A Brief Personal Review - 2023

I have read quite a few posts reflecting upon 2023 and sadly most of them weren't very positive. Guess it reflects the current state of our world. For me, 2023 was a mixed bag of beans. Nothing great, but also nothing too bad.

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I just checked my Hive journey and saw that I published thirty-one blog posts - if I am being honest, I expected to count even less, so I guess - that falls into the not so bad, yay.

Why did I expect it to be even less? Well, I have been on and off social media all year. More on a hiatus actually (except for Hive), the first time I posted a pic on Insta was in September, nothing from our June France trip, followed by a few photos from our October vacay and then again nothing. No FB and forget about Twitter/X - what a shit show that has become. The reason I'm still on X is to promote hubby's books but seeing the stats and how few people get to see my tweets... I may delete my X account in 2024.

Thankfully, my Hive blog wasn't affected as much as I thought. But only 31 posts in a whole year is pretty lame. If I remember correctly I aimed at one post per week. Well, I guess that will carry over to 2024.

New year = next try at: One post per week!

What kept me from writing / posting on Hive more often? Well, apart from the usual i.e. lots of hours spent at my job and not having any brains left for writing, painting, or taking photos I went through a stretch of roughly four months during which I didn't feel like myself. That probably doesn't make much sense, so let me try and explain.

In February, after three months of back and forth with my medical insurance, they finally agreed to pay and I started on a medication that I knew would come with side effects. But those known physical side effects weren't the issue. However, in my case the drug made me feel numb, I had no motivation to do anything. I went to work, came home late, made dinner, watched something with the hubs, went to bed, slept, and rinse and repeat. I had no energy, no desire to paint, draw, play a game, or go for a walk - nothing at all. I'd rather just sit and stare into nothingness or lounge on the sofa even when I had the time to be doing something. Quite depressing, and absolutely not me.

Thankfully, the meds worked physically but mentally it got to the point where life didn't seem worth living anymore. So, in coordination with my doc I stopped the medication for a couple of weeks and life became the normal fun again. That was in July. Later in August I restarted the meds but on a low dose which I increased gradually but not as high as previously. This seems to have done the trick because to this day, I feel fine. No more side effects and hopefully, a little healthier.

Sticking with the subject of social media - I did cave in and signed up for Threads and also for Bluesky but have a guess how much I posted or spent time on these? Yeah - delightfully little - LOL. The one new app that I did use a little more is the decentralized social network Nostr. @thecyberdexter live-streams on Nostr's zap.stream and I like to have a stream in the background when I'm painting. But I'm not very active on Nostr either.

Let's move on in the year and away from social media and health - in September I participated in a model photoshoot. Something I loved doing but haven't done in a long time due to time constraints and generally not being in a photo mood. But this one was a fun shoot with models I had worked with previously at a Jersey Shore vintage carousel (I'll probably share more photos in a separate post).

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_{Model: Heather Stevenson}

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Then October was here and it started with our freezer acting up and going bad while we were away on our annual road trip to the Outer Banks. Don't worry, I had a feeling and didn't have much in it. But - we had to get a new one upon our return asap. Also, our OBX trip came with a twist this year - we didn't go alone. My best friend from Australia came to visit and she tagged along. We hadn't seen each other for ten years so you can imagine that we had a lot to talk about. We returned to NJ on Halloween and she stayed on for a week in NYC where we met one more time to watch a Broadway show together before she returned to Oz. Seeing a show on Broadway was a first for me!

November, Thanksgiving holiday as well as December, Christmas/New Year's was and is being spent relaxing at home this year, unfortunately, with little time spent in front of the fireplace because it is fairly warm. Initially, we intended to visit hub's fam in San Francisco but we all agreed to avoid the holiday stress. We'll likely go and visit in January instead.

And that was my 2023 in a nutshell. Sure there were a lot of other things, I did quite a bit of vector art and other drawings, highlights like our France trip, or selling my entire Nikon photo equipment and getting a little but great Fujifilm X-T5 instead. All the photos in my post about our France trip were taken with it, 😍 except for a few iPhone pics.

Anyway, have a Happy New Year! And lots of health and happiness in 2024!

Hopefully, I'll be seeing you a bit more often this year.

Cheers,
(Ocean)Bee

_{Unless otherwise noted, copyright for all photos, dividers, and gifs ©Oceanbee|ImagesByCW}

_{99% of photos taken with my Fuji X-T5, maybe some iPhone pics}