2022 Year In Review

2022 was a rather notable year.

Travels

For me, the thawing of 2+ years of pandemic restrictions was by far the most defining characteristic of 2022. To make up for lost time, we were not shy about packing our schedules with trips: the family spent a week in Las Vegas, two weeks in Andalucia, Spain, and half a week in Disneyland; separately, Hong went back to New York for a week and I visited Mexico City with Phil for five days. We felt resurrected to once again have 2-3 future vacations queued up.

This year’s travels changed our day-to-day life in a couple ways. After Las Vegas, Hong and I both signed up for gym memberships and started going regularly. The excess of casino buffets was certainly a trigger, but a larger reason was that we finally started feeling okay about not wearing a mask in an indoor public space. Then, because we were so inspired by the coffee in Spain, we bought a Moka pot after the trip. We went from having almost never made coffee at home, to grinding beans and brewing stove-top espresso on a daily basis.

Work

I made Partner at Mercer! It’s awesome, and an honor I did not expect even just a couple years ago. Work got busier than ever though thanks to colleague turnover with severely delayed replacement. But it’s alright because work is just something we do between vacations…

Stuff

We bought more stuff in 2022 than in any year since moving into this home ten years ago. Not everything was entirely necessary, but the technological upgrades elevated our lives.

January: Refrigerator

Our 10-year-old Samsung side-by-side was still fine, except that its horizontal space limitations were incompatible with Hong’s growing ambition in baking. We had it swapped for an LG French door. I don’t have a strong preference, but the new fridge’s ice dispenser was more elegant.

February: Phones

It’s a stretch to say that anyone needs the latest smart phone, but our Samsung Galaxy S8 was nearly five years old and the battery life was getting shorter by the day. They wouldn’t survive the photo-intensive trips that were coming up! So we both upgraded to the Galaxy S22+ upon its release. The drama there was that we switched “back” to Verizon from T-Mobile in reminiscence of our memory of a better network, only to immediately realize that the opposite was true. Thus we scrambled to switch back to T-Mobile after three months, wasting many hours of administrative hurdle both ways.

April: Wireless Headphones

Along with the new phones, we also got our very first pairs of wireless headphones (Samsung Galaxy Buds). I was skeptical of these things’ ability to not fall out every five minutes, but so far these rather large ear pieces fit more securely and comfortably than any headphone I had used before. Their battery life has been surprisingly good, too.

August: Robot Vacuum

The only true necessity on this list resulted from the inevitable death of Alfred, our seven-year aging Neato XV robot vacuum. It had been blind for two years with the display no longer working, so we could neither configure it such as setting a cleaning schedule nor diagnose problems through reading error messages. Even in that condition, we had squeezed the last bit of service out of him via only the “start” button. Once that also stopped, we had to get a replacement. Online reviewers spoke highly of Roborock S4 Max, so we ordered one and named her Hannah. Her ability to read the room (e.g. identify and create a map in the house) was clear evidence that she came from a newer generation, and we loved being able to task her to clean specific portions of the house via the smart phone app.

August: TV

Our 52″ Sharp TV was a modest investment from 2010, back when “1080p” and “flat panel” were all the rage. It had moved with us from New Jersey to San Bruno to Millbrae, and sat in the same spot for over ten years. Like the fridge, it continued working faithfully as well as it did on day one. Unlike the fridge, though, the world around it had moved on significantly. When we turned on the new 65″ Sony OLED, it was an experience like when I put on my first pair of prescription glasses… we could now see things that were not there before!

Aside from this equipment being a upgrade of display by several leagues, it also came with superb sound quality so we were able to get rid of the old receiver, sound bar, and subwoofer that took up a lot of space. It even took us no time to fall in love with the smart TV features that I used to be skeptical of.

August: PS5

With the new God of War coming out, getting a PS5 had been an important item on the to-do list. Given how little I play video games these days, fighting the supply shortages to buy a brand new console seemed a bit much. But hey, it’s all good because I was buying it as an award for that partner promotion. PS4 came with my last promotion and PS3 was tied to my FSA attainment, so it seemed fitting that I continued with this tradition.

