2011 was a crazy year for the world. For Laura and I, 2011 was a very busy year filled with hospitals, construction projects, and lifestyle changes.
January brought a new driveway for our house, which meant our longtime construction project was soon coming to a close.
We were also able to retrieve and scan all my wife’s medical files from Ohio for her original brain injury 13 years ago. This proved very helpful as the records showed the doctors then found the same brain abnormality our current doctors just found. Proof surgery was the right track.
February Laura and I started following the Paleo diet in hopes to clean our her system from all the ineffective anti-seizure drugs she’s been taking for the past few years. Surprisingly, this also decreased her seizures by 75%! Normally she would have a cluster of seizures every month, without fail. On the diet, clusters came every 2 to 4 months.
March launched ChefDave.org’s site membership using the Membrr / OpenGateway and Solspace’s User plugins. This is also the time when my love of ExpressionEngine started falling apart due to various issues.
Also in March I bought a road bike after I sheared off my pedal arm on my Raleigh hybrid. Though time in 2011 been scarce, I hope to get back into cycling soon.
April saw the final piece of COJ.net go live. This wrapped up a year-long conversion and redesign project of the 30,000 page site.
In May we finally finished the outside construction on our house, completing the addition of my wife’s workshop and my (albeit unplanned) office. This major project included demolishing the existing one car garage and replacing it with a 30x30 garage with AC, 220v and 3 phase power. It’s the dream workshop of almost any woodworker. Now we start the inside of the house and shop.
In June my garden was in full swing. The bell peppers and cucumbers were great producers, and my watermelon plants were full of blooms. I planted 11 watermelon plants total which meant about 66 square-feet of vines—but no watermelons actually came to fruition. I will try again, though, with only one or two plants this time.
June was also the last month my wife had any seizures. From July to November was the longest stretch of no meds and no seizures. All from dieting alone. This was great, but also added additional stress without knowing when a cluster of seizures could strike.
I converted rwbaker.com to WordPress using the Briefed WooTheme.
At the end of August Jacksonville Mayor’s new blog went live. It was a very rushed and fast-paced project and I even learned a few things.
September I rewrote the API for ChefDave.org, making it more flexible and removing a big bottleneck when requesting a lot of data. This also lays the groundwork for larger system-wide changes down the road.
In October my mother-in-law finished her battle with breast cancer.
November Laura had a right temporal lobectomy to hopefully put an end to her partial complex seizures. Every seizure wipes Laura’s long and short term memory—she doesn’t know who I am, doesn’t recognize our house, etc. Surgery took exactly 3 hours, and they were even able to reuse the incision from her first craniotomy. She was awake within one hour, and walking around in five. Two months post-op and no seizures so far.
I converted rwbaker.com to Octopress/Jekyll after my WordPress install was hacked and made a mess of my server. I love the static platform though, and it’s a great way to get started in Ruby and SASS.
For December, Christmas was in Ohio this year, which gave us a great opportunity to take up the truck and fill it full of lumber for Laura’s new shop. The holidays, quality family time, and October fresh in our minds gave us time to reflect on the year and where we are in life.
December marks 6 months my wife has continuously known me, the longest stretch in our 10 years together.
Hopefully 2012 will bring a lot of changes for Laura and I. Some big, some fun, and perhaps even a scary one or two. On the personal side of things, I want to branch out more with Node.js, Ruby on Rails and iOS development, and maybe even start a new side project.