As a now committed attendee of World Domination Summit, I tend to follow along quite a bit with Chris Guillebeau‘s blog. Every year he does an annual review, which I think is a good idea to put things in your life into perspective, both to give you some idea of how your year went and what you accomplished, as well as help you prepare goals (NOT resolutions) for the upcoming year. I don’t always go too in-depth when I do any kind of annual review, but last year at the end of the year, I was privileged to have quite a bit of time off from work relaxing in Maui. This gave me plenty of time to think about the past year as well as what I wanted to be different in the new year. I found it pretty refreshing, and I’m looking forward to having some time off at the end of this year as well.

Lately Chris has posted about working on his annual review, so I thought it might be a good idea to take a look at 2014 for myself and how it went. He advocates starting with the questions “What went well this year?” and “What didn’t go well this year?”, which seems like a pretty simple but effective approach to take. So that’s what I did. Let’s see what my outcome was.

What went well in 2014?

Well, it made me feel good that the list of things that went well was much longer than the list of things that didn’t go well. I’ll try not to bore you too much, but here is what I came up with that went well for me this year.

I got to ring in the new year in Maui, which gave me time to evaluate. I really feel like that was a great way to end a year and begin a new one. I mean, obviously Maui itself was fantastic, but I’m actually talking more about having the time to reflect and plan. It was really helpful for me.

I covered the Phoenix Film Festival as press. This was an awesome experience for me. I was privileged to see and review some great films and meet some really cool new people that I look forward to staying connected with. (I’m looking at you, The Showerpeople!)

I attended World Domination Summit and visited Portland for the first time. This was an amazing experience, and one I hope to repeat again for many years to come.

I traveled to Charlotte, NC for work and got to meet my work team in person. I work with a lot of cool people, but we have a team that is spread out over the globe, and I am the only one in Arizona. It was fun to finally meet some of them and have real faces and experiences to put with names and voices I hear over the phone every day. This trip also resulted in getting assigned to a specific project to work on, providing some much-needed clearer direction at work.

We bought a house! Ricky and I moved into a really great house that we absolutely love. It’s bigger with more storage, a garage, a really awesome view. There’s a lot of cool things we like about it, and we are looking forward to enjoying it for at least the next few years.

Ricky and I took a road trip up the West Coast for vacation. It wasn’t the vacation we originally planned, and it didn’t go 100% perfect (but what vacation does?), but it was a good experience nonetheless. We started out by driving to San Diego, taking a train to Portland, then driving to Vancouver and Seattle and flying back from there. The worst parts were a 9-hour train delay, a 3-hour delay at the border both in and out of Canada, and then a big fight our last night there (just being honest… couples do fight!). But all around, it was a very fun experience, and we got to try a LOT of new beers.

I consolidated all of my credit card debt, allowing me to pay all of it off within three years. Not too much to say about this one, really, but it did give me some peace of mind. If you are in debt and struggling to pay it (or just want to have an easier payment and ensure you pay it off relatively quickly), I highly recommend a company called Upstart. I was glad to find them and realize this opportunity was out there.

I was able to go back to Indy to visit friends and family. At first, I wasn’t sure that this was going to happen this year. But, after making some financial changes, I secured a plane ticket and made it out to visit for a few days. I got to see family and enjoy a dinner with quite a few friends while I was there, and I hope to be able to make it out more often in the future.

Ricky and I continued our tradition of visiting San Diego for Thanksgiving. So far, we have done this every year since we moved to Arizona, and it seems to work out well. We’ve gone with different people every time, but it’s always a fun trip and a tradition we hope to continue. This year we actually found a great place to stay via AirBnB. We met the owners of the house we stayed in, and they seem excited to have us come back and stay there again next year.

Recently, my work environment has improved. Pretty much all of the various frustrations I had with my job at different points this year have been eliminated. My biggest source of frustration was my commute (an hour each way), which has been solved by moving to an office location much closer to home, along with being permitted to work from home a bit more as well. This has caused my stress level to go down quite a bit. Also, after learning a lot of new things on the project I’ve been working on, it looks like there is the possibility for a promotion next year, so we’ll see what becomes of that.

