2020 Wrapup

First, the 50,000 foot overview.

Obviously an awful lot of things about this year sucked. I am currently in a phase of “do I really have to wake up and shower and figure out what to eat and then clean my kitchen every single day?” Depressingly, so far, the answer is yes.

If I’m being honest though, a lot of other things were great. Biden won the presidency. Working from home with my dog for company is awesome. My loved ones are safe and healthy. My job is secure and even prospering as we pivoted to remote work. I took on some cool community positions that mean I’ll be able to do really good, really useful work, and I won election as a Justice of the Peace in my small city. A bunch of my social things translated well to Zoom hangouts, and I am particularly delighted with a small community of cool people I have assembled around a book series that I love.

Tristan and I had an up and down year; we had a really terrible debut at First Level that wrecked my confidence in riding in a way very few other things have. He dumped me not once, but twice. Despite that, he’s also going spectacularly well right now. We seem to have tapped into some better way of understanding his body, and he is regularly giving me soft, floaty trot work and starting to organize his canter in the same way. Granted, it is still coming with the daily threat of bolt&spook temper tantrums, but – I will take that trade-off.

My little saddle cover business also took off this year, continuing a growth that was consistently between 100% – 150% all year, and I feel like a lot of pieces I’ve been experimenting with for a while came together. I added in more designs that people liked, I streamlined pieces of my process to make it faster and easier, and I did some mundane bookkeeping and organizational work to keep things more standard.

I’ll blog later about 2021 goals, but here’s my final wrapup of my goals for 2020, a bit early, because who doesn’t want 2020 to end early?

1. Ride a First Level test at one of the two barn schooling shows – done. sucked, but done.
2. Take notes (however brief) on every ride – got about halfway through the year with this, sigh
3. Clean tack at least 1x a month – nope
4. Volunteer at 3 events – WHAT events?
5. Take 25 lessons – definitely
6. *Reach goal: Go to Crossfit 100 times (or roughly 2x a week) for additional fitness – This got a bit rocky with our second round of closing, but I feel confident in saying I hit 100; for most of the summer & early fall I was going consistently 3x a week. I have not been since Thanksgiving. I MISS IT SO MUCH. Fuck you, COVID.

Business

1. Keep up with monthly expense/revenue tracking – sure, enough
2. Maintain 100 listings in the Etsy store – I was never able to crack this consistently; 90 is about what I could keep up with
3. Mustang gear goes live – nope
4. Sponsor 5 riders – nope
5. Table at a horse show – sigh.
6. *Reach goal: Get to 1000 sales on Etsy – uhhhhhh yeah, crushed this, with a count right now of 1295!

General

1. Try 25 new recipes – Definitely long past 25, calling this done
2. Try making: croissants, eclairs, cinnamon rolls – eclairs are my Christmas Eve plan and croissants are my vacation week plan!
3. Declutter in February – eff it, calling this done, I’ve done a ton of decluttering
4. Finish 5 craft projects – sure, I guess, I’m calling this done
5. Finish upstairs bathroom, front guest bedroom, and nook room – nah, all work ground to a halt after the bathroom finished
6. *Reach goal: submit Morgan article for publication – lmao remember when I did my own research? sob.

Goals that I did not put on the list but accomplished anyway:

• did a fuckton of political organizing
• got COVID tested four times
• got elected to local office
• re-organized my entire office to work from home, made a ton of upgrades
• hit a bunch of financial goals that were not projected until 2021
• explored a lot of local state parks & trails, did way more hiking & dog walking than usual
• did not lose my mind or murder my husband after spending so much time together, honestly, underrated accomplishment