The Month Of Holiday Cheer: December 2022 Recap

by A Purple Life, posted in Blogging, Early Retirement, Early Retirement Updates, Film, Finance, Fitness, Food, Hobbies, Investing, Net Worth Update, Spending, Travel
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And just like that, 2022 was at an end… Weird 🙂 . 2022 was filled with so much travel, food and fun that it seemed to fly by. Years used to feel a bit infinite, but now they’re whizzing past. I’m glad I have these posts to look back on and remember what I did with that time 🙂 . So let’s see what I got up to during the last month of 2022!

I Moved To Upstate New York

After my lovely 5 weeks in Buenos Aires, Argentina it was time to return stateside…right in time for snow and cold temperatures 🙂 , which were quite a shock after days of tanning in 90 degree weather. However luckily, I quickly acclimated and was able to run in the winter weather and enjoy the great parts about it: giant sweaters, comfy blankets and sipping hot beverages while watching the snowfall from inside. It was also nice to see friends and family again after being on the other side of the world mostly alone.

I Visited Connecticut

During my time in New York I made a 5 day trip to Connecticut for my baby cousin’s birthday. I also got to see other family that had gathered for that occasion, which was nice. I also continued to be impressed with how easy it is to get around the northeast by train:

I Learned Spanish

It was the last month of my 2022 goal to become fluent in 1 year and I did it! If you’re interested in how I go into deep detail here:

However, the learning continued even after that monster post, and part of that included FINISHING DUOLINGO SPANISH!!!

…and (per the above) it was sadly anticlimactic.

Duolingo shows characters cheering and dancing every time you get one tiny thing right on their app, but when I completed their whole program…nothing happened 🙂 . No confetti, no congratulations, nothing. A trophy showed up at the bottom of my page and I couldn’t scroll to anymore new lessons since they didn’t exist, but that was it.

However, I later went back to the page and randomly clicked on the trophy and a dude flew out of it (screenshot below)…I guess that’s something.

Anyway, I was already disillusioned with Duolingo after they changed their entire lessons structure and removed the most helpful (in my opinion) part of their platform: Stories. I did expect more fanfare when I finished the program based on how they handle everything else, but I guess they’re playing hard ball – trying not to give me that satisfaction so I’ll stick around 🙂 . Instead of a congratulations they even started trying to tell me “Level Up”…no thank you.

Anyway, putting my complaining aside, using Duolingo for the last year – specifically the Stories – has been helpful to my language learning journey and I am grateful to have had that resource, especially for free. But now it’s time to move on. I’m not sure to what though – if you have any suggestions feel free to let me know!

Mental Tiredness

Something interesting I noticed this month since I came back to the US after 5 weeks in Argentina (and living 1/3 of 2022 in Spanish speaking countries) is how tired I was 🙂 . It was a nice mental break to be able to not only speak, read and listen to Spanish all the time.

I think this was because in Argentina, I intentionally tried to stretch my language compared to when I lived in Italy for 6 months where I took every break I could. For example, if someone started speaking English to me, I went with it and left Italian behind. That wasn’t what I did in Argentina since I was trying to learn as much as I could in a relatively short time.

Anyway, this gave me an even larger appreciation of people that don’t get to leave after 5 weeks, take a break and go back to speaking their first language. It is wild having 99% of my interactions with people being embarrassing because of language learning instead of the usual 20% because of my general social nervousness 🙂 . Those percentage points count let me tell you!

Continuing My Learning

After resting my brain for a little bit this month, I hopped back into continuing my language learning! I’ve still been only texting my Mom in Spanish, my phone is still in Spanish and I chat with my Mom on a weekly call in Spanish. One funny outcome of all that is that the emails I’ve been getting from my future Airbnb bookings have been in Spanish since that’s the default language on my phone (and therefore the Airbnb mobile app). That’s helped me learn some more helpful vocab words.

I also found ways to bring Spanish into my every day life in the states. For example, we went to a restaurant in Connecticut and my aunt started speaking to an employee in Spanish and I joined in. He was from Venezuela and I understood him! It’s good to know that my latest understanding doesn’t just extend to Argentinian Spanish. He then sang “Happy Birthday/Feliz Cumpleaños a ti!” with the rest of the staff to my aunt in Spanish and we joined in, which was fun.

