This year is starting out with a sputter rather than a bang.  I came down with a nasty virus right at New Year’s and it’s still hanging on.  That means there are a few things that I wanted to get done on my vacation time that just didn’t happen.  However, that just means I’ll have to fit them in around my regular schedule.

As far as 2017 goes, the biggest accomplishment was that Michelle finished her courses and practicums at SAIT and passed her certification exam with CHIMA to become a Health Information Management professional.  She also got hired as a casual rural employee with Alberta Health Services, and when she isn’t booked with them she can still book in doing her previous profession as a sign language interpreter.

So, after two years of squeaking by on basically my income and tapping into our savings, we are moving into recovery mode.  Fortunately I’m still working full time at Calgary Laboratory Services and enjoying that.  I work with a great group of people there and there are some interesting developments that were recently announced that will mean an expansion of what we do to a provincial level.  It will come with an name change as well, but that hasn’t been settled on yet.

I also spent way too much time in 2017, and late 2016, following American politics.  As a Canadian, I’ve never really invested a great deal of time paying attention to what the US does but things down there have gotten so wacky and dangerous I can’t help but watch.  It’s like a big impending car wreck on a global scale.

As I posted earlier in the year, we did finally get our basement put back together after having it flooded in 2016.  We still want to get some remodeling done in Michelle’s stained glass studio, design and get built some storage for all her sheets of glass, then she can finally get back to working on some projects, which will be nice.

My big project this year was working on my Family Tree, primarily on the Knorr side.  I teamed up with Morris Knorr, who wrote a couple of books on the Knorr history, and we started the “Knorr Genealogy Canada” Facebook group in May.   We are now at one hundred and two members and have members across Canada, Australia, Russia, Germany and many other places.   I’ve filled in a lot of missing information, and just recently we tracked down one missing branch of the Knorr family that Morris had been trying to find for many years.  It’s been such a success that I started a “Grywacheski – Lozinski Genealogy” group just recently for my Mom’s side of the family.

As for other things, I did manage to get almost all of the miniatures I had purchased over the course of the last two years assembled and primed and ready to paint, both the spaceships and the characters.  However, I’ve just barely started the actual painting.

I see I didn’t do a New Years posting for 2017, but looking back to the one for 2016, Happy New Year 2016, most of what was said there remains true.  I did do a major revamp on my ICE Webring Site mid 2016 with additional changes in April 2017 and that’s about the last time I’ve done anything with it.  I also haven’t done any work on my Battlestar Galactica D6 RPG project either.  The BSG Roleplaying Community on Google+ has basically stalled out as well.   The photographing of concert tee shirts and old cabaret posters hasn’t happened yet, although that might actually occur this year.

Still looking through the 2016 posting, I did do a pretty major downsizing in my library, including a large portion of my Star Trek books.  As expected, getting rid of my Roleplaying games proved to be too hard to do, so I still have almost all of them.  Moving the CDs into sleeves also stalled out, but I did get the majority of the “extra music” into iTunes instead of being stored separately.

I could also pretty much copy the weight loss and exercise portion of the 2016 posting verbatim and it would apply for this year, although I am starting the year at 260 lbs and not 268 lbs like 2016, so some progress has been made.

Some additional goals for 2018 will be to get back in touch with some people that I haven’t seen often enough in the last couple of years.  I think a few meals at some of the board game cafes, or over at my place will be in order, and maybe some “Locked Room” events.  I did a couple of those this year and they were a lot of fun.

That’s it for now, I might come back and add a little more once my head clears up from this cold 🙂