Personal
Family: Similar to last year, my home life has primarily been focused on my daughter. And while it feels like that’s the only thing I do, if I think about it, that’s exactly how I want it to be! The last few years have passed by so fast, and it’s obvious to me that if I don’t spend a lot of time with her when she’s young (and wants to spend time with me) I will regret it. The one challenge though is balancing time with her and everything else. As she’s getting older and doesn’t necessarily need to spend 100% of her time with her parents, I’d like to dedicate some time to other things like date nights, hanging out with friends, hobbies etc. Overall though, I’m pretty happy with the amount of time I get to spend with my immediate family (maybe less so with my extended family though), and it’s directly in line with my insight last year about quality time.
Friends: Speaking of friends, I’ve done a pretty poor job of hanging out with them. For most of my close friends, I probably saw them maybe once or twice in person, usually for some occasion like a birthday. I’m hoping that I can do more of it as my daughter grows up, and (hopefully) will start to accept a non-parent baby sitter. In any case, I’m grateful that I have a bunch of old friends where whenever we hang out we can just pick up from where we left off. Still, I know I can do better but I’m still trying to find the right balance. Finding this balance is probably the hardest thing for me as I get older.
Fitness: In terms of fitness, I’ve been taking baby steps. I’ve committed to doing some form of exercise at least once a week, and I had a six month streak going before I injured my back recently. I’m slowly building up my cardio and strength but I’m realizing that I should be shifting my goals. Whereas in my 20s, I wanted to be stronger and faster to be better at sports or do some moves (e.g. back flip), now I want something different: to be injury-free and not be in pain.
One thing that I realized as I have been getting older and more sedentary is that I have more muscle tightness and pain, am more prone to injury and, am taking longer to recover — the trifecta of old age. The muscle tightness is the most noticeable issue on a daily basis where I wake up and all my muscles are tight. I think this is primarily a function of old age. When I was in my youth, I didn’t feel like warmup stretching did much for me. Now, I’m acutely aware of how tight my muscles are and how much looser they can be after stretching. So I’ve mostly been doing a daily stretching routine to ensure that I’m (mostly) functional. Ditto for moving my muscles. It’s not enough for them to be loose, I’m much more acutely aware of “use it or lose it” rule with my body. So getting some form of movement (and range of movement) have been important.
The other thing that stretching and movement helps with is injury protection. This is particularly important for my core, which historically has been pretty weak. I attribute my back injury directly to a weak core (and overuse from lifting my daughter all the time). The sad thing is that it also takes a lot longer to recover. I would sometimes get injuries in my 20s and after a week or two I was back at 100%. Now, not so much. I’ve been going to a physiotherapist recently, learning exercises to strengthen key stabilizer muscles, and being much more mindful of how I perform actions. I can’t just power through everything physical anymore, I have to be smarter about how I use my body, compensating reduced physical prowess with hard-earned wisdom — what other way is there to age?
Health: Besides the minor injury to my back, health wise I’ve been pretty lucky. Luckily, COVID did not have any lasting effects on me. My weight has been pretty steady, which is a win in itself given my sedentary life. I’ve mostly learned to cut back when I overeat from time to time, creating a sort of homeostasis state for myself. Mentally, I’m feeling pretty good too. There were various times that were stressful during the year due to (self-inflicted) increased workload, but nothing too prolonged or intense compared to my startup days. Having a great partner at home, interesting work, and a young daughter to keep me on my toes, I feel like I’m exactly where I want to be right now.
Hobbies: My hobbies from before my daughter was born have all been put on the side lines. Music lessons has not been a priority for me, and since my daughter doesn’t like me playing anymore (maybe because she has a better ear for music? lol), I don’t play that much either. That’s all right for me for now since I’m sure I’ll be able to get back to it later.
On learning Chinese, it’s also taken a back seat. I’ve stopped my biweekly lessons because it’s simply too busy on the weekends. I’m trying to work in some more organic Chinese reading into my schedule with an app I downloaded but I’m still struggling to make a habit out of it. I do get a bit of practice with my extended family but that’s more maintenance than active learning. My hope is that my daughter will start going to Chinese lessons soon and I’ll schedule parallel lessons for the both of us! (I’ll let you know how that works out.)