I was also grocery shopping with my Mom in CT and we heard the cashier (cajero/a) speaking Spanish to someone so we spoke to her in Spanish while checking out and did that whole interaction in Spanish including her asking if I had a discount card! That was awesome 🙂 .

Outside of that, I finished my 2022 goal of watching 8 films in Spanish per month strong! Here’s what I watched this month:

  1. Knives Out (Puñales Por La Espalda aka Daggers In The Back)
  2. How The Grinch Stole Christmas (El Grinch)
  3. The Holiday (Vacaciones)
  4. Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows (Sherlock Holmes: Juego de Sombras)
  5. 21 Jump Street (Infiltrados en Clase aka Class Infiltrators)
  6. A Cinderella Story (Una Cenicienta Moderna aka A Modern Cinderella)
  7. It Follows (Está Detrás De Ti aka It’s Behind You)
  8. Klaus

Now I just need to decide how I want to continue my language learning in 2023. Decisions, decisions 🙂 .

I Planned 2023 Travel

I keep telling myself that I’ll just ‘window-shop’ for possible Airbnbs and flights and before I know it I’m creating complex lists and spreadsheets and have the first half of the year planned out. Oops 🙂 .

Well, if you’re curious or if you want to meet up while I’m there, here’s where I’ll be in 2023 by month:

January: Boston, Upstate NY, NH
February: New Hampshire
March: New Hampshire
April: Sacramento, CA
May: Seattle, WA
June: Chicago, IL
July: ???
August: ??? (Maybe Portland, ME)
September: Australia
October: New Zealand
November: ??? (Maybe Puerto Vallarta, México)
December: ??? (Maybe Puerto Vallarta, México)

Whoops listing it all out makes me realize basically the whole year is planned. My bad 🙂 !

I Did My Roth IRA Ladder Conversion!

Once again, at the last minute 🙂 . Luckily though, “past me” had my back:

I have been laughing that I had already forgotten what I had done a year ago, and that this post is now helping me go about my retirement 🙂 . One thing to note since I wrote that post though – the Vanguard conversion page now requires that you input the number of shares you want to convert instead of a dollar amount so you have to calculate that number based on current share price. Just a heads up in case you’re doing something similar 🙂 .

My Website Went Down For 13 Hours

So this happened:

I had seen the “website down” notification the night before and thought it would be one of those quick outages that I had complained to Bluehost about before, so I went back to my life. However in the morning, I noticed that my website was still down. WTF?!?

So I tweeted their support (which is usually the fastest way to get someone to help), but I instead heard back 5 hours later. Luckily, I didn’t wait around and instead using my favorite Customer Support Website, Get Human to find a number that goes to a human I can talk to (here’s the one for Bluehost).

So I called them and a robot kept leading me in circles so I hung up and called back. This time I kept saying “representative” and pressing 0 until the robot put me through to an actual person. They looked into the program and said that they needed to update a certificate to get my site to work…why hadn’t they done that in the first place?!

Anyway, after a few minutes, they fixed it and my site was back up. Now I’m seriously looking into new host options instead of Bluehost. I’ve been burned too many times. I used to have a lot of downtime issues with them, haven’t for a while and now this, which was more downtime than all of my previous times combined. It’s disappointing. Anyway, if y’all know of any website hosts you love, please let me know in the comments. It’s time to go.

I Played Video Games

This month was video game filled and I loved it! I played my beloved Sims 4 and LOTS of Cities: Skylines. I’m getting much better at it. I can now go from 0 to a 65,000 person town in a day, which used to take me weeks of playing hours every night. Improvement!

I Hung Out With People

In addition to lots of lovely family time, I also got to see a few of my college friends and continued my weekly movie nights as well as a ‘bad’ movie night with my Seattle friend. We watched these films together:

If you’re curious about my ratings of movies, I have a Letterboxd account here.

