It's time to yeet another year and I wanted to reflect on it before my memories become unreliable and I have to query some future voice assistant to learn how I was feeling at times in the last 12 months.

2021 was a year that went both fast and slow, like when you orbit a clock around the Earth at high speed, and then you check it afterwards and it says it's 2022 but everybody around you looks like it's 2020 still. It sounds messed up, but it's a good answer when people ask "where did the time go?"

2021 was in a lot of ways a year of giving up. And I don't feel smug for announcing in January that the pandemic was only going to get worse. Mutate nine tames, shame on you; mutate fifty times, a shame for all of us.

The theme of giving up shouldn't be construed as giving in. Giving up can be a good thing, like giving up chocolate, or social contact... I mean, social media...

I've achieved a lot in 2021, my work life alone is testament to the fact that this year has not flown by, as I only started my consultant role eleven months ago so there's no way I could have been doing it for years (even if full time working from home means you can fit three work days into every 24 hours). But it's true, my first quit at the start of 2021: I left my job of six years. That's two years longer than I owned my VK Commodore.

I gave up Age of Empires II. It was a time consuming folly that I burnt a lot of evenings on trying to recapture my youth. Ultimately I think this was a success, because I wasn't very good at Age of Empires when I was young either. So I'd classify this as "Won and Done".

I gave up on flying. By the end of 2019 I flew so much I took it for granted that I could buy a ticket and go anywhere if I ever wanted to. 2021 was the first year I didn't get on a plane since 2005. At some points during the year even seeing a plane in the sky was a surprising experience. I hope I will fly again. There's not that much I haven't already seen between Port Broughton and Port Elliot.

I gave up Netflix, and BBL, and the idea of watching television and movies in general. Now when I watch television it's probably because my hamstring tendon is inflamed, or because drinking a beer is better when slippery men are bashing into each other in pursuit of a football, or watching NBA socially, or if there's a movie that has a story I want to hear the end of. Other than that I will stare at things on my tiny giant phone thank you very much.

I came real close to giving up Lego. I packed away most of my sets and told my brother I would send the boxes back home with him after Christmas. Then I thought about making a photo series about giving up Lego forever, and after clicking a few pieces together I realised maybe I wasn't ready to surrender this part of my youth. I did reposition my pirate ship so it's not visible in the mirror during Zoom calls though.

I gave up basketball and weightlifting, and I gave up having a bicep tendon that attaches to my labrum. These things are - or were - connected. Health and fitness remains important to me, but I have to concede being strong and hitting corner 3s if I want to stay healthy and fit long term. Who knows what this will look like in 2022. Pilates and riding/hiking probably. At least those can all be done during lockdowns.

All of these things make 2022 seem very exciting, with the long, grey cloud of coronavirus obviously still diffusing the rising sun. As I pass the midpoint of the life expectancy of an 80's born Australian male I will exist with a refined and streamlined lifestyle, set of habits, and functions. I know what I can do with my life, and what I can't do as well. Determined and focused, I should really excel at quitting a whole bunch of additional things in 2022.

All through childhood I loved Lego for its combination of construction, imagination and smooth plastic. Every Christmas I hoped and prayed for new sets to build.

When I became an adult I still loved Lego, and now that I had a full time job I could afford lots of sets.

Then I bought my camera and the two hobbies combined and I took photos of Lego scenes and made phocumentaries about all the surgeries I had. I bought even more Lego and sorted it into all the different shapes and colours. It didn't matter how old I got, I knew I would never grow sick of my Lego and I would one day quit my job to be a famous Lego set maker or professional photographer. Or both!

And then I stopped buying sets. And I stopped taking photos. And I stopped making things with Lego. All I did was work in an office with boxes of sorted Lego beside me that I never opened up or took photos of.

I had got too old for Lego.

Then, when I heard my little niece and nephew were coming to Bradelaide for Christmas I suddenly realised that there might be a purpose for this sorted Lego that could make a couple of people very, very happy.

So I made this Christmas Phocumentary for amusement of my present self and my future self, and then I packed away all my Lego again.

