First, I’ll start by quoting some of what I said last year, and talking about what I did/did not accomplish:

I would like to do two things: 1) Learn Glitchless, and improve my overall movement and 2) Start doing Majora’s Mask Any% (or All Masks?) Blindfolded. So those are to come.

I feel like I want to try and be more charitable in 2017, and use my stream as a vehicle to do this.

I may at some point do another Bingo Tourney, but this would likely be late summer or so.

I’ll probably buy a Nintendo Switch and get Zelda, but I don’t know how much I’ll stream it at first. I kind of like to explore the game and go at my own pace. We’ll see.

Game related goals…I never even attempted any glitchless practice or runs, so that was a complete fail. I did however start my MM blindfolded challenge, and it’s gone pretty good so far. I did follow through with my charity stream. Never did another bingo tourney, however that could still happen in the future. I was going to do one right after AGDQ if bingo got in as that would have been a really hype time to do it, but it didn’t so we’ll see. Surprisingly, I never bought a Switch and have yet to play BotW.

Outside of speedrunning. the most important goal I have for this entire year is going to be pass my Professional Engineering (PE) Exam.

I mentioned in my previous post about 2016 that I would be trying to run more. Again, I don’t really like goals like, “Run more” so my target is going to be 1500 miles in 2017. I may shoot for a Fall half marathon, or 10K, or some race to really train for, but I don’t want to dedicate to that just yet.  I do want to try and pick out some books and read more. I need to cook more. Again I don’t really like goals like this, I have just struggled to turn them into tangible things. 

I passed my PE Exam and I’m now an official engineer! Easily one of the biggest accomplishments of my year. It will help me so much moving forward in my career. As for running, I’ll talk about that in a bit, but I ultimately came a bit short of the 1500 miles, not so much that I’m that bummed out about it though. I did run a 10K and it was my first race in several years. Didn’t really read much, didn’t really cook more. Like I said, I don’t like goals like that, they are hard to follow through with for me.

Moving forward, let’s look at some stats I keep for 2017!

WARNING: Just because I track these stats, does not mean my life revolves around them. I don’t set my worth to them. They are tools, but they don’t measure my happiness. I see too many streamers measure their worth by how many followers or subs they have. I see too many people in the corporate world set their worth by how much money they make or how nice of a car they drive. It’s good to have goals, but it’s also good to step back and just enjoy life.

OK with that out of the way, let’s look at my drinking total:

Ended the year at 119 drinks. 2.3 a week and 0.3 a day. That’s up from a year ago where I hit 89, but down from the year before where I had 161. I don’t actually set any goal numbers for this, I’d rather just let it happen kind of naturally. I think last year was abnormally low, and in 2015 I didn’t make an effort to cut back until midway through the year, so this is probably what I think an average year will look like for me. You can also see the distribution in weeks. Over half of the weeks of the year, I didn’t have any drinks at all. There were only 4 weeks where I had 8 or more which I think is pretty good too. I’m most impressed with the 7 weeks I had only one, as it’s usually hard for me to stop at just one drink.

Let’s check on my weight, keeping in mind I really had no weight goals this year at all:

Nothing too spectacular here. These are weekly averages, which I feel is a bit better than a daily chart as that can vary a lot. I typically weigh myself right after I go to the bathroom in the morning and am always just in my underwear, so it should be a consistent measure. There is an obvious trend downward until about June or July, and then I start to creep back up (Halloween candy, Thanksgiving, Christmas cookies, etc.). Overall though, there is a low of 136.8 and a high of 142.6 – a spread of less than 6 pounds. So I’m quite consistent overall. While I’m pretty thin and don’t really *need* to track this, I like to do it and will be able to see if anything starts to creep up on me. If something does, I can ask myself, what have I changed? What am I doing different? Do I need to adjust my exercise? My diet? Don’t let something like this creep up and shock you…stay ahead of it if you want to remain healthy.

Moving on to my running stats:

So I had set my goal for the year at 1500 miles. I ended up with 1297.9, falling about 200 miles short. Overall I averaged 25 miles a week and 3.56 daily miles. I’m not super disappointed about this, I still got a decent amount of miles and was fairly consistent throughout the year. You’ll notice a few realllly high mile weeks. Those happen to coincide with…Pokemon GO double XP events (yes you read that correctly). Pokemon GO pushed me to really get out and grind XP during their events, and I made sure to run around a lot more and catch pokemon. There was one in Easter, one in late July, and one in November. I also picked it up from July onward as I was training for a 10K, which I finished in 36:48. The period after Easter and before July however, was pretty poor. I basically have a ‘base miles’ I always get, because I run to and from work, and that was pretty much all I was getting in those weeks. I’m not sure how to tackle running in 2018. I think I’d like to hit that 1500 again, so just overall keep consistent like this, but with a few more miles.

Here is some stats I keep on sleep:

Nothing here looks out of place. Last year I had 28 weeks of 50-53 hours, this year I had 27. Last year I had 219 days of 7-9 hours . This year I had 241. I’ll keep tracking it because it’s fun, but there’s really no goals I need to set at this point for my sleep. It kind of just is what it is.

Looking at the info by the day:

This chart looks at a lot of things at once by the day. As you can see most of my miles come on the weekdays, where I simply gain a ton by going to and from work. Interestingly, I never had a drink on a Tuesday in 2017, but had 15 on Wednesdays! Kind of a weird anomaly I think. As expected, the sleep on Saturday and Sunday is quite higher than sleep during the week. My total run time formula is messed up, it’s lopping off the days (I’ll fix it next year!). I ran for 7 days, 7 hours 41 minutes and 50 seconds.

Moving on to a few financial charts:

The first chart is simply all accounts income minus all accounts expenses. Not only did I contribute to my savings every month, but the market did exceptionally well in 2017, which allowed me to be green every month. A really good feeling. I’m really proud of the net worth chart even if I don’t reveal what the total itself is. There is a clearly defined slope change from about 2016 onward compared to what I was saving in 2012-2015. I’d like to continue this in 2018. It’s important to note that the more I save, the higher the percentage that currently ends up in the market and that can fluctuate a bit. We saw record highs all through 2017, will it continue? I’m not so concerned with the month to month or the year to year even with that, since it’s a long term investing vehicle. Still, it’ll be interesting to see how that affects my charts in 2018.

Last year I said I would update my excel charts, becaue they are kinda from an era where I had money in a lot fewer accounts and it was easier to manage. Now it’s a bit out of control. I did NOT accomplish this, so it’ll likely be another year at least of using these excel charts. They aren’t terrible, but for example, there was a $10 error between what the monthly spreadsheet I looked at in June 2017, and my total overall year to year excel chart (it took me like 20 minutes to find where this was at and I was cursing at myself for not keeping things cleaner).

One other, non-chart or gaming related thing I want to talk about: I had a fantastic hunting season in Fall 2017.

I did not get that many opportunities to go out, but when I did I made the most of them. Spending time in the woods is one of my favorite things to do, so even if I don’t get anything, just being out in nature and getting away from looking at screens all day is really nice. Sometimes it just feels like you are always in the right place at the right time in the woods to make things happen. This year was one of those times. I killed 2 bucks back in 2013 in a similar fashion, and at that point it felt like I was ALWAYS going to be able to walk in the woods and do it every year. From 2013 until now, I had not killed a single one. So it was nice to get a few more and provide food for the family again.The turkey is only my 3rd, they are still really difficult for me to figure out and have extremely good eyesight. It was a small one, but it made a good meal for four people on Christmas with my family. Hopefully I can continue the success in the next year.

In my next post, I’ll go over some things I have planned for 2018.