Happy Birthday to me - A year in review.

Well it's Christmas and it's my 37th birthday.

2011 is going to come off as a year where I experienced the largest change in my life.

In the same year :

a) Downgraded from a semi-D to a 5 room flat.
b) Moved from the financial sector to join the worker's union.
c) Became a father to my daughter Clio.

It's one heck of a change.

On the upside, 2011 is the year I really started to live exclusively on my dividend income, paying off taxes, maid, wife, mum and personal expenses on investment income. Career-wise, I switched to a formal administrative management job role from that of a technical specialist with NTUC-ARU and gained three new certifications the CGEIT, TOGAF 9 and possibly the CRISC. For my writing, I really started producing books in the Kindle development platform writing a full-fledged RPG, two non-fiction books and in the next few days, my first fictional product.

On the downside, some things have changed this Christmas. In the past, Christmas meant Borders and spending time having coffee with my friends in Starbucks. These days, Borders is gone and I can't seem to get that holiday feel any-more because I get almost all my media consumption on my Kindle Fire. Even if Borders is still around there are the floods to contend with. Next year, we have to even say goodbye to Page One. I'm having some mixed feelings of the massacre of book-stores in Singapore, since I write e-books and own a lot of REITS, this makes me somewhat responsible for all this creative destruction in the book selling business.

And there is no rest for the wicked. Even right now, I'm in the middle of an escalation with Singtel. A we're having some network difficulties and Singtel has been sluggish in the holiday season to get the problem solved. If Singtel screws up, there goes my birthday celebrations.

So it's been a heck of a year.

If I survive this winter season with my sanity intact, I'll declare 100 days without a personal project so that I can can get my health back together.

Back to basics - Focus on work and family.