The year twenty fifteen brought me lots of personal highs and only a couple of lows.<\/p>\n

In 2015, I celebrated both my 20th wedding anniversary, and my 20th year of working at the FAA. In October of 2014 I moved to a new department at work, and was promptly assigned to a different work detail, which I spent the majority of 2015 working on. I applied for a different position in the summer of 2015, which I got and began in November. I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels at work in 2015, but I am very excited about my new position (which involves writing and communications) and I’m hoping things begin to move forward again for me in 2016.<\/p>\n

In February of 2015, my last grandparent, Grandma O’Hara, passed away at the age of 85. “Gramma O” had been suffering from dementia for a couple of years, and while of course I was sad that she passed away, it was just as sad for me to see her confused and unable to remember me. I am super glad that my kids were old enough to know her and visit her and have their own memories of her.<\/p>\n

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Not counting the road trip to Chicago for Grandma O’s funeral, our family took four trips this year. In March of 2015 we took a road trip to Washington DC by way of Louisville, Kentucky, where we got to visit our friend Betty from work and visit Churchill Downs and the Louisville Slugger Factory. After spending a week in DC I was able to continue on to Tonawanda, New York and met Sean (my co-host on the Throwback Reviews Podcast) in person for the first time. I had a great time hanging out with Sean and his family. In May, Susan, the kids and I took a road trip up north and, among other things, stayed in a Futuro UFO house for several days. During that trip we saw and did things in Iowa, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Minnesota. In October, the four of us once again visited Colorado, where we got to briefly visit Robb Sherwin before heading up to Gransby, Colorado and spending a few days hanging out with my buddy Jeff and his family. Finally, in December, our family flew to Los Angeles and then boarded a cruise ship and sailed to Hawaii. And, in case you missed the announcement, Hawaii was my 50th state to visit, so I can finally mark that off as an achievement.<\/p>\n

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As usual, I did a lot with computers last year. After experiencing a server crash at home I migrated most of my websites off to another hosting service (robohara.com is the only one still at the house, and I’ll be moving it soon as well). I spent some time with virtual DOS machines, eventually getting TCP\/IP and USB flash drives working on a FreeDOS machine running on VMWare, but ultimately virtual DOS machines just don’t feel like the real thing. This year I upgraded all my client machines to Windows 10, and spent some time playing with my Raspberry Pi computers. I also continued to digitize things, everything from old cassette tapes to VHS tapes full of old commercials. I sold all but one of my remaining arcade games to the wonderful guys at Arkadia Retrocade in Arkansas. Oklahoma City got its own retro arcade, the FlashBack RetroPub.<\/p>\n

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I continued to podcast last year. I released multiple episodes of You Don’t Know Flack<\/a>, Sprite Castle<\/a>, and Throwback Reviews<\/a>. I temporarily joined the great arcade-themed podcast No Quarter<\/a>, and started another movie-themed show, Multiple Sadness<\/a>. I also set up a web page<\/a> with links to all of my podcasts and feeds. I also worked on recording the audiobook version of Commodork, which will be released in 2016 for the book’s 10th anniversary.<\/p>\n

In the summer of 2015 I was diagnosed with Stargardt Disease, a genetic vision disorder that inevitably leads to blindness. It affects your fine central vision and mostly leaves your peripheral vision alone, which means that, should the disease progress as my doctor expects it will, I will lose the ability to read and drive but not walk around. The Dean McGee Eye Institute asked me to come back for additional tests, as I currently only show major retinal damage in one eye, which in the doctor’s words, was “unheard of.” After my latest round of tests, my doctor suggested if I enjoy driving or reading “you should do a lot of it before the age of 50.”<\/p>\n

Partially based on that diagnosis, I decided to go back to school and pursue my master’s degree. I began attending classes at the University of Oklahoma in the summer of 2015. I finished my first class (“Writing the Short Story”) and begin two more classes later this month, with a goal of earning a Master’s of Professional Writing by the summer of 2018. Attending class inspired me to submit some of my short stories to various magazines. I haven’t been published yet, but that’s a goal for 2016. I also wrote a lot more “article-style” blog entries here at RobOHara.com. <\/p>\n

In the summer of 2015, Star Wars toys began arriving in local stores. I bought all of them. (Okay, not all<\/i> of them, but a lot<\/i> of them.) My Star Wars room at the house is now busting at the seams. Star Wars hype culminated on December 17th, 2015, when the kids, Susan, and I saw Episode 7: The Force Awakens in El Capitan theater in Los Angeles before boarding our cruise. The movie wasn’t perfect, but it was good — better than the prequels, and did a great job of jump starting a franchise that a lot of people had given up hope on.<\/p>\n

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I haven’t made any official New Year’s resolutions for 2016 yet, and considering today is the 6th, I’m not sure I’ll get around to it. The simplest bet is to go with “less weight, less stuff” and hope for the best.<\/p>\n

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The year twenty fifteen brought me lots of personal highs and only a couple of lows. In 2015, I celebrated both my 20th wedding anniversary, and my 20th year of working at the FAA. In October of 2014 I moved to a new department at work, and was promptly assigned to a different work detail, which I spent the majority of 2015 working on. I applied for a different position in the summer of 2015, which I got and began in November. I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels at work in 2015, but I am very excited… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}