I didn’t try nearly as hard as the diehard gamers, like stalking the Walmart website at midnight with five simultaneous devices. Still, geez, it was difficult begging to be invited by Sony to wait in virtual lines at specific times until supplies ran out. Beyond that first hurdle, the online shop also had some serious bugs with the payment system that I struggled for hours with to no avail. My luck finally arrived 4 months later, when I chatted up the Best Buy manager while TV shopping and had him save me one from a customer’s cancelled reservation. I hadn’t felt so excited about bringing something home from store in a long time.

December: Fitbit Charge 5

This was likely the most frivolous of our technology upgrades this year, because our 5- and 6-year Charge 2 units were still working fine. However, I figured that we could use some of that incremental new features such as a color screen and always on display. More importantly, we had a bunch of Dell credits to burn through. So… fancier new watches for us for Christmas! It’s been alright, I suppose. New features were there, for sure, but battery life suffered as a result.

Games

In anticipation of buying a PS5 to play the new God of War, I had to tie up loose ends on the PS4. Thus, I rushed to finish Horizon Zero Dawn. It was a great game, though got somewhat tedious after a while.

When buying my PS5, the only option was a Horizon Forbidden West bundle. I wouldn’t otherwise have paid full retail price for it, but it was fine since the Horizon sequel sat solidly in my heart as the second most anticipated game. I continued with Aloy’s journey on PS5 on the new Sony OLED, and it was gorgeous. I enjoyed it for ten consecutive Saturday mornings, and had to put it away…

… because God of War: Ragnarok came out in early November. It wasn’t even a question in my mind that I’d commit $70 to pre-order it, and fire up the PS5 on a Wednesday night just around the kids’ bedtime. I just had to. The game was a major reminder that I still had the capacity to obsess. Before the year was over, I had spent 70+ hours and fully completed the main story and all side quests. Its 2018 predecessor was already an acclaimed engineering marvel, and this latest title further expanded upon every aspect of it. I’d write a whole essay to worship it, but plenty of pros do that for a living. Instead, I’ll just comment on two key observations.

The first is the immersion in a group environment. Unlike most video games where you just control a single protagonist, Ragnarok is all about Kratos, Atreus, Freya, Sindri, Brok, and a few others working together. As the story progresses, you alternate to control a lead character and his companion (sometimes more than one). You see the world through different perspectives, and interact with supporting characters through different bonds. Even though many quests can be done in a number of orders with different character combos, their interactions and dialogues always feel natural. It makes me wonder what a huge library of recordings each voice actor must go through, and what percentage of them never gets used in a single play through of the game.

The second and more important observation is that, despite it growing out of a hack-and-slash franchise, Ragnarok has become a master at conveying emotions. The game goes way beyond the old days of Kratos being a rage machine to explore facets of interpersonal relationships between parent and child, husband and wife, siblings, friends, and more. The story, script, voice acting, and music do a better job than most movies at making you feel the love, hate, hope, and regret. The computer-generated characters are so great at driving the drama through subtle facial expressions that you forget they aren’t award-winning Hollywood actors.

Crafts

In 2022 we tripled our animal heads collection at home. There’s something very awkward about decapitated corpses, but I have always loved the idea of cool animal heads hanging on a wall.

The elephant was from 2020; included here for completeness

On the tedious side, we completed two Alice in Wonderland pictures. One was a large diamond painting and the other a 1000-piece puzzle.

When it came to crafts done with kids, I managed to put a Disney spin on everything.

Although I’m the only one playing God of War, the kids have also been fans of Kratos and Atreus for two years. Sure, the game is rated M (17+), but that’s… for reference only, right? 🙂 They’ve been following the Ragnarok story as I enjoyed the game on our new TV. Then when winter break came around, Ting decided to use her time to make a replica of Kratos’s Leviathan Axe. This little project evolved to us three building a whole arsenal of GoW weapons, mostly out of holiday scraps – wrapping paper roll, cardboard shipping box, LEGO packaging, gift box ribbons, etc. Like Brok, Sindri, and Lunda – the three dwarves in the GoW universe responsible for making everything – the three of us found ourselves incrementally upgrading these weapons bit by bit.