This month was a nice respite from the last 11. We were gone seven nights total—three in a hotel, four in an Airbnb cabin—and the rest of the time was spent holed up at home in the gloom and doom of Southern winter (read: gray, depressing, worthy of all the spiked coffee), catching up on life, deadlines, family time and finishing some big year-end projects. We’re completely reconfiguring our consulting model for the new year, and I can’t wait to see what comes of it.

Highs

We returned to our beloved OKC. Have we mentioned lately how much we adore Oklahoma City? Well, we do! And that feeling grows even stronger with each passing visit. This time we were in town for the opening of the OKC streetcar, a game-changer for both locals and tourists, and we’re already counting down the days until our next trip in May.

I turned in a huge cover story for a major publication on a topic near and dear to me. Wanna guess what the topic is? OK, I’ll spoil it—MURALS! Of course. What else does my life entail these days if not travel and public art? I can’t wait to see it in print, especially as I worked on it for nearly three months.

Speaking of public art, we did our year-end report for our passion project, public-benefit corporation DMA-events. Turns out, we contributed more than $14,000 in public art to our community since founding DMA in May. How cool is that? Though, we really want to triple—if not quadruple—those efforts in 2019. You can read the full recap here.

We produced our first commercial! It was on about three days’ notice and we didn’t even have proper audio equipment, but it was a whole lot of FUN and we’re both happy with the way it turned out. I’m grateful for all the time I’ve spent getting video editing coaching from Eric at One Eyed Pop as I’m finally getting comfortable with Premiere Pro, which felt like a complete impossibility just four months ago.

We spent Christmas in Georgia with my family. We went back to the same cabin we rented near Blue Ridge this summer, this time with my parents and two of the pups, and it was a perfect, peaceful four days to end the year. We hardly left—well, other than to see Mary Poppins and get a round of beers at Grumpy Old Men Brewing, that is.

While there, we got to catch up with Team Mayhem. We hadn’t seen our dear friends Angie, Keith and Sydney in a year, so it was awesome getting to swing by and have a quick lunch with them, though nowhere near the time we needed to soak up their awesomeness.

Lows

None really to speak of. Though we are still dealing with ignorance in our own current city, it would be redundant to mention it again (someday soon, I’ll tell the full story…), so for now I choose to be incredibly thankful for my health, my family, a job I adore and the cutest niece on the planet. Ready for more of this good stuff in 2019!

How did your end of the year shake out?

I’ll be doing my annual year-end recap this week, but you can also catch-up on all my month highlights from the year below:

• January
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November