This is My Year

 

Welcome to 2026!!! 

I hope you all enjoyed your holidays and wish you all have a good new year. I know people who take this moment to set some goals for the year or create a vision board to guide them to greatness or some other silly stuff. I have never done any of that as most of these goals people set for themselves at the beginning of the year fall away as soon as life starts back up again. 

I'm not saying I don't have some things I could improve upon or that there aren't some adventures I want to go on but I'm more a continuous improvement person than doing a yearly review. However this year is a little different.

For the first time since college I no longer have a full time job. I'm medically and financially healthy so there are no real limits to what I can do with all my free time. This past month I have started adjusting to not working. I have mostly been busy with making calls to get all my benefits setup and taking care of all those small project that I didn't have time for because I was working. 

It is still going to take some time to adjust to my retirement and get into a new routine. Now that the new year has started and things have stabilized I'm going to look for new things to occupy my time. My wife already volunteers at a farm so I will probably help her more with that. I want to do some teaching or mentoring to help keep my technical skills fresh. I'm also going to look for some ways to give back to the community. I have always done some volunteer work that has helped me keep a good perspective on life so I want do continue and do more of that.  

Of course I will have more time for biking and my other hobbies so I look forward to not having a job that will interfere with any of that. I'm excited by the possibilities so am looking forward to the new year. It should be a good year. I know that it is 2026( or 5786 on the Hebrew calendar or the year of the horse on the Chinese calendar). However I'm unofficially naming it "The year of Tom" as this is my year to do as I please and I plan to enjoy it to the fullest.