This was fun: it took me exactly two weeks to go from writing "with luck my equipment roster will remain mostly unchanged next year" – and sincerely meaning it — to swapping out my XT10 for an XT2 and adding the XF80mm macro. It has been a while since I've owned a good long macro, or had a weather-sealed system, and I hadn't realized just how much I've missed those capabilities. Having a camera as good as the XT2 also shifts some weight away from my big old Nikon, so perhaps I may finally meet my 2017 goal of ending a year with fewer cameras than I started it with.

Other goals from 2017 are being carried forward as well. Music, podcasts, and even Twitter have been great ways of finding different and interesting people to listen to, so that will continue. I've also reduced some of my phone neediness, reducing the beeps and prompts it provides, becoming okay with it being out of arm's reach sometimes, and finding entire tasks that I don't need it for, like 'reading'. So being more discerning with my electronics will continue.

New for 2018, but drawing from seeds from last year, is the intention of becoming more connected to the living things around me. Specifically: butterflies. They're pretty, entertaining, and are active in good weather, making them a suitable camera subject. But more than that they're an entry point. Learning butterflies means learning what's important to butterflies, so I'll need to learn about their plants and what's important to those plants, and so on through the inevitability of interconnectedness. And part of that will also be connecting with people who are interested in what I'm interested it, and all of the benefits and ripples from that as well.

Powerful animals, butterflies. It's going to be a good year.