New Year's Meme

(Seventh in a series. See also New Year's Day 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013.)

1. What did you do in 2013 that you'd never done before?
*Got a book contract (and completely finished everything to do with Book One)
*Rented out our house
*Started a year of Italian classes
*Set myself a blogging schedule and kept it

2. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes: one college friend had her first, another her second, and a post-college friend also had her first. (Can you tell 40 is on the horizon?)

3. Did anyone close to you die?
Our realtor, whom I felt close to despite the brevity of our relationship. She'd worked with us for months finding our house and was just finishing up the credit checks and paperwork for our renters when she died quite suddenly, only a few weeks after her father died.

4. What countries did you visit?
England and Canada

5. What would you like to have in 2014 that you lacked in 2013?
I would really like to spend it living with my spouse, full-time and for the long-term, in our house. But barring that, I'd like for the Article of Eternal Return to STOP RETURNING.

6. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Getting Book One out of my life (and into everyone else's! Mwahaha!)

7. What was your biggest failure?
I had some disappointments this year, but they were all comparatively minor.

8. Did you suffer illness or injury?
A couple of colds, a couple of migraines, and a minor infection that required too many different courses of antibiotics to knock out completely.

9. What was the best thing you bought?
Uh, a new coffee table? Nothing big or notable is coming to mind.

10. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Pope Francis

11. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Oh so many people on the internet.

12. Where did most of your money go?
Between repairs/upgrades to the house, renting a bigger apartment for my sabbatical, and two separate moves, housing expenses ate up a ton of cash.

13. Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder? b) thinner or fatter? c) richer or poorer?
a) Happier
b) Maybe a touch heavier, but who's to say? I LIVE in my yoga pants these days.
c) Poorer (but only because I'm on sabbatical and at half-pay)

14. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Reached out to old friends. I'm in touch with a lot of people, but there are some friendships I haven't been as active in keeping going as I wish I'd been.

15. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Fretted about the future

16. What was the best new book you read?
I read a number of books I expected to love and didn't (Telegraph Avenue, Bring Up the Bodies, White Teeth). But Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, which I'd never read, made up for all of them.

17. What was your favorite film of the year?
Either Frances Ha or Enough Said

18. What was your favorite album of the year?
Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City

19. What was the best play you saw?
The Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? was probably the best, but I'm glad we made the trek to Brighton to see the Globe's Henry VI (all three plays in one day).

20. What kept you sane?
Uh, being on sabbatical? That rules.

21. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2013.
Which of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to his life span?

Wishing everyone a marvelous 2014--may it bring you all you deserve or desire!