New Year, New Post

I don't generally do well with the whole New Years resolution thing. Like a lot of people, if I make any at all, they tend to get followed for a few days or weeks and then fall by the wayside. Last year I made some; nearly all of them didn't take. (I did make the cabinets, though. This year I need to make some more, slightly different ones.)

This orbit, my thoughts are similar to last—fear and trepidation from the Trumpster fire at 1600 Penn., anxiety and impatience about my housing situation, dissatisfaction with personal stuff—and I could almost copy and paste last year's post here without much tweaking and it'd be just as appropriate to the moment.

But let's go through the exercise, just for the hell of it. So, Things I Would Like to Do Going Forward in This the Year 2018:

• Get back to sketching. This is one from last year that failed pretty spectacularly.
• Resolve the house issue. This is not entirely under my control, there's a big element that depends on the real estate market, but I would like to think that in a year's time I will be living in a different domicile. If nothing else, for the satisfaction of telling my landlord what I think of his 25% rent hikes. This issue has been something of an education this past year, as the already-tight Seattle market has gotten even more ridiculously expensive and choices even more sparse. My primary motivation for wanting to buy a home had been to ensure I don't get financially forced out of the city, but I'm starting to concede that I may have to do just that. Goddamn Amazon and other outfits bringing more and more people with money to burn into town are really screwing the rest of us as housing prices and rents keep skyrocketing. I've been seriously considering homes in Shoreline and less-seriously considering places even further out just because that's where they're for sale at asking prices that I can afford. It's depressing. I'd put Tacoma in the realm of possibilities if it didn't seem like it'd make my existence even more isolated living down there; the options seem to be a lot more plentiful there, but it would genuinely feel like a defeat if I left Seattle.
• Grow my business—not a lot, just some. Enough to make up for the loss of clientele that have gone out of business in 2017. To that end, I'm working on some ideas for ways to appeal to folks that aren't rolling in dough, but it'd be better to land more clients that actually have the means to pay for custom work.
• The old standby: More exercise. I've been a sedentary lump more often than I'd like to admit lately. Walk and/or ride the bike with some regularity, even when I don't have anywhere to necessarily go.
• Once again, do better with the blog. How is it I don't have anything to say? C'mon, son. Even if it's nonsense about TV and comics, surely I can fill a post now and again that's reasonably interesting to, well, me if no one else.

The larger macro picture of the world promises to be plenty interesting, of course, and here's hoping we all survive it. Everyone—at least, ever American—make sure your voter registration is up to date and be ready to fight when the corrupt Republican party tries to rig another set of elections.