Blog: I have been able to keep up with some amount of blogging. I wrote a nice post on Charlie Munger soon after his passing on this blog. I also managed to eek out three posts on my technical blog, mostly because the posts weren’t as long as the previous years monster posts. My technical blog has been my highest priority “hobby” because it overlaps with my professional development. As I mentioned in the past, I can directly attribute key career opportunities to it, so it remains a top priority. However, that’s mainly just a positive side effect. I use the projects on the blog to learn and code, and it remains the one outlet where I get to do “real” technical work (not management or leadership), so it’s one of the few techy oasis’s in the rest of my busy, hectic life.
Professional
Borealis: I had quite a busy year at Borealis where I led the Incubator program where we ran more than half a dozen AI projects. The purpose of the Incubator is to get projects off the ground from concept to delivery. Around half of these projects have matured with lots of potential to make a big impact at the bank. One of my colleagues asked me a question I hadn’t thought about before: “Was this my best year (ever)?” And thinking about it, it quite possibly has been the best year of my career, at least from a value delivery point of view. It wasn’t without some stress at times but it was made a lot easier from working with lots of smart, dedicated people on meaningful problems for the bank. Although there is a ton of hype around generative AI and how it’s going to transform society, there are many less visible use-cases within non-technology businesses that could massively benefit from AI (generative or otherwise). My career, in retrospect, has been delivering AI solutions (in all its iterations from symbolic to ML to generative) to some of these less well known areas of the economy. It’s not as sexy as working at OpenAI or Instagram but it’s an important niche where most of the value of AI is going to be from. Maybe I’ll write more about this some day.
Rotman: This past year at Rotman has been quite similar to the past years with the one exception being the boom in generative AI. On the teaching side, we all had to scramble to see if we should be doing anything differently now that everyone has access to ChatGPT. My approach last year (February 2023) was to assume students were going to use it BUT to make them accountable for any errors, penalizing them more heavily than usual. I think the policy only had a minor effect in the end. Some students used it, others did not, and, on average, the grades were similar to previous years.
I’ve got a few things that I’m experimenting with this year in this era of ChatGPT. One obvious thing that I’ve had to do is to add material specifically geared towards modern generative AI (I had some GAN stuff before but that’s a lot less relevant). How can one of my students confidently say they learned AI without knowing both how to use ChatGPT and how it works (at least conceptually)? I’m most of the way through the material and I think I have a good overview for the students that covers most of the topics, but who knows what the state of the art will be by February, it’s all moving so fast.
On the education side, I organized a panel on generative AI last May that was really thought provoking (at least for that moment in time). Much more discourse on LLM’s have been had since then, but at the time there were many issues from jobs to regulation to risks that were discussed. Even now, many of the topics and points are still relevant although, obviously, there is a lot more depth and understanding of how LLM’s work now. Generative AI is still in its infancy so you can expect that I’ll be organizing more related events next year.
Events: Here are a few public events that I was involved in either through Borealis or Rotman throughout the year:
Investing
My portfolio (like most of the market) is quite a bit higher this year. As with most value investor portfolios, I’ve been outperforming the market in the last little while since the end of the COVID boom. Overall, I’m probably beating the general market by 2-3% over various long term horizons depending on how your count things, which is pretty satisfactory overall. I’ve all but given up on trying to get Buffett like returns because, quite frankly, I’m not as good as him (obviously), and more importantly, I simply can’t dedicate the necessary amount of time. However, based on the last 17 or so years of my investing career, I believe I have good evidence that I can consistently outperform the market by a few percent, so I still think it’s worth it for me to keep investing, especially as my portfolio gets larger.
The other part of the investing process for me is that it’s so interesting! The myriad of businesses out there are so complex and tell an important part of the story of civilization (if I’m being romantic about it). This gives a ton of motivation to learn more about how the world works. I dare say that I’m getting better at it too, although I wouldn’t call myself good at it yet. After so many years of casually investing, I feel that I’m in the conscious incompetence phase, possibly on my way into conscious competence in the next little while. The stock market is such a humbling place because it is in many ways a great reflection of reality with no safety net. You either make money or you don’t. And in a true reflection of reality, sometimes there is hype and you totally fall for it, and sometimes you can still lose (because of timing) even though you were right in the end. It’s hard to fool yourself (in the long term) because there is a quantitative measure that you have at the end of the day.