I Read 16 Books

This month I read:

  1. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
  2. American Royalty by Tracey Livesay
  3. House of the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
  4. Heat Wave by TJ Klune
  5. Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
  6. A Lady For A Duke by Alexis Hall
  7. Barbarian Lover by Ruby Dixon
  8. Barbarian Mine by Ruby Dixon
  9. The Kraken’s Sacrifice by Katee Robert
  10. Stone Heart by Katee Robert
  11. Neon Gods by Katee Robert
  12. Electric Idol by Katee Robert
  13. Sacrifice by Katee Robert
  14. Heir by Katee Robert
  15. Queen by Katee Robert
  16. Abel by Katee Robert

So did I read this many books because I was accidentally close to 100 books read this year and I’m a competitive little shit? Yes and no 🙂 .

I’ve noticed patterns in my retirement and a main one is that I find that I read a lot more when visiting large groups of my family when there is a lot going on, usually non-fiction. I think this is because it’s hard for me to pop in and out of the world of a fiction book to respond to someone talking to me in the living room or react to something else going on. I get sucked into fiction 🙂 .

So since I am blessed to be retired, I spend most of my time reading in communal areas and interacting with the people that flow through them. That allows for a lot of reading time compared to when I go to a new city and want to explore outside all day. Instead I’m in the northeast, it’s cold outside and I’m gonna sit my butt on a couch with a hot cup of tea and read the day away 🙂 .

But also yes, because once the number of books I was reading kept increasing effortlessly, I said “fuck it” and did intentionally read a few extra books before the end of the year so I could receive the high honor of GLORY for reading 100 books in a year. For comparison’s sake, I think my record while working was 1-2 per month so I’m feeling pretty fucking good about this. Now it’s time for a nap 🙂 .

If you’re curious about what I’m reading and my ratings of these books, I have a Goodreads account you can check out here.

I Wrote 9 Posts

In case you missed it, this month I published the below posts:

  1. The Month Of Argentina: November 2022 Recap
  2. Review: Cabify – The Latin American Ride Share App
  3. Review: American Airlines Business Class 777-200 – Buenos Aires to NYC
  4. The Year Of Spanish: 2022 Goals & Accomplishments
  5. How I Saved $44,667 With Travel Hacking In 2022
  6. From 0% to Fluent: How I Learned Spanish in 1 Year
  7. How Retirement Allows Me To Live My Childhood Dreams
  8. How I Made $9,621 While Retired In 2022
  9. How I Lived On $16,930 As A Global Nomad In 2022

In addition to all that, I was featured in an article in Reader’s Digest! Check that out here if you’re curious: The Money Secrets of People Who Retire Early.

For the 3rd annual PurpleMas, I published twice a week in December. I was able to do this because of the jumpstart completing NaNoWriMo gave me. However, similar to NaNoWriMo this year, I found PurpleMas harder than I remember 🙂 . As a result, I have to think if it’s something I want to do next year even if I do NaNoWriMo again. We shall see 🙂 .

Anyway, outside of that, I was asked to work with a new finance app, an investing company, a cellphone service and an outdoor brand, but I didn’t pursue any of them. It’s time to rest 🙂 .

I Colored

Basically, this:

So that’s a fun addition to my bird appreciation. I also realized this month that I now know most common birds by sight. One of my nieces had bird flashcards and I could name them all. WOW! I didn’t realize how deep this hobby went but apparently, I’ve been learning a lot in the past year or so 🙂 .

I Reminisced 

I’m over 2 years into retirement so I wanted to take the time to remember how I got here and to make sure I don’t ever forget that my life did not used to be as idyllic as it is now. So I read through my “How Did I Get Here?” series to remember my journey, and it was fascinating to read after publishing those posts a year ago. It almost seemed like reading someone else’s story. It seemed so far from my current experience. Weird 🙂 .

There were even some details that I didn’t remember anymore so I’m super glad I wrote them down! I didn’t realize how quickly I could forget what my working life was like so it was very helpful to revisit that. Anyway, here are those posts if you’re curious:

  1. $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 1 “Is This Adulting?”
  2. $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 2 “Avoiding My Problems With Exercise & Consumerism”
  3. $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 3 “Discovering FIRE…And Ignoring It”
  4. $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 4 “Catching A Unicorn”
  5. $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 5 “A Seattle Bait & Switch”
  6. $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 6 “Searching for Bigfoot”
  7. $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 7 “The Goldilocks Zone”
  8. $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 8 “The Boring Part”
  9. $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 9 “The Final Countdown”

Physical

Sleep

I slept really well this month! I was able to take lots of naps, go to bed when I was sleepy and get up when I felt ready. It was perfect 🙂 . I also greatly enjoyed the amount of blankets I can comfortably use during a cold winter. I feel like a marshmallow and I love it 🙂

Food

I got back to keto once I came back to the US from Argentina, but after a few weeks got off it again to enjoy seasonal treats! No regrets 🙂 .

