One of the things I always do at this time of year is tackle a few end of year / beginning of year jobs. This includes:

• Reviewing our electricity billings to see if our solar roof is working as expected (PV roof is indeed working, but something else bumped our end of year costs way up…still investigating)
• Upcoming year detailed financial planning (with retirement and the new responsibility of making sure Dad is taken care of, this is more complicated than prior years)
• Upcoming year travel planning
• Cleaning up and filing papers that need to be kept (ugh – the worst – I despise filing)

These activities always gives me a lot of satisfaction. Not as much satisfaction as, say, this crew at left, but it’s still good. I’m a planner at heart – the planning actually gives me more pleasure than the doing, except for maybe travel. In fact, one of my favorite jobs was “Executive Director of Planning” for Kaiser’s IT group. Doesn’t sound like much, but IT at Kaiser was (is) a multi-billion dollar organization, so the planning functions were huge. That job didn’t last too long (a rapid reorganization), but I enjoyed it.

All this planning also helps me internalize the fact that another year has come and gone. I previously wrote about how our sense of time passing changes with age, and it’s very true. It’s another one of those semi-cruel realities of life – just when you need time the most, it runs away from you.