I made some progress in my journey to being healthier. It might not seem like much progress (at least it doesn’t to me, but more about that later on in things that DIDN’T go well), but I did find a gym that I like (even if I still don’t go often enough) and I have pretty consistently been following a recipe and meal plan that includes healthy dinners that I cook at home. It’s really helped me to learn more about cooking, and I actually enjoy it quite a bit as well.

I surpassed my goal of reading 30 books this year.  Goodreads allows you to set a challenge for yourself for a number of books you want to read in the year. Last year, my goal was 25, which I made. This year, I increased it to 30, and I have already surpassed that number by 7 books. I’ve definitely enjoyed making an effort to read more this year, and I’ve found some really good books as well as shared a few book discussions with friends.

What did not go well this year?

We won’t look at this as bad, just learning experiences, right? There aren’t that many here, but as I tend to be very hard on myself most of the time, I still take these very seriously and they get to me. I just need to look at them as attitudes to change, or goals to work harder towards next year.

Ricky and I were not able to do our initial plan for vacation this year, which was to go to Oktoberfest in Munich. This was a decision that I made because I just didn’t feel like I really had the money to spend on this this year. We were sad to miss it, but with finances in better shape and a renewed commitment to doing it, we are looking forward to making this a definite vacation for 2015.

I did not really lose any weight and pretty much failed miserably at being consistent with working out and eating healthy. While I do now have a gym I like and a plan of attack for eating healthy, my laziness and enjoyment of food still won out this year. It’s mostly just due to a lack of consistency. I need to work on continuing to stay focused on the end goal instead of letting short-term rewards win out so often.

I honestly probably spent more money than I should have this year. Despite feeling like I have my finances under better control, there were plenty of purchases that I made this year that were probably not the best financial decision. I don’t necessarily regret any of them, however, I do see this as a challenge to take on for next year – to spend my money more wisely, and again, not let short-term rewards win out.

I did not really push myself to get out of my comfort zone all that much. There are a lot of things in my life that I feel could be improved if I got out of my comfort zone more often. After all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, right? Some of the best things that happened this year were actually the result of when I DID get out of my comfort zone (coughWDScough), so I can only imagine how awesome of a year I will have in 2015 if I make an active decision to allow myself to be uncomfortable more often.

So there you have it. I promise there will be an upcoming post soon about what my goals and plans are for 2015, but maybe I’ll save it for after 2015 actually begins. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about some of your experiences this year. What went well for you in 2014? What went not so well?

It has become a tradition for us to head to San Diego every Thanksgiving. This year, Ricky played golf on Thanksgiving, so I took advantage of the opportunity to check out the San Diego Zoo. It’s supposed to be one of the best zoos in the country, and it didn’t disappoint. I went with our friend Tom, and we had a blast!

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It’s been a while since I blogged, but I would like to start blogging more. So, I think I am going to try to blog once a week, on Fridays. If Friday has passed, and you don’t see a blog from me, just poke me. No, not on Facebook. Well, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook, but don’t poke me. Nobody does that anymore. And yes, I see you people out there that are headed right now to go poke me and prove me wrong. Jerks.

So, a little over two years ago Ricky and I packed up all our belongings and moved across the country from Indiana to Arizona. I honestly can’t really believe that it’s been that long, and even after being here for two years, after spending the first 32 years of my life in Indiana, it’s still hard for me to believe that I am now a resident of Arizona. I linked to a video today on Facebook about Arizona, and as my caption, I put “I love my state”. I think that is the first time I have said it like that. Arizona is “my state”, the state where I live. It’s still hard to think of it that way. Don’t get me wrong, Indiana will always be where I’m from, Lebanon will always be my hometown, and Indianapolis will always hold a very special place in my heart, but Arizona is now “my state”.