My only saving grace from my incompetence is that I’ve taken the idea of margin of safety pretty seriously. I’ve developed a habit of really only buying into a position if it’s obviously cheap (but still have got it wrong many times). This has protected me in a lot of places from buying into crazy overvalued stocks only to see them fall a gut-wrenching amount (but still have experienced this situation more than I’d like to). I know that I’m ignorant, so I really want a big buffer to protect myself. Of course, this means that I probably miss many more opportunities than I could otherwise take advantage of, but it’s easier for me to sleep at night. I’m still optimistic that I’m getting better at investing but it’s a lifelong journey, and it’s still quite possible that I’m still fooling myself — that’s why it’s interesting (just like life)!
A few random thoughts about investing this year for posterity:
- I trimmed down a few of my larger positions (including Berkshire) earlier in the year to rebalance my portfolio hoping to take advantage of some deals. Most of those trims were getting rid of leverage (LEAPS options) to reduce my risk. As usual, I sold too early but better safe than sorry.
- I was able to take advantage of a couple of deals throughout the year affecting individual stocks but there was no general downturn, which I had hoped for. Despite that, I still have about 20% of my portfolio in cash or equivalents in case something does happen in the next little while. This is usually the position I’m in as I’m still accumulating and I always want to be able to jump on a good deal (if it’s obvious to me).
- My biggest position is now that fast growth company I took a position in last year, which is up almost 100%. I’ll say that most of that is luck. But the more I learn about this company, the more I like it, especially at the price I got it at. It’s hard to say that it’ll be the next Microsoft/Google/etc. but it definitely has some potential to be. One of the ideas that I’ve been crystalizing in the last little while is to buy companies that have upside optionality for cheap. There’s probably some reasonable mean expected growth rate, but you want a skewed distribution to the right with some fat tails. As long as you buy at a reasonable-lowish price, then you protect a lot of your downside risk as well.
- On that end, another insight that I feel that I finally have internalized is to buy great businesses and be happy holding them forever. Took me long enough! Honestly, Buffett and Munger have been saying this for longer than I’ve been alive, yet it still took me 15+ years for me to deeply understand it. On the one hand, these are the businesses that have the longest potential for growth, making it so that you only need to sit on your ass and watch them grow. Who wouldn’t like that? On the other hand, great businesses have relatively fewer problems. They navigate downturns better, outcompete rivals, and generally have less sources of worry. The corollary here is that, I’ve stopped being tempted by cheap opportunities even if it is a potentially decent business. It’s quite hard to buy them cheap and figure out when to sell them. Now I’ve shifted (for the most part) my focus to buying companies I want to hold (nearly) forever. I’ll repeat this again: took me long enough!
- The one thing that I really have no mental model of approaching is when to sell. A couple of my investments in Chinese stocks have been a big flop for me so far. Yet at current prices they seem cheapish and they still have dominant positions in the Chinese market. So should I sell? I don’t really have a good framework to think about it. In the absence of having a framework, my default action is no action. So I continue to hold. Maybe this is the next level of my investment journey where I either have enough detailed research to be confident one way or the other, or I really bite the bullet and realize that I don’t know enough (and maybe never will) about these businesses to stay invested in them. Being consciously incompetent, I guess I’m not there yet. Check back in with me next year.
- The sudden rise in interest rates have also motivated me to take action on where I’m keeping my cash (both for investing and my rainy day fund). There are some high interest savings ETFs where they essentially park your cash at banks but provide an interest rate pretty close to the overnight rate (both in Canada and US) versus essentially zero at my original big 5 Canadian bank brokerage account. The one detail is that you can only purchase them at non-big 5 Canadian bank accounts since most of them don’t allow you to trade since they are worried about deposit flight (I presume). This wasn’t too big a deal since I’ve been moving more of my new savings to a different brokerage because the FX fees at my big 5 bank were killing me because I predominantly invest in US stocks. This should also help my performance relative to the index because I hold a decent percent of my portfolio in cash, and have been getting basically no interest on that cash throughout my entire investing career.
- One important tactic that I’ve been using to do more research (that I can fit into my schedule) is to use the Quartr app. It’s a really convenient way to listen to quarterly earnings calls and other investor conference presentations. It’s obviously not the same as reading a transcript and/or watching a video, but it’s much easier to fit into my day during a drive to work or brushing my teeth. So while the consumption of information is less focused, it does help with passive acquisition. In addition to podcasts, I’ve been working quarterly conference calls into the rotation, which has been a good source to indirectly learn more about various businesses and industries, even if it’s not super efficient.
