Well, here we are, with another New Year’s Day post. I’ve been doing these posts since 2008 or thereabouts. It occurs to me now that I should create a category for these posts, so I can see them all together. So I just did that. The category is NYD, and I have added it to all (or most) of my previous New Year’s Day posts.
Health
2025 was a bit of a rough year. Honestly, it didn’t start well, and it didn’t end well. I started the year sick, and I ended the year sick. There were a good number of healthy days in between, of course, but right now I’m fighting a cold (or flu or whatever) that’s been on and off since Thanksgiving. And I had my second bout of COVID in 2025, in July. That was unpleasant.
Travel
I don’t think I left NJ at all in 2025. No trips to NYC or anywhere else. I didn’t even go too far within NJ. I finally closed my E-ZPass account and returned my tag last month. I hadn’t used it since 2019.
Weight
I started the year at 165 pounds, and ended it at 167. (It’s gone as high as 169, but hasn’t stayed that high for more than a day or two.) I’d hoped to keep it at 165, but I haven’t quite managed to do that. In 2024, I went from 160 to 165, and the year before that, from 150 to 160. So I’ve cut my yearly increase from 10, to 5, and to 2 pounds. So that’s progress!
Exercise
It’s kind of funny that Apple Fitness doesn’t have a fancy “year in review” function the way so many other apps/services do. Going into the Health app, and looking at some yearly graphs, here’s what I see:
- I’m averaging around 500 move calories per day over the last year.
- I’m getting an average of 7800 steps in per day.
- I’m averaging 28 minutes per day of exercise.
I also just downloaded an app called Fitness Wrapped, which is supposed to generate a year-in-review, but it requires payment before showing me the 2025 summary. It looks interesting, but I don’t know if I want to pay for it.
Either way, I think I did fine on exercise in 2025. It seems to be down from 2024 (550 move calories and 45 minutes exercise per day), but it’s fine.
Work
We didn’t do performance reviews this year, but I did get a small raise. It was slightly bigger than 2024’s raise, but smaller than 2023’s, for what that’s worth.
In January 2025, I transitioned to a new boss. (My previous boss is now my boss’s boss, so he’s moved up a bit.) The new boss is someone I’ve worked with for years, and I think we have a good relationship. It can be hard to tell, when you don’t have a formal performance review or any other structured review, but I think I’m doing OK.
Learning
My 2024 performance review included a goal (from my previous boss) that I pursue a SAFe Certification. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it, but I figured I should give it a try, so I did a bunch of e-learning around it, including a long series of videos on O’Reilly Learning. The cert exam is pretty expensive, and I never got an OK to go through with it, so I dropped it at some point and concentrated on other stuff.
I also mentioned in interest in pursuing an AZ-204 certification in my New Year’s post for 2025. I did actually go through with that one, and two other Microsoft certs. I passed the AZ-900 in April, the AZ-204 in June, and the GH-300 in December. So I’m a bit proud of getting all of that done.
This year, I’ll need to renew the AZ-204, if I want to keep my “Azure Developer Associate” status. I have until June to do that. And the renewal test is simpler than the initial one; you can do it without all of the Pearson OnVUE nonsense. So I’ll probably do that.
Books
Now onto some fun stuff. My Goodreads 2025 reading challenge shows me as having read 60 books. I think it was actually more like 50; the challenge picks up stuff from my Kindle that it probably shouldn’t, but I’m not going to try to clean that up.
I finished reading A Memory of Light in January, so that finished up the Wheel of Time series that had taken up so much of my time in 2024. I didn’t take on a similar project in 2025; I just read a bunch of random stuff, really.
- I read a few Robert A. Heinlein novels that I thought I hadn’t read before, but which I discovered that I had read, probably in my teens. So that was interesting.
- I was going to read a few Kurt Vonnegut books, but I see I only read one, Breakfast of Champions. Maybe I’ll get to a few more this year.
- I managed to finish The Stand, by Stephen King, which I’d started in 2019, and then abandoned. That’s a very long book, and took a good chunk of time to get through.
- I got on a Star Trek kick near the end of the year, and finished the Rise of the Federation series. I also started the Prey series. I’m almost done with that. (I was going to try to finish off the last book yesterday, but didn’t quite make it.)
- I didn’t do a lot of self-help reading this year. I did finally manage to read How to Win Friends and Influence People, but that’s about it.
- And I didn’t do much book reading for professional purposes. I read one random book on AI, and started another. I’ll probably mark that second one as “abandoned” on Goodreads and give up on it. I wasn’t getting much out of it. At this point, I guess I’m mostly doing all of my professional learning in video form, via O’Reilly and Pluralsight.
- My comic book reading this year was pretty random. I read through a few volumes of Greg Rucka’s Lazarus series. I’m enjoying that, and should get back to it soon. I read all three volumes of Ed Brubaker’s Velvet series. I really enjoyed those too.
For next year, I’d like to maybe make some progress on my backlog of Dresden Files novels, Laundry Files novels, or maybe Discworld. (I said the same thing in last year’s post, and didn’t do any of that. So maybe in 2026.)
Summary
2025 felt like a “let’s just get through this” kind of year. I don’t blog about politics much, but… geez. And my health has been up and down. I’m hoping 2026 will be better, on several fronts, but I’m not sure it will. I’m pretty sure I’ll get through it though. I’ll end with links to a couple of funny New Year’s Day comic strips: Over the Hedge and Lio.