Normally around this time I’m posting my annual year in review. However, at this moment I’m sitting in a hotel room in Wisconsin getting ready for the Tuscobia 80 bike race tomorrow morning, so this year’s “year in review” is going to be more of a simple wrap-up.

The main thing that I can say about 2021 is that it seemed to take forever. I’m not complaining because at my age birthdays can take however long they want to arrive. But it certainly felt like this year dragged on and on, and frankly I can’t even remember what happened in 2020 vs 2021. So maybe I’m just feeling like I experienced two year’s worth even though it felt like only one.

In many ways 2021 was the time where we started to figure out what the “new normal” looked like. I haven’t been back to my office for more than a few hours since March of 2020. It looks like I won’t be going back in any permanent capacity either, instead continuing a mostly work-from-home set up. I’m fine with this, as I’ve worked with and managed remote teams for almost a decade, but it feels like it took most of this year to really get everyone to accept the fact that things are going to be different.

Perhaps another reason this year dragged on was that I felt like I was either very busy, or not busy at all. There often wasn’t much in between. Because of things like the pandemic and my wife’s knee surgery, we weren’t able to plan as much as we used to. Therefore, we often seized on opportunities to do things without much consideration for what else was happening around them. Once again, not a bad thing, but it made for some hectic times.

Overall though, I feel like we survived 2021 and that’s probably enough. There were lots of good, a bunch of bad, and for the most part… it was a ‘year’. Maybe that’s OK though and we can just be content to let it be and move on to tomorrow. Tomorrow I start the year doing a very hard thing. Seems like an appropriate way to let go of 2021 and start off 2022 with a bang.