It's been a few months since the previous update. I've been busy wrapping up the end of the year. At times, the struggle was real but I am now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
My baby started walking sometime in October, and with that began a reign of terror. What they say is true: you don't know how busy it can get raising a kid until they learn to walk. While we don't have to worry as much about him sucking on his dirty fingers from crawling around, now, he is walking everywhere at a brisk pace, sometimes falling, other times putting himself on the path of danger, and other times, just leaving a mess. Now, he loves taking things out of containers and putting them somewhere else, leaving the house looking like a warzone.
We gathered together with my parents and brother in Austin for Thanksgiving. It was a fun time of feasting, board games and hanging out with the whole family. It was a nice time that I'm starting to appreciate more. Over Christmas, my parents came over and we ate hot pot together.
On the other hand, these festivities have set me back. My original goal in August was to move my office downstairs by the end of the year so that baby Joseph can have a room to himself. That involved reorganizing everything, building new custom bookshelves to hold everything, and moving my stuff accumulated over my lifetime. That was before my parents decided to go to Austin for more than a month, leaving my wife and I to take care of the baby. It was before we decided to join them for Thanksgiving and losing some progress there as well. It's looking unlikely that I'll be able to meet that goal but, again, there is now light at the end of the tunnel, and I just gotta move the ball forward. This has been consuming all of my free time since Joseph's first birthday.
I pulled the trigger on going solar. I had looked into this two years ago. At the time, it was the wild west and there was a wave to fly by night solar installers. There were many horror stories from that time period. For me, I ended up getting married, so I had hit pause on that. Now, with Trump going into office, and the future of the solar tax credit in limbo, I felt that it was either now or never, so I bit the bullet and pulled the trigger. This will set me back financially, but according to projections, I should break even in around 10 years and be positive from that point forward.
Financially, I haven't been able to conduct my annual review of my finances, but that is coming up on my list of to-dos. I've just been too busy to knock this out, but I should be able to get to it soon. Just from my impression, I think this year went better than previous years, it will take some time before I can state this conclusively.
