It’s Christmas Eve again! Feels like just yesterday that I was looking forward to 2015’s Christmas morning. That one went relatively uneventfully and peacefully. The immediate family and I convened for the day’s festivities once again, at the casa.

This year, it’s again looking like a smooth day is coming up, but so many good, and a few not-so-good things have come to pass. First, the not-so-good.

America is celebrating the holidays as usual, but it’s been a kind of crazy year. There’s still some pretty serious racial tension in the country, and it’s only been worsened by the surreal election of our next President, who is going to be a person not known for having much in common with the majority of citizens. He’s almost trying to bring a different, more centralized rule. Not even inaugurated yet, he’s known for using taxpayer dollars to spend the majority of his living time at his personal residence, in his mansion-like penthouse in New York.

I’m sure New Yorkers affected by that aren’t super happy about that, with the traffic snarls it’s likely caused already. At any rate, the next 4 years are going to be interesting, to say the least.

On to the good, though.

Work’s been going decently well, with the company continuing its growth and reorganization into a “product-oriented” style. There are product managers and marketing managers for pretty much all the core and even the newest, cloud-related products. Some coworkers have come, some have moved on. The annual Halloween party was pretty fun.

Speaking of Halloween, that marked a pretty good life transition for me. It feels pretty good to have an adventuring partner in real life and I’m glad it grew from a friendship of a few years already. I look forward to reading her messages, hearing her voice (and laugh), and, of course, spending time together with her. I like to think of myself as a hopeless romantic, which extends to the fact that even though I don’t really think I’m the coolest guy around, I still manage to delight her, even while she is enchanting me (hopefully, she’ll read this and find my written awkwardness adorable.)

I’m still trying to grow and improve every day, expanding my knowledge as much as possible, while also having as much fun as I can along the way. This is about as close as I’m going to get to an annual retrospective for 2016. I won’t dwell on what I did not accomplish more than to say that my intentions for 2017 are fairly similar and continue on some from 2016. We’ll see what the new year brings, soon.