A very happy new year to all my readers. Another year has passed and it is time for the usual year in review to bring out some highlights and low lights from our life in the past year. Time to reflect and assess how things went. The past year was good in some ways and not so good in other ways. I think it is pretty much how most years are anyway :). Don’t think a year can be all good or all bad.


The most important thing for me is that I safely navigated another year in retirement and financial independence! It has been 7 years since I became financially independent and has never looked back. These 7 years have been amazing and filled with lots of great memories with family, friends and hobby projects. While I did not accomplish anything that anyone would care about, I had a quiet peaceful year.


There was no turbulence in the stock markets which would affect my retirement. There were some changes to the budget which affects me a bit, but that is alright. Still think early retirement is the right thing to do and still wish I had retired a bit earlier :). Never for once thought of going back to work, nor have the finances caused much trouble so far. What the future holds, no one knows. So lets wait and see.


Coming to my projects, starting with this blog (yes, blogging is a project for me), I have so far posted more than 450 posts and am slowly approaching the 500 mark. Whether I will accomplish that is yet to be seen. I have a hint of what might happen :). The readership is slowly trending down with a few folks unsubscribing, so I know the direction things are going. I introduced the dark theme to my blog, but other than that nothing else has changed. I continue to post about one article a week and posted almost 50 articles in the past year.


The solar panel project continues to receive improvements and now is even better than ever. I have made several upgrades to it, all of which I did not post on my blog because most readers don’t seem to be interested in electronics related posts. To keep things short, I replaced the arduino nano and HC-05 bluetooth module with esp8266. Then I replaced the hall effect sensors with shunts and INA226 sensors to measure DC currents. Both those changes reduced the complexity of my design. So I cleaned up my wiring and gave them nice enclosures to give a good clean look.


Enclosure for shunts and INA226 sensors


Next big project that started for us was a farm. We bought a 2 acre farm a few hours drive from Bangalore. We want to use this farm as a place to live in the later part of our life when we are relieved of our duties as children and parents. Other than that we don’t have any major plans for the farm as of now. In fact we are not sure if we will move into it ever or even keep the farm! It was just a dream of ours to live in a farm, but we have to live with the eventualities of life and let life drive the direction for us.


Other than those projects mentioned above, I have worked, or have been working on several other interesting hobby projects, just for fun, not money. Some of which you might have read on the blog. Working on these small projects is pure fun and that keeps me super busy and happy. There is so much to do that I am unable to find free time anymore.


We are still unschooling our daughter but with a slight twist. She is now going to an alternate school for a couple of days a week. I use “couple of days” very loosely because it is more like once a week at best. What I should be saying is that we are paying the school for the cost of couple of days a week of school and she is going once a week :).


She enjoys some classes like music and art and doesn’t like any other ones. So we find a day with most periods she likes and send her on that day. Even on that day, she attends the classes she likes and for the rest of the periods she is just playing by herself while the rest of her friends attend class. Since we travel here and there mostly on week days, she misses a lot of school that way too. The main reason we send her to school is because she enjoys playing with her new found friends there during recess, music, art, circle time etc.


Coming to health and fitness, I have finally achieved my goal of earning a black belt in Karate. I have been training for 7 years before I was able to reach the goal. It was one of my happiest, most satisfying, challenging and a proud achievement in a long time. Unfortunately however, health was not the best in 2024. The whole family and extended family had several health issues and multiple visits to the doctor’s office. Our daughter had an especially bad year in terms of health. Hoping the new year would be better.


The best part about 2024 was that we finally took a long vacation and had a lot of fun. This vacation has been pending for a long time and we have been postponing it for several years due to various reasons. The vacation was very memorable and totally worth the price we paid.


Well, that was the journey in 2024. Looking forward to an exciting 2025!