In 2021 Wellington managed to give Delta the slip twice, the council almost imploded, Transmission Gully didn't open, and the city said goodbye to its celebrity cat Mittens.
It's fair to say the capital didn't have a cracking year, but there were a few moments, projects, and people tobe proud of.
While Auckland endured the heavy burden of an ongoing alert level 4 lockdown, accepting life at Delta level 2 was still a hard pill to swallow when there hadn't been any community cases for some time.
The first time Delta showed its face in Wellington was when a tourist travelled from Sydney in June and unknowingly brought the virus with him.
Much chatter was made about the resulting locations of interest - the man truly had a quintessentially Wellington experience.
He visited the likes of Te Papa to see the new Surrealist art exhibition, he visited Unity Books, Pickle & Pie, Highwater Eatery, Floridita's and the Weta Cave shop.
He and his partner tested positive for the virus after arriving back in Australia, yet not a single case was detected in Wellington over the ensuing weeks.
Cases of the Delta variant did, however, arrive in Wellington from Auckland when Covid-19 took hold in the city of sails and the country was plunged into lockdown.
The cases in the capital were caught early enough that in as little as a month all 17 community cases were recovered.
Meanwhile, Wellington City Council will be hoping the New Year is less chaotic than how 2021 started.
Wellington mayor Andy Foster. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Deliberations over the city's Long Term Plan, a critical budget considering Wellington's crisis of broken poo pipes, quickly turned into a shambles.
Mayor Andy Foster's worst moment was undoubtedly emailing councillors at an ungodly hour of the morning to propose a string of amendments to the very plan he had only announced days before.
He found himself in a full-blown stoush over his proposal to privatise a part of the central library building.
Furthermore, the Green Party issued a "please explain" after deputy mayor Sarah Free, who ran on the party ticket, voted against tripling the cycleway budget.
By the end of February tensions had reached boiling point and Foster announced an independent review of the council after the public's belief in their ability as councillors had been shaken and eroded.
The review did somewhat draw a line in the sand but its findings weren't particularly damning.
Foster soon landed back in the hot seat when he was found to have breached the council's code of conduct.
He avoided formal censure and was told to apologise after it was claimed he shared potentially defamatory and previously discredited information before a controversial Shelly Bay development vote.
Shelly Bay, Miramar, Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Speaking of Shelly Bay, the development still hasn't happened. The land continues to be occupied while developers work out how to get spades in the ground.
Speaking of spades in the ground, Wellington's multi-billion-dollar transport project has finally started work, but only on two intersections to improve them for pedestrians.
Not exactly impressive, but a spade is a spade.
Let's Get Wellington Moving is in good company - Transmission Gully did not manage to open - it was meant to be finished last year.
By the way, the botched Island Bay cycleway still isn't fixed either. It's taken so long to do anything about the cycleway that even Let's Get Wellington Moving has caught up and intervened with a solution because mass rapid transit is planned for the southern suburb.
Mittens the cat is a Wellington personality. Photo / Facebook
To top it all off, Mittens the celebrity cat famous for warndering around the central city and making himself at home wherever he pleases, is packing up his bags and moving to Auckland, a truly devastating turn of events.
It also rained a lot in December.
But peppered among a gloomy year there are things to celebrate.
Capital and Coast was the second DHB in the country to reach the 90 per cent fully vaccinated milestone.
The council agreed to a draft district plan that would drastically change the rules and allow higher buildings, shrink character areas and intensify areas around train stations.
A plan was also announced to build a 147km network of safer bike routes across Wellington within the next decade. It's a considerable increase from the 23km that currently exists.
Jemima Gazley's legacy has left her family with a 'huge warm glow'. Photo / Supplied
The person Wellingtonians can be most proud of is teenager Jemima Gazley, who is the New Zealand Herald's 2021 Our Heroes award winner for her selfless campaign for research and funding into brain cancer, in the final weeks she was succumbing to the disease.
I'm not going to attempt to make any predictions for 2022, but what I do know is that there is nowhere else in the country I'd rather be than Wellington.
• Senior Wellington journalist Georgina Campbell's fortnightly column looks closely at issues in the capital.