Exercise

Running is still going well despite the drastic weather change from Argentina! I learned to run in winter and didn’t have trouble breathing through it like last year. I wear a gaiter, layers, and plan around icy, rainy and snowy days. However, I still got out a lot because my family includes a lot of runners and we encouraged each other and went together. It’s so much easier if have help with the hardest part: getting out the door 🙂 .

Mental

Learning

So it’s time for my favorite segment: Fun Facts Nobody Asked For! Here’s what I learned and explored this month:

Christmas

  • If Jesus existed, he was most likely not born on December 25th, but in the spring. Also, he wasn’t born in 1 AD, but between 6-4 BC. I had no idea about any of this 🙂
  • Also, apparently Stonehenge is a winter solstice calendar – say whaaaat?

Astronomy

Stargazing was both awesome and challenging this month because while there were several meteor shower opportunities, it was also freezing 🙂 . I saw a lot of beautiful planets, stars and meteors, but going outside to do so in the dead of winter led to me looking like an overstuffed marshmallow in all my layers 🙂 .

Anyway, despite the odds, I was able to see the lovely Geminid Meteor Shower, which touts 150 meteors/hour and despite me not being in the darkest spot, I saw a shitton of them!!! It was absolutely beautiful and worth the cold.

Fauna

This month was animal-filled! I saw:

White-tailed Deer, Cows, Sheep, Corn Silk Snake, Eastern Gray Squirrel, Fox Squirrel, American Red Squirrel, Eastern Cottontail

Flora

I saw the usual northeastern trees this month, but now I can actually identify them 🙂 :

Eastern White Pine, Eastern Hemlock, Paper Birch, White Oak

Birds

Birding was lovely this month because despite the cold outside, it’s way easier to see birds in winter when there are less leaves to hide behind. I saw all the usual suspects for this area:

Black-capped Chickadee, White-breasted Nuthatch, Blue Jay, American Goldfinch, American Crow, Peregrine Falcon, Eastern Wild Turkey, Dark-eyed Junco, Tufted Titmouse, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Common Merganser 

I also learned that there are 5 subspecies of North American Wild Turkey: the Rio Grande, the Merriam’s, the Osceola, the Eastern, and the Gould’s. Who knew?! I ran outside when my father-un-law yelled that there was an Eastern Wild Turkey outside the house.

I also had a lovely time birding while on my runs. Multitasking! Nature is so cool 🙂 .

Creativity

My creativity was flowing this month, which is great since there was a lot I wanted to create to finish 2022 🙂 . In addition to all the writing and editing I did, I had a great time working on my winter photography, coloring as I mentioned and my nail painting skills. Taking the time to do all of that was rejuvenating and helped me to refill my creativity cup that almost ran dry in November for NaNoWriMo.

Emotional

My emotions were awesome this month 🙂 . Usually I find cold and dark winters a challenge, but this year it wasn’t. This might have been because there wasn’t a huge covid surge like last year or that I was able to run through this winter unlike the last one or maybe because I had more family time, but I think I found a way to both enjoy and stay happy during the winter.

We’ll see if I can keep this up since instead of jetting off to Thailand soon like I did in 2021, I’ll be staying in winter weather until April. So I have plenty of time to be proven wrong 🙂 .

Money

Ahhh yes – cash money 🙂 . As I usually do at the end of the year, I added up everything I made and spent in 2022:

And once again I am shocked at the outcome. When I retired in the fall of 2020, I expected to use my cash cushion for 2 years of expenses and begin pulling from my investments in October 2022, but I haven’t had to do that.

As a result of my accidental income and below budget spending, I’m still living on my cash cushion and will be doing so for another year at least. I won’t need to touch my investments until at least 3 years into retirement, which is really cool. Once again, life is going better than forecast 🙂 .