Insights and Learnings
In this section, I’ve jotted down a bunch of insights that I’ve had over the year. If I was more serious about social media, I would probably make each one of these its own blog post or tweet, but I’m not. In general, I’m pretty bad at social (including the in-person kind) and besides, who has the time to do this throughout the year? In any case, I’ll leave them here for posterity in a more raw form than I would have otherwise done, hoping that it will be useful to you (or my future self).
Multifactorial Problems: Something that is almost obvious in a complex world is that the causes of most things are multifactorial; not understanding this is the fallacy of a single cause. Most of the time, it’s much easier mentally to say, “oh, it’s because of X”, or “Y explains it”, and very likely that’s part of the reasoning, however, it’s unlikely the whole story. It’s so hard to tease out the causal components of why things happen so it’s important not to fall into this trap. I’ve also found that this leads to a false sense of confidence where I feel that I know more than I should. Acknowledging ignorance is a good way to stay humble and avoid overconfidence, which is optimal for learning. Lately, when something like this comes up in conversation, I’ve been agreeing with the X or Y cause, but also adding that, it’s probably complicated and a multifactorial problem. I’ve yet to hear someone disagree because it’s almost always true when you are thinking about any non-trivial problem. A small but meaningful trick to help you try not to fool yourself.
Boundaries and Constraints: Earlier this year I was listening to Tim Ferris interview Seth Godin, and they touched upon an important idea of defining your (true) boundaries and constraints first then thinking about what’s possible. Part of the motivation is that if you just imagine what you want, you will be overwhelmed because you can probably do anything (but not everything). Starting with your (true) boundaries and constraints allows you to reduce your solution space to search for things that are truly important for you. In some sense, this is like inverting the problem. Reflecting on where I want to go, the biggest constraint at this point in my life is my family. This is my number one priority and I’ve decided to rearrange most other things in my life around that. This obviously limits me in some ways, for example, greatly reducing time with friends, or aggressively pursuing “career success” (whatever that means). But in the end, this is exactly the tradeoff that I want to be having now, and this framework helps me accept that I can’t do everything but at least I’m doing the important things.
One Question When You’re Feeling Down: A question that I’ve been getting into the habit of asking myself this year when I’m feeling down or upset is: why? The most frequent answer: being tired. There’s this acronym you learn in management training called HALT, which stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired. It’s there to remind you that we are all humans, and we are very often not in a good mood due to one of those basic causes. I can attest that pretty much every tantrum that my daughter has is due to one of these causes. And at the end of the day, adults aren’t that much different than children, just better at hiding (or ignoring) the reasons for being upset.
For me personally, being tired is usually the main reason or amplifier of the other three feelings. I get angry more easily when I’m tired; I get more lonely when I’m tired; and I’m generally more upset when I’m tired (I overeat when I’m tired, which is another unhealthy negative). Asking myself this question usually doesn’t make me not upset but it does help a bit because identifying the proximate cause (even if multifactorial) helps me understand that it’s a temporary feeling. If I can get a good night’s sleep (at least for me), it’s magical how many problems that solves. Whatever anxiety, worry, or problem I have seems so much less intense the next day, and I’m able to face it more easily. So this little trick has helped me cope better with the inevitable times when I’m down. Hopefully it helps you too.
Improving Sleep: Ever since I’ve started working full time, I’ve had on and off problems falling asleep at night (or waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep). Most of the times I can’t sleep I can attribute to two primary causes: caffeine and stress. The caffeine part I’ve dealt with for a while by limiting myself to one Coke Zero at lunch per day. I’ve switched to decaf and/or caffeine free drinks for coffee or Coke. I occasionally drink a bit of caffeinated tea or a second can of Coke Zero, but generally I consume a limited amount of caffeine. Whenever the coffee shop mistakenly gives me a caffeinated drink, I always end up awake in bed cursing myself for not double checking. I now know the feeling of being awake due to caffeine, which just feels like my mind can’t get into “sleep mode” (even if my body is tired). It just keeps going despite my best efforts.
