of that is related to the hospital incident. Some isn’t.
So to kill the stress I go walking. I love walking. Over the last few years walking was just exhausting. Post Surgery I started hanging out in a multi-use park down the road. They have a little bit of everything but most importantly they have a two mile walking trail. I would walk a half mile, rest, then walk the half mile back. The first time I broke 1 mile I silently danced. The day I broke 2 miles I did dance. It was hard too. The last bit had no where to stop and rest so I just kept walking.
I ended up at 4 conferences this year. I’m currently wondering how to reduce that down to just 2. The one crazy one I did was driving down to Jekyll Island in September…in my exceptionally old jeep. It was a conference I hadn’t been to in probably a decade. I got to see some old friends and hassle people about QGIS. Every conference I hit this year was awash in AI. Artificial Intelligence. Then you had the crowd that insisted in putting “Geo” in front of it – As if that made it more palatable or better. I remain undecided on AI. It will probably at some point turn into a useful tool but for now I remain unimpressed.
I did make serious strides in getting QGIS-US back up and going. I think that’s the big thing for me moving forward. I dropped one board. I have another year or so on another board and then I’m off that one. I have nothing left to prove except I want to canoe about a hundred miles on a multi day trip. Let the young crowd get excited about boards and minutes and meetings.
I did crank up a training website. It’s my second foray into “virtual” training. So if you go to https://training.northrivergeographic.com you’ll see that I have one class posted. I have a second one I’m working on. I’ve got some more “things” to work through on certificates and other things. It’s operational thanks to Naomi Moon over at Wicked Web Solutions. Training has turned into a bit of a pain as of late. I do training classes at conferences but that’s about it. I enjoy it as long as the students are enjoying it. Anyway – I’m hoping the website at least pays for itself moving forward.
There’s more I could talk about. There was the one client I should have said no too. There was one potential client that basically said “We don’t want to hire you because you might die”. There is another one so far behind on payments it’s exhausting.
When I thought I was going to die I threw all my training material at these two ladies from Vanderbilt. I was exceptionally fortunate to meet them several years ago. They co-taught a class with me at the NCGIS conference. They co-taught with me at the Tennessee State conference. Maybe they take the QGIS class and add some woman power to it. I hope so. The QGIS-US group needs more people that don’t look like me in it.
Oh what else can I add. I took up reading again. I go to my local used bookstore and take 10 bucks and buy whatever I can. Which – for 10 bucks isn’t going to be NY Times best seller list stuff – BUT – I do enjoy a western and some cheesy tech/Sci Fi. I made it through 6 or 7 books.
I fell back in love with tech with forays in PostGIS, Jupyter Notebooks, and my dreaded nemesis Python. It should be apparent how much a healthy heart lends itself to being able to pursue interests. I found sitting in 2024 and digging through things was just exhausting. Now not so much.
Other things that I did: I bought a watch so I’d stop looking at my phone for the time. I bought an $80 dollar computer off ebay and loaded Fedora Linux on it and now I do weird things with OpenStreetMap out in the “field” – in many way the laptop capped off a mapping backpack I had toyed with building.
I also looked at a lot of ways to simplify my life and just “be happy” and I have no clue where that takes me moving forward. There’s a lot I want to do and staring into the abyss at the “end” was enough for me to make some much needed changes.
Anyway – there’s a lot more I could type. I probably typed too much as it is. I leave you with this – a mix of 90’s Rap. Why? I’ve found a love of old Rap this year. I say old. It’s not that old….only….30 years…..