Here’s the video I posted, if you’d like to see it. It’s actually really beautiful, and it’s a good reminder of exactly why I do love living in Arizona. Whenever I get asked why I moved out here, I tell the story about how both Ricky and I didn’t want to live out our whole lives in Indiana, and we both had visited Arizona before and loved the weather out here and had family living here, so it made perfect sense. And he was in love with Scottsdale, which is where we moved to and lived for our first two years. We now have a house in Phoenix (not far from Scottsdale, which we still love and visit all the time). Our house is great. I love it, especially the fact that it’s on this little hill and that we have a nice patio upstairs, meaning we can see mountains and for miles across the northeast part of the valley… similar to some of the scenes in this video.

Watching this video and reading a blog post a friend of mine wrote recently about his several month stint of living in Arizona (he’s from Oklahoma City) made me decide that I’d write a happy, grateful list post (because list posts are all the rage, right? Hello, BuzzFeed!) about some of the reasons I love living here. Without further adieu…

1. The weather

Ok, so yes, it does get up to somewhere close to 120 degrees during the hottest part of the summer. And yes, we have haboobs (dust storms to the uninformed) and this year it has gotten pretty wet during the last part of monsoon season. But… that’s the end of the bad weather list for here! There are basically 4-5 months of the year that you have to deal with “bad” (if you consider dry heat and dust storms that bad) weather here. It’s October now, and it’s pretty much going to be perfect weather now until next May. I will take that weather over humidity, thunderstorms, snow, ice, and freezing rain any day of the week.

2. The palm trees and mountains

I never saw either of these things in Indiana. And they are both things I love to see! Honestly, I never saw palm trees until I was probably a teenager, at least not real ones as a part of a place’s scenery anywhere. Driving around here still kind of boggles my mind sometimes, that there are literally palm trees and mountains wherever I go. It’s so pretty. We even have palm trees in our backyard and mountains in both the front and back, so I don’t even have to leave my house to see them anymore.

3. The sunsets

Oh yes. I’m pretty sure that there are not any more beautiful sunsets anywhere in the world. Almost every night here is gorgeous, you just have to glance over to the west. I also like seeing the mountains in the east during the sunset, and how the sunset reflects off of them. You just can’t beat the sunsets here. Sunrises are pretty hard to top as well, I just see those less often…

4. The laidback atmosphere

This one is a bit harder to describe, and I’m still not sure that calling it the “atmosphere” is completely accurate. Since it’s basically almost always nice weather outside, and pretty much never really cold, everyone usually dresses pretty casual. I think the fact that Phoenix/Scottsdale is also a pretty big tourist destination factors into that as well. You can easily go out to almost any nice restaurant here and dress casual. Since people are outside a lot, it just gives the place a laidback sort of vibe. It’s similar to how I’ve felt visiting Hawaii as well. I guess you can chalk it up to that warm weather tourist destination factor, since I would have to say Florida is similar to this too.

5. The diversity

This one is an interesting thing to describe also. In Indiana, it seemed like almost everyone was from Indiana. Most people grew up there and just never left, or left and came back because they had family there. Also, while you might run into some people that had traveled internationally or to lots of different places, it seemed that the number one reason people traveled outside of Indiana was to visit Florida for vacation. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like Florida too. But it just seemed like that’s where so many people went on vacation all the time. It’s an easy vacation destination from Indy, since if you need to, you can even drive there instead of flying. But I’m all about visiting as many different places as possible. Ricky and I almost felt a little out of place because we did travel so much. But, living in Arizona… well, I’d say the majority of the population is NOT from here. There are a few, but there are far more that are people that moved here from somewhere else. There are actually quite a few from the Midwest, like us. And people that are willing to pack up and move to a new state across the country, also tend to be people that like to travel. I love the melting pot that is here of people that have lived or traveled to so many other states and countries.

There’s plenty of other things I love about living here, but those are some of the top ones. Arizona has proved to be a good home for us so far, and I hope it continues to be for quite a while!