Conclusion

And that’s my last monthly recap for 2022! I hope you’re still enjoying these updates and find them interesting. I’ve been finding them very helpful for myself to remember what I spent this year doing 🙂 . So I’m going to continue writing these in 2023. See you then!

If you’re interested in the other weekly and monthly retirement updates I’ve written, they’re all here:

Weekly (2020)

  1. Early Retirement Week 1: The Freak Out
  2. Early Retirement Week 2: The Vacation
  3. Early Retirement Week 3: The Whiplash
  4. Early Retirement Week 4: The Heartbeat
  5. Early Retirement Week 5: The Election
  6. Early Retirement Week 6: The Trophy
  7. Early Retirement Week 7: The Train
  8. Early Retirement Week 8: The Challenge
  9. Early Retirement Week 9: The Question
  10. Early Retirement Week 10: The Game
  11. Early Retirement Week 11: The Recharge
  12. Early Retirement Week 12: The Holiday

Monthly (2021)

  1. The Month Of Rest: Early Retirement Month 4 (January 2021)
  2. The Month Of Birds: Early Retirement Month 5 (February 2021)
  3. The Month of Change: Early Retirement Month 6 (March 2021)
  4. The Month of Atlanta: Early Retirement Month 7 (April 2021)
  5. The Month of Portland, Maine: Early Retirement Month 8 (May 2021)
  6. The Month Of New Hampshire: Early Retirement Month 9 (June 2021)
  7. The Month Of The Northeast: Early Retirement Month 10 (July 2021)
  8. The Month Of New York State: Early Retirement Month 11 (August 2021)
  9. The Month Of City Hopping: Early Retirement Month 12 (September 2021)
  10. The Month Of The Southwest USA: October 2021 Recap
  11. The Month Of Santa Fe: November 2021 Recap
  12. The Month Of Family: December 2021 Recap

Monthly (2022)

  1. The Month Of Freezing My Balls Off: January 2022 Recap
  2. The Month Of Thailand: February 2022 Recap
  3. The Month Of Spring(?): March 2022 Recap
  4. The Month Of México: April 2022 Recap
  5. The Month of Mérida: May 2022 Recap
  6. The Month of Seattle: June 2022 Recap
  7. The Month of Washington State: July 2022 Recap
  8. The Month Of New Hampshire: August 2022 Recap
  9. The Month Of Maine: September 2022 Recap
  10. The Month Of Acadia: October 2022 Recap
  11. The Month Of Argentina: November 2022 Recap

How was your month?

30 thoughts on “The Month Of Holiday Cheer: December 2022 Recap”

      1. OH WOW!!! That makes me so happy to hear 🙂 . And even a slight comparison to the “Oprah Book Club” is putting me on Cloud 9 haha. Thank you!

        Reply

    3. Happy New Year! And that’s so cool to hear – I’m glad you liked that book 🙂 ! And lol thank you. Cheers!

      Reply

  4. Oh man! I am local to you in Albany and a super fan! You prob don’t meet up to network with random internet people but I am in Saratoga and would love to grab a coffee sometime! You’ve inspired me to want to retire early and I just hacked a trip to Costa Rica for $100 a flight! Boom! Thanks for the continued inspo

    Reply

    1. Oh wow – I was actually supposed to go to Saratoga yesterday, but I got sick and stayed home. But I’ll let you know if I’m heading back there soon. I enjoy hanging with random finance nerds 🙂 . And congratulations on that awesome travel hack!!

      Reply

  5. Sounds like an awesome month! I do love the holidays. I have a question for you though… how do you stick to your nomad ways and have everything you need everywhere you go? Like summer and weather clothes, nail painting supplies, running gear, etc. Do you travel with like 10 giant suitcases? LOL! I’ve been trying to (mentally) try on your lifestyle to see if it would work for me and this seems like a sticking point – what about all of my STUFF?!?

    Reply

    1. Thanks! And lol – no I have a 40L backpack and a canvas tote. I have a winter coat that folds up to be super small, don’t bring nail painting stuff (I buy it where I am and leave it there or give it to someone) and my running gear doubles as athleisure clothes. Easy 😉 . Getting rid of my stuff initially was challenging, but once I did it I realized I actually only use a tiny fraction of that stuff. So I just brought everything I actually used and was good to go 🙂 .