Stress is another hard one to deal with because it’s harder to control than caffeine. Thankfully, I’m not working at a startup where stress levels were through the roof so it’s a lot easier to control nowadays. One simple trick is to not work in the evening. Having more “space” (or time as it were) between your work and sleep (including vacations) is probably one of the best ways to deal with it.
Despite having a more balanced work life now, even a bit of stress can prevent me from sleeping. This manifests in me feeling tension in my muscles or being too hot. One intuitive (but maybe not scientific) explanation I heard was that, if you think about it, to fall asleep, by definition your muscles need to be relaxed. You don’t have tension in your muscles when sleeping (mostly true), so you must be able to get to a relaxed state before you get to sleep.
One trick that I’ve been practicing on and off for a while (but am using much more consciously now when I have troubles sleeping) is to lie flat on my back, start to take deep breaths, focus on them, and alternate on each exhale thinking to myself either “relax” and “sleep”. During the exhale, I’m actively trying to relax or “sleep” my muscles. That is, I’m trying to consciously relax my muscles or put them in a “sleep” state (whatever that means to you). Each exhale, I usually can make a small amount of progress where I feel my muscles go into a more relaxed state. I usually try to have my body remain completely still at the same time to help things along. At some point, some of the very relaxed muscles go into a different state, which is hard to describe, but it’s almost like a numb-sleeping kind of state. If I can keep this up long enough, my mind usually starts to drift off to sleep with a relaxed body (assuming not too much caffeine).
Sometimes I’m very tense so it’s even hard to use that trick. In those cases, I picked up another trick from a video about the 4-7-8 technique (although, I remembered it as the 4-5-7 technique), which is basically breathing in for a 4-count, holding your breath for a 5-count, and then breathing out for a 7-count. I usually only need to do this a few cycles to calm my body a bit, then I can move onto the trick above. I don’t use this trick exclusively to go to sleep since it requires a bit more conscious effort so I haven’t been able to doze off while doing it.
I explained some of my methodology to a friend and he said that it sounds an awful lot like meditation. I guess it is? I don’t do much explicit meditation, but boy do I like to get good sleep. So I’m happy to adopt any techniques that can get me better sleep.
Reading on a Screen: Something that I’ve spent a lot less time doing recently is reading. Due to the ever changing schedule with my daughter, I’ve been finding it hard to find a consistent time for reading. And although I still prefer to read on paper, pretty much all the books I’ve actually read this year have been on my phone via the Kindle app. The convenience of always being there means that it’s just more accessible than paper when you’re strapped for time. I’ve just come to accept that it’s better to read on a screen than not read at all.
The other big hurdle I’ve gotten over is to just buy the same book twice, one physical and one Kindle. I like collecting books even if I don’t read them right away (or ever?). In fact, I’ve probably bought more than a dozen physical books that I haven’t even touched this year. But if I really want to start reading it, I’ll just buy another copy for my Kindle app to get me over that friction. The cost of buying a book or two is just so massively out weighed by the potential benefit, that it’s a cost that I’m very willing to pay (even if it’s not the most efficient). What is the point of having money if not to be more productive (actually reading), have more convenience (second copy on Kindle) and/or have a warm fuzzy feeling inside (physical copies).
Parenting: One insight that has become so obvious to me now as a parent is that there is no one right way to parent. This is frustrating from both the perspective of your child because you want to do the “right thing”, but also from the perspective of judging other parents and their kids. The important part about the former is to understand that all kids develop at different paces and have different strengths and weaknesses. It’s very unlikely that the one or two explicit choices you make about your parenting style (vs. the hundreds of unconscious ones, including genetics) are going to make that big of a difference. All of this is to say that you should find something that works for you and your child, and simultaneously accept that your kid is uniquely themselves (and not compare them to other kids as hard as that might be).
The latter point about judging other parents, this is a tough one too because for most of us (including me), our ego is tied to our kids, and feeling good about the choices we made for our kid (even genetically), makes us feel good about ourselves. Some parents even feel the need to evangelize their specific way of raising kids, convinced it’s the best. Going back to my first point: there is no “best way”. It’s hard but I think the best thing we can do for each other is just let parents choose what works for them without all the judgement (outside of obvious abuse scenarios).
