2018 By the Numbers
Today, I reflect on the year that will reach its conclusion at midnight tonight. Sure, time and calendars are man-made constructs. But they’re constructs I have lived within for 64 years, a month and 18 days, and I’m a guy who likes to count things, kind of a math geek, if you will. You can count on it. I’m not a slave to numbers — they just have meaning to me.
2018 was a year in which I wrote and posted 145 stories and 318 poems. For me, compared to the past six years, those aren’t big numbers. But I started the year intentionally not writing every day. I felt I needed a little break from my daily writing commitment, and focused a little more on getting better sleep, and improving my physical fitness. I’m over that now, and back to writing every day, thank God! Sleep and fitness are good things, but for me, writing is like breathing. I’m glad to report, my writing numbers rose considerably in the last few months of the year.
Much more important than the numbers of pieces I wrote was how many new connections I made, primarily on Medium, but earlier in the year, on AllPoetry (AP), as well. I haven’t counted them — but there’s been a lot of them. I got over my grief from losing Cowbird (as an interactive writing community), and expanded my horizons on Medium beyond The Story Hall, and on AP.
I am still devoted to the Hall, and the storytellers here — I love you guys, and thoroughly enjoy sharing your journeys here — but I waded out into the vast universe that is Medium, and discovered some fabulous storytellers out there that I love to follow, as well.
At one point, sometime in November I think, I pronounced Cowbird officially dead, when all we got was the black screen of death for well over a month. I was sure it was down for good, even in its non-interactive, static-library state. That was about when I really branched out on Medium, and am guessing one was directly related to the other. That was part of my letting go of Cowbird.
When Dave Lauer miraculously breathed new life into Cowbird, and brought it back from the Black Screen of Death, I had a new and different perspective on it. I was finally past my emotional grief, and was able to see, objectively, that I have 2,000 stories still on there, most of which I’d never bothered to download to somewhere else. So, I began that process, in earnest.
Previously, I think, it was just too painful to do. I was partially in denial that it would never return as a vital, active storytelling site, or perhaps I was still hopeful that somebody was going to create a Cowbird clone, but that never came to fruition, and won’t.
So far, I have downloaded 600 of those stories onto Medium. I save them as drafts here, although as I reread them, while downloading, I have seen fit to post a few of the gems. It’s a slow process, downloading them, but I keep at it, whenever I can find the time. I just have 1400 more to go!
Back to fitness numbers — I swam 79,527 yards in my back yard swim-spa in 2018. That would be the same as 3,181 laps in a 25 yard long pool. My pool is only 15 feet (or 5 yards) long, but instead of actually swimming laps in it, I swim against an adjustable current. I’ve really enjoyed that swim spa more this year than I ever have before (we’ve had it for four years). Having the apple watch that counts the yards and calories burned helps a lot.
I’ve walked 1,839.6 miles in 2018, an average of 5.04 miles per day. I like to walk, and push myself to maintain my average above 5 miles a day. Sometimes, I really have to push myself, while other times I look and see I’ve walked 7 miles that day, without even realizing it. The past couple of days, my numbers have been off, but I’m good with it. I’ve been enjoying some well-deserved and needed relaxation after a hectic week, working through the furlough.
I actually got my average hours of sleep up to a 7 hours per night average, for a few months there, but have fallen back to a 6 hour per night average. This has gone hand-in-hand with my return to daily writing. But, hey, that’s still better than the 5 hours per night I used to average, when I was writing every day, and playing softball 3–4 nights a week. I’m still making progress — one step up, two steps back sometimes, but I’m working at it.
We took 3 good vacations in 2018. The first got a little crazy, by the numbers. It was a vacation that got postponed 3 times, finally becoming our 33rd anniversary vacation, which we took in April. We went to Disney World.
It was our 33rd Disney Vacation Club trip to Disney, and our 35th trip to Disney World in the past 25 years. Our room number at the Old Key West Resort, where we stayed there, was 3525. Our flight number going down was 4433. Coming back, our flight got delayed and we had to stay at the Hyatt hotel at the Orlando Airport — they put us up in room 6033. See, if I wasn’t a numbers guy, I wouldn’t have noticed all those numerical “coincidences”. That was really crazy, but fun!
In July, we spent a week in South Carolina, beginning with a one night stay at our favorite plantation, just west of Georgetown, SC — that always starts the week off on the right foot, for us. The rest of the week was spent in Debordieu, on the beach, with my large family. There’s so many of us, we always stay in four or five different houses there. This year, it was just Kathy, my brother Ken and I in a beach house designed to sleep 8. We had lots of room, and all the peace and quiet we desired, whenever we wanted it. It was a great week!
I was still recovering from a very intensive oral surgery I’d had the previous month, and began that week still experiencing severe migraines the surgery had triggered. By the third day, they went away. At the same time, our dog was back home going through major trauma after her oral surgery, which she’d had right before we’d left on vacation. It had started as a routine teeth-cleaning that the Vet had talked me into, that went terribly wrong. She wound up in the ICU of the animal hospital for 4 days, costing us a cool $5 grand, between the surgery and the hospitalization, and by the time we got back, I was sure we were going to lose her. She’s a little white Yorkie, and it seemed the life was just oozing out of her. Then, in one day, she just bounced back to her old self, and has been fine ever since. No more teeth-cleaning for Chloe!