      Reply

  6. Do you ever use Ebird to find birding hotspots nearby and go specifically for birding expeditions, or are you mostly just noticing birds as you go about your daily life? I got into birding because of you and now I’m always hitting up E-bird hotspots whenever I travel. It can be a fun way to find parks you didn’t know existed – or other random places, like when I went to the retaining ponds at county dump in Florida in hopes of seeing Black-necked Stilts (alas, I did not find them, but I did get my first Sedge Wren there, so, worth it!)

    I’m also curious what your US & world life lists are if you know!

    Reply

    1. Just the latter, but I should try the former if I’m feeling like an adventure 🙂 . And that’s SO cool!! I’m definitely going to try that now 🙂 . I list the birds I see in all of these monthly recaps, but I don’t have a running list on 1 app that I can share or anything. How do you manage those lists?

      Reply

      1. E-bird manages all the lists! Whenever I’m intentionally birding for a bit, whether walking in a park or just sitting at a window watching a bird feeder, I start an E-bird checklist. It’s helpful because it’ll show you all the likely, unlikely, and rare/non-reported birds in your area (has definitely helped me narrow down an ID when the bird In thought it might be had never been reported there before). You can also create “incomplete” checklists to log birds you notice while doing something else that you’d want to get on your life list. E-Bird keeps all that data for you and has a running list for the birds you’ve seen in every county, state, country, and the whole world! Plus it’s a citizen science app where the data is actually used by scientists to track bird migration and abundance en masse throughout the world, so everytime I submit a checklist I feel like I’m doing something good!

        I even think you can link Merlin to E-bird so what you record in Merlin can go to a checklist, if you are using that for IDs (I don’t use Merlin much because I am old school and carry around a physical bird guide).

        It’s really fun both to keep the life list (I’m at 204 after 2 years of birding!!) and to be able to track how many species you’re seeing at a given time. I often notice 20+ species in ~45 mins or so birding in city parks and backyards, and my record for one day was over 60 species at a national wildlife refuge in Philly at the peak of spring migration.

        And as I mentioned before, you can look up hotspots, as well as most recently seen bird lists, for any location you’re going to which can be a great way to find cool outdoor places near and far!

        Reply

        1. Super interesting!!! I didn’t realize Merlin (that I already use) is powered by Ebird. I’ve tracked birds on Merlin before and love their features. However, the eBird hotspots and ability to help the birding community is super cool! Thank you for sharing.

          Reply

  7. Thanks for the Spanish encouragement. I have been studying on my own for about a year. I can read a lot of things but definitely had trouble listening. Duolingo stories (under the practice tab) were definitely helpful – thanks for putting me on to them. I also started listening to TV shows and movies – very helpful. Thanks and congratulations!

    Reply

    1. Just realized the stories in the practice tab were stories I did before they integrated them into the learning pathway. I really liked them seperate!

      Reply

  8. Come to Minneapolis in July! Do you like biking? It’s a great city to explore by bike. There’s even a large 4th of July group ride called Freedom From Pants which is very entertaining…

    Reply

    1. I’ve actually been to Minneapolis in July before! I didn’t do much biking though so fair point. And that sounds like a fun ride haha. Is it nude like the one in Seattle?

      Reply

      1. I’d say it’s more “really skimpy costumes” than totally nude. Fun, but not a reason in itself to visit.
        Last summer hubs and I did a leisurely “day long” ride around the city. It’s totally fascinating to me how I can live here my whole life but always discover something new while out biking.

        Reply

  9. I’ve just seen Gritty Spanish and it looks interesting, not sure if you’ve checked it out? Great recap as always 🙂

    Reply

  10. Awesome year! I had to book a boutique hotel in Mexico over the phone and I was so proud of myself. I’ve been using https://www.espanolautomatico.com/ it’s based on using linguistics techniques to teach you Spanish the way kids learn it naturally and it’s great.

    It’s so crazy that you have been living the life you live without dipping into the investment accounts, nice!

    Reply

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