Taking Stock of the Past Year

I am not a retrospective person and taking stock of past activities is not a favorite pastime as I am usually left with a feeling of dissatisfaction. Kinda like a performance review - you do your best but there's always room for improvement so you feel like you come up short no matter how good your boss says you are. The focus is always on the 'needs improvement' section instead of the 'excels in'. However, over the last couple of years, I have gotten used to the fact that the end of the year is a great opportunity to reflect on the past year to review what was accomplished and what wasn't, find out what could be done to make the next year better, yada, yada, yada. Reflecting is obviously not my favorite activity.

If you ask me, 2006 was great. Lots of positive things happened. We went back to school after a long hiatus, we rehabbed some houses like we'd talked about doing, we were smarter about investing because of our experience with Uncle Sam the previous year, we went on vacation, albeit towards the end of the year but we still took a vacation TOGETHER. Stuff like that happened. Good things. However, on the other side, we still ain't painted the house yet (we're still debating whether to do it ourselves or have someone come in and do it for us). Actually, I know the answer to that. We pay people all day long to paint the investment property but we're going to do ours ourselves? That doesn't sound right. So, that's still up for discussion. Also, the situation with our 'home office' is still chaotic and we would like to be more organized next year. Life is so much better when you're organized. For instance, when there's a lot of clutter, you can't find stuff. With tax season approaching, we've got to unearth documents as we prepare to battle once again with Uncle Sam. Our current filing cabinet, with it's labelled folders has been good to us but we need to upgrade to one that can hold legal documents, yada, yada, yada. On the personal side, I've still got lots of room for growth. I say we a lot but I'm not always about us.

Long story short, this past year has been good. We're healthy, we're happy and we thank God for all the miracles we received in 2006.