Every furniture set I buy from Ikea is missing the minifigure.

I had the dream again... I think I'm playing basketball, but actually I'm anesthetised, topping up the bank accounts of members of the ATO's top 5 income earners while they re-attach my tendons to the wrong parts of my skeleton.

In the six weeks since I have been following the booklet of arm rehab advice. The exercises primarily involved using my good arm to swing around my bad one.

This was the shittiest beard I could find on a Lego head.

The goal is not 360 degree swivel articulation like the Lego dudes. I'd take what I had before back.

My favourite exercise was the one where I used a wooden spoon to push and stretch my arm away from my body. The physio couldn't have known that I would have the Official Bradism Long Wooden Spoon For Tall People in my kitchen.

Combined with my discipline for rehab, I quickly regained mobility and strength. After a few weeks I felt like I could win an arm wrestle against a toddler.

I saw my surgeon today who refreshed my memory on how good he was at cutting into people and re-attaching tendons to the wrong parts of skeletons.
Maybe I asked too many questions because he charged me an $8 gap.

I asked if I would be able to dunk a basketball after 6 months and he said yes! That will definitely make this worth the investment...

Sometimes I think I'm feeling nostalgic about those early days of rehab. Sitting in the backyard listening to audiobooks and drinking cups of soup. Watching NBA playoffs on the couch. Excused from having to work and write and exercise and needing to floss and (briefly) shave. In reality I know that nostalgia for days in pain is really just nostalgia for days in pain where I didn't also have to work eight hours a day.

Now the pain is starting to fade, and I can use the wooden spoon for its intended purpose again. I'm looking forward to a return to the gym and the writing desk and maybe the basketball court, and putting this behind me - which I can currently do to about 50% of normal range of motion. I can move on and embrace the future. Yay!

Parenting is not something which comes naturally to me, but this weekend I was entrusted to keep alive two small humans for over 24 hours.

To get through this I needed to draw on the advice and examples of other child-raisers in my life. Most recently, I saw a mother swan with four developing cygnets crossing a lake in the hope of a feed. When I offered nothing, the mother coloured the water with fecal discharge, which the trailing offspring sucked up for nourishment.
I put this in the maybe pile.

I was proud of myself for lasting the first day of babysitting without resorting to TV, candy, or violence. I gently led the children to believe that playing Lego was their idea, and killed several hours building “spaceships” which were in fact a carrot, and an octopus’ car. I didn't even need a drink that night.

My greatest challenge early on Sunday morning when both children were crying about how their sibling “hated them” or had said something mean. I solved this by explaining that, as brother and sister, they would always be in competition for emotional superiority, and the earlier they developed a thicker skin to their family member's trolling and jabbering, the more successful they'd be.

Ultimately - despite never feeling completely comfortable that I could sit on the toilet for thirty minutes without interruption - I think I did a capable job of fostering children. Made possible completely by the knowledge throughout that it would soon be over.

I landed just before lunchtime and caught the train to Barangaroo. The contrast between Adelaide's CBD and Sydney's latest redevelopment is astounding. I feel like there are more jobs in these new buildings than there are in the entire state of South Australia. All the fast food outlets have classy, monotone logos.

As I explored, a business-woman in a stylish running outfit and a full face of makeup jogged past me, sealing a consultancy deal via Bluetooth headset as she reached five kilometres. I remembered why I left.

Almost everything is back to normal since my return from extra summer to Adelaide winter. All the old routines are running, except for my nightly backups.

See, before I left the house for a month I hid important things in obscure places for extra security. Not the best thing to do in the post-procrastination frenzy that took place in the hours before the airport. I found my car keys inside a Lego truck the day after we got back, and my supermarket rewards cards were with my socks. They were easy. But it was only today, five weeks after returning, that I found where I hid my external hard drive - it was in my office in the city. I guess I'd really been worried about a fire wiping out my MP3s and those sitcom episodes I wrote in high school.

My first Lego Pirate Ship and my first colonoscopy preparation. I never expected that these two things would happen on the same day.