2024 – Goals
All right folks, listen up: I wrote down my goals and some comments on the past 367 days. By god, I am average. However I have learned that average just means, that many people want something. That can be a good indicator to follow, unless you have a strong indicator that says differently.
tl;dr Learnings – nothing beats happiness and a life partner who has your back. – happiness makes you boring, but that's ok. – do stuff that makes your life more joyful and meaningful. Else ditch. (Unless it's taxes, pay taxes) – gardening is war. Permaculture gardening is also war, but we hide it better. – disregard any fitness tips from people under thirty. Their bodies are not breaking down yet.
tl;dr Goals – the smol, wonderful family continues to come first – more and regular writing – sports – get the bees from the box into the basket – make one of my projects profitable – launch my new project
Review 2023
2023 started hmmmm 'kay levels. I was in a customer project that was super stressful. I ditched that in April, because while I loved the project and my development team, we where just set up for failure, by both the end customer and the agency. So after the same mistakes where made repeatedly, I ditched it, despite it being very well paid. I had three employees, two of them left the company, both on a better track now. I did not rehire, because the economy and project landscape is just meh, and I don't want people stuck in meh projects. I did another customer project, which sounded idealistic and to good to be true and indeed it was. It ended quick, 3 years early, but I am glad for the people I met and the opportunity to spend some time on building cool visions for the future. In autum the economy and projects on offer was still meh, and my new pet project was not making progress at the speed I wanted. Soooooo I had a chat with my amazing husband at taking a bit more entrepreneurial risk, and am currently working on that and my co-working space Tempelgehöft Co-Working 100% at least until March. What is this mysteroius projecté you may ask? I will not tell yet. The goal is to make sustainable gardening and farming easier. It's cool. Stay posted (or DM me ;)). In summer I started developing arthritis in my feet. That sucks, I love walking. Working on it with the doctors and still optimistic that this will go away again with time and proper care. That also led to us not getting quite as much gardening done, as we wanted. However we made some progress on creating more garden beds, putting up rain barrels, so we hopefully need no extra water for the upcoming dry periods and made the decision to get rid of all these “hardy and fast growing plants” we inherited in our garden. If you are considering these in your garden: don't. If you dont know what else to plant, DM me. I can help you find a better option. What are terrible timekillers that grow so fast they need permanent tending to? Bamboo, Sumach (Essigbaum), Virginia creeper (Wilder Wein). We are replacing them with elderberry (Holunder), honeysuckle (Geißblatt) and ferns. We might keep one of the bamboos, if we manage to fence in its roots. I also have two bee colonies again, who moved in during August, so fingers crossed both will make it through winter. They both get to live under our brand new terrace roof. We also spent some time renovating out flat. It is now nicer and a lot easier to keep tidy, while still enabling us to have a lot of stuff. Boxes and doors are wonderful inventions! We spent the holidays at home with friends, because people are just too stressed out at Christmas and Covid is at an all time high again. I can highly recommend that procedure.
Plans for 2024
Over to the upcoming 363 days remaining in this new, shiny year. Partnership and family got even better with our new habit of going out once a week, and this is something we will continue doing from now on. Hopefully my feet will be fully functional again very soon, because I miss our daily dog walks together.
A few weeks ago, inspired by one of our pen and paper groups I started writing. What was supposed to be a “what if” character exploration 15 years into the future and has turned into currently 14.000 words of ghosts, necromancy and family drama. I love writing it, Nico, who currently is the only one who gets to read this unedited version, enjoys reading it. I've enjoyed writing for a long time, but this I did not really make enough time for it in my life, so this year will be another attempt at doing more of that. Terry Pratchett is said to have had the habit of writing 400 words per day, which is about 100 words less than the 2023 review in this blogpost. I am going for 400 words, on 3 days a week.
I want to do more sports because it makes me feel better overall. On top of some light morning exercise I also started going bouldering once a week with friends. Definitely want to keep that up. Gardening loveliness will continue, as will home improvements. Next up is our kitchen – which is in really dire need of renovating. Dread and joy combined! :D Also the bees need to move from boxes into baskets, so that I can keep this old timey way of keeping bees alive, while also adhering to modern knowledge and practices. I will probably also write more about that, because keeping bees in baskets is different from keeping bees in boxes in terms of maintenance, reproduction and medicinal tools available.
For my professional life the main focus this year will be getting the co-working space to profitability. Currently it is covering about 2/3 of the costs, and my goal is to round about double the revenue to achieve that. And then of course launching the new project and building a new customer base for that.
Wish me luck, health and stamina!
I am looking forward to this new year, and hope you are too!
Happy new year! May you be fortunate, healthy, happy and experience some pleasant adventures!