Parenting Books: Two books that I’ve read this year on parenting which I thought were insightful: How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen, and The Opposite of Spoiled. The former is more targeted version of the classic book How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen so Kids Will Talk, which I’ve previously read with similar content but targeted for a 2-7 age group. Although there are multiple parenting styles that all probably are good, the ideas espoused in this series is closest to how my wife and me are approaching communication with our child. It’s quite a different style than I was raised on, which is closer to traditional Asian style parenting (not quite a Tiger Mom style though), and this book has really shifted my default ideas on parenting (based on my upbringing) to something that seems to just make much more sense to me.
The other book, The Opposite of Spoiled, touched on several really important topics of raising kids not-spoiled (there’s no real word for that). My family was not wealthy when I was young, and I learned a lot of lessons on how to be frugal, work hard, grateful etc. through that experience (although some of that I’ve actively tried to unlearn but that’s a post for another time). So how can you raise a child who maintains those values but in an environment where money isn’t as scarce? There isn’t a universal answer to this question but this book gives many examples and ideas of how you might go about that. If you’re interested, I suggest you pick up the book and give it a read.
Sensitivity: It’s difficult to understand how others perceive the world but it’s becoming more obvious to me that I experience the five basic senses much less intensely than others. For example, I like looking at nice things like natural scenery but it doesn’t really do that much for me beyond the moment. My sense of smell (and I think taste) seem to be less acute than others around me. I’ve also noticed my hearing is less sensitive than others, and similarly, at least compared to my wife, anecdotally I have a higher pain tolerance. It’s hard to know if it’s more a physical or a mental thing, but it’s definitely a thing (probably multifactorial where they both have feedback loops into each other).
What’s interesting is that things that might excite others like extreme sports or traveling to exotic destinations do a lot less for me. It’s often hard to untangle the social peer pressure to want to go to these places versus how much they actually made me happy. Don’t get me wrong though, I enjoy going to Europe or Asia, but honestly, I value the people I’m traveling with much more than the places I go (although again, it’s hard to say if it’s just due to the way I interpret the world or some other things that are going on). That combined with my natural introvert tendencies make it so that my ideal vacation is easy going with family or really close friends, which fortunately could be most places in the world.
Taking Notes: I watched this video from a philosophy professor named Jeffrey Kaplan who did a nice video series for his students on how to be a good student. One of them was about taking notes that I thought had a lot of good ideas in it. In the context of reading some dense text like a philosophy textbook, he suggested actively summarizing every paragraph, then every fifth paragraph or so summarize the summaries that you made, and then keep doing this recursively until you have a summary of the chapter or book. The main idea is the best way to understand something is to put it in your own words, that is, literally try to make a summary of it. It improves comprehension and recall, and it has the side effect of producing a good set of notes to study from. It’s definitely slower but he makes a compelling argument that it’s more efficient in the long run even on a total time basis.
I never thought about taking notes so systematically when reading, rather I just jotted a thought down any time I read something interesting. This is useful for some types of reading. But the active summarizing note-taking method he explains is better for really dense text because often my mind will wander while reading. Worse yet, I finish reading a section and totally forgot what I read. I practiced using the method for a while, just doing every paragraph, and it was definitely helpful but also more mentally taxing. This also made reading a bigger task, eventually reducing the amount of reading that I did. I ended up going back to just taking notes more casually except when I explicitly wanted to digest something in more detail. This is probably the right balance for now until I have more time to spare, but it was useful to have another trick up my sleeve for better learning.
What You Do: I’ve been casually browsing through Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice for Living, and he had this really good insight that I thought was really important to reflect upon:
You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.
Reflecting on what I spend my time on, it’s basically been family, learning (technical, investing, misc), and work. Those are the major dimensions of who I am right now, which is pretty much how I want it to be. As I wrote above, I hope to have more time for friends later on, and maybe hobbies or interests, but right now family is the number one priority (with work being a necessity). Hopefully, what you do is also as intentional?
Next Year
In 2024, I’m mostly expecting more of the same as 2023: family time, work stuff, and a bunch more learning. Thankfully the pandemic is mostly out of my psyche and I can look forward to more normal things like vacations and spending time with my daughter. Looking back on the last few years and what’s going on around the world, I can’t help but be grateful for everything that I have. Life’s never easy for anyone but I feel that I’ve been given a good roll of the dice so far. And while the last year was a more “normal” year without any big ups or downs for me, I’ll be happy taking as many more of those that I can get. Wishing you and your family a happy and prosperous 2024!