Our 3rd vacation was a real humdinger. We hit 4 different countries (England, Ireland, Scotland and Canada), crossed an ocean, spent 18 days total on the cruise ship, and had one of our very best vacations, ever. That’s a high bar, too, because we’ve had some pretty great ones.
At work, I served in three different executive positions over the course of the year. I began in the position I’d been in for close to two years, but one that I was growing increasingly discontented with. By February, I knew it was time for a change, and I let my superiors know I needed a change.
I offered to go on a detail to the Department, to the Secretary’s office, to head up a new initiative the Secretary was implementing, something called the Customer Experience. At first, they said no, they had a guy for that, but then they realized, since their guy had never worked in the federal government before, they needed someone to help him with his implementation. Since I had already raised my hand for it, I got the nod.
For me, it was primarily my ticket out of a position I could no longer sustain, and maintain my health, in. It was a tremendous, exhilarating experience, we got a lot accomplished in three months’ time, getting that office set up and the initiative off the ground, then I was ready to go back to my agency. That was good, because they could no longer afford me, there, anyway.
My Under Secretary knew I didn’t want to return to my previous position, and it just so happened a new executive position had been created to lead the agency’s new focus on the Employee Experience. She offered me that position, which is called the Executive Associate for Employee Experience. I was only hoping to not have to return to my old job, but when she told me that title, I immediately got excited about it. I was going from the Customer Experience to the Employee Experience — what an experience! It was also an opportunity to set up another new shop from scratch, my second in the same year. That’s a first for me.
Another first in 2018 was the first Stanley Cup Championship for the team we’ve been following for 22 years, the Washington Capitals. They had to beat their age-old nemesis on the way to the Cup, the Pittsburgh Penguins, but they overcame them, and all other obstacles to their finally winning the cup. The city of Washington, DC, celebrated that achievement all year, its first major sport championship in 27 years. I had my oral surgery the day they had the parade through town, but I watched it all in TV, despite the extreme pain I was in. It was a joyful site to behold!
I made two memorable trips back to my hometown of origin, Pittsburgh. The first was a reunion of all of my siblings (all 7 of us) to surprise my next older brother, Brian, for his 65th birthday. We pulled the surprise off, and had a wonderful couple days there, despite a blizzard that fell overnight on our first day there. I got to tour the Roberto Clemente museum, the Andy Warhol museum, spend time with all my siblings in the place we all started from, and got to meet up with my old pal Darrell, for the first time in 45 years. He was my partner in crime my last year and a half in Pittsburgh. It was a fine reunion. The second trip put us there on the same day as, and eleven miles away from, the synagogue shooting that happened there. We were there for a baby christening. It seemed to be a real sign of the times, as such incidents became, sadly, more commonplace in this country.
I attended 320 AA meetings through the course of the year, and led or co-led 26 of them. The meeting attendance number is actually down a bit from my first two years getting back to the rooms, when I averaged a meeting a day. In this area, it’s not hard to do. There are meetings early in the morning, noon meetings, and meetings in the early evening, and late in the evening. When I can, I like to get out to one. Whenever I’m asked to lead a meeting, I just say yes, unless I have a time conflict. I sponsored six guys in the program. A sponsor works with another member, helping them to go through the 12 steps and with applying the principles of the program to their lives. It’s a very fulfilling activity, and most importantly, helps an alcoholic to get out of themselves.
I attended 27 personal counseling sessions with the same counselor I began to see in August of the previous year. I’ve never stayed with one counselor this long. I’ve previously only gone as long as whatever crisis I was going through had passed, then I’d stop. This longevity has allowed us to establish a relationship — he knows me, now, and is able to reflect things back to me, in a way that really helps me to form a more realistic picture of who I am. I tend to always sell myself short. He won’t let me do that. I appreciate this relationship a lot. It feels like it’s really helping me to come into my own. Some of us are a little slower than others. All in good time.
I also attended 2 AA retreats, like I’ve been doing since 2013. Beginning last year, I started only going to one in Connecticut, and the other in southern Maryland, where a lot of the people I see in meetings I attend all over the DC metropolitan area go to. These retreats really help me to recharge my spiritual batteries, which do often have difficulty maintaining their charge. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have so many opportunities to keep growing.
I’m planning to live to triple digits, but only if I can keep growing over the next 36 years, and keep myself relatively sharp, mentally, physically, and spiritually — a day at a time, of course!
Now that I’ve gotten 2018’s wrap out of the way, I can begin to think about my intentions for 2019. I think I have a few brewing. I want to get some clarity on them, and then lay them out there. After that, I just start living. Intentions always have a way of incorporating themselves into my life, unlike resolutions, which usually go by the way before January’s half over.
