2024 was an eventful year. The highlight of the year was my wife finishing her PhD in May. The final run up to her dissertation defense was intense, but the payoff was great and we celebrated her graduation with a party at our favorite brewery. Although I wrote last year about it being our last year in the house, she got a postdoc at the same university so we’re staying put for a few more years. That process was stressful, but it is nice to get to stay here for a little while longer. I also wrote about work last year, but nothing particularly interesting comes to mind for 2024, so I’ll just say I’m enjoying my job and working every day at incremental improvement has been bringing good results. There’s some interesting stuff coming up in the pipeline so I’ll probably talk about work more next year.

Our travel for the year started with going to the Netherlands for a friend’s wedding in February. We started off in Amsterdam for the bachelor party and then spent the weekend in the small town where the wedding was held. It was a great time, except most of the groomsmen ended up with food poisoning (amusingly from a Michelin star restaurant). We joked that we had the tamest possible bachelor party for Amsterdam and most of us were still down for the count. Luckily the groom was fine so everything else went well so it was certainly memorable. We went to Disney World in March for my wife’s birthday, which was fun as always.

We wanted to go on a trip to celebrate my wife’s graduation, but didn’t plan anything specific becuase we thought we’d be moving. She found a cheap Alaskan cruise on the Norwegian Jewel that we booked only a few weeks out. We flew to Anchorage and after spending the night there took a scenic train to Seward where we boarded the ship. The train ride was incredible. The first third was along a highway, so there wasn’t much different of a view, but after the train went further away from the highway we got to see so much more than we would have in a car. We saw a few glaciers, a moose, tons of bald eagles, and some incredible mountains. The cruise had a day at sea to visit Hubbard Glacier, and stops in Icy Straight Point (a tourist trap, but we got some great whale watching), Juneau, Skagway (also a tourist trap, but again, great scenery), and Ketchikan before ending in Vancouver. That itinerary was great becuase the ship was basically a floating hotel. We woke up in a new place, spent the day on land, and came back on the ship for dinner. The highlight of the trip was a group canoe trip to Mendenhall Glacier. We canoed from the other side of the lake right up to the side of the glacier, which was breathtaking. Ketchikan was our favorite town because it felt the most like a real place where people actually live. My favorite thing there was visiting the Totem Heritage Center. It was fascinating to learn about the history and preservation of such an important part of the Indigenous culture of the area and heartbreaking to see how much of it was destroyed.

It was also a good year for me for hobbies. I’ve continued playing in the PennMed Symphony Orchestra and our music selection for the fall was excellent. The highlight for me was Florence Price ’s Symphony no. 3. I had a great reading year, with 48 books (or 42, depending on how you count it). I’ll do a separate post about the year’s reading. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to, either on my website or writing fiction. I did write a few short stories, including two finished and one in progress as part of Writing Month after the AI-related implosion of NaNoWriMo. Even though I didn’t write as much as I wanted to, it still felt good to finish some stories. One big hobby change this year was racing in a league in iRacing. I ran the full season of the Crown Jewel Racing Truck Series, which ran full-length NASCAR truck series races on Monday nights. It was really cool racing with mostly the same people every week. I finished 5th in the season standings, with zero wins but four second-place finishes. I’m racing this same series again in 2025, which should be fun. We also started going to trivia at our favorite brewery consistently with the same group of people. It’s great to have a scheduled time to see friends every week.

My goals for 2025 are very similar to last year’s.

• Phone Use: I’ve successfully replaced my bedtime phone use with reading books, but I still spend way too much time on my phone during the day. I spend a decent amount of time on Mastodon, which is great, but I also spend a ton of time on Instagram, which I really need to curtail. It’s such a massive time suck and I honestly don’t enjoy it half the time. I’m planning on cutting that way back.
• Health: I didn’t ride my bike as much as I wanted to this year, so I’m going to work on that. When I’m not riding outside, I want to try to fit in a half hour ride on the spin bike most days. I think we’ve been doing a pretty good job with healthy eating, especially cutting down how often we get takeout. I want to keep that up and also reduce my alcohol consumption.
• Writing: I really just need to start a habit of writing something every day. Whether it’s working on a short story, writing a blog post, or making some notes for a novel outline, making a habit of getting some words on the page every day will get me closer to where I want to be. My goal is to submit a least two short stories by the end of the year. If it’s possible I’d also like to outline and start some serious work on a novel.
• Activism: I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do or what to call this one, but I want to do something to try to make the world better in the face of gestures broadly at everything going on. I want to start being more active in the things I care about, whether that’s contacting my representatives, starting to use my bike for transportation, doing more to cut consumption and waste, or volunteering. I’m leaving this open ended.
• Friends: I want to focus on relationships with friends and making time for seeing people. Trivia has been great, but it’d also be good to have more game nights and just generally hanging out.

With everything going on in the US, it’s difficult to be excited about 2025, but I’m going into the year thankful for what I have and looking forward to finding joy wherever we can. Happy new year!