2024 was quite a year. It had some good, it had some bad, and I can’t believe it’s coming to a close. I had to say goodbye to my cat Cookie, I turned 40, I ran a lot, and I proceeded to watch in horror as American voters decided to turn towards authoritarianism and a dumpster fire. But I think I’m going to try to focus on the positives.
Fitness
Fitness-wise, it was a good year for me.
I’m continuing to play hockey. I’m on 2 teams and occasionally sub for a 3rd. I’ve continued to play, and I believe improve, in net as goalie for the team in the lower league, and captain and skate out for the other. Both teams have found some success this year, but are still trying to take that next step. Hopefully the upcoming seasons will allow us to do just that.
My lifting routine has sort of been in a holding pattern. Towards the end of the year I had been putting in a lot of time running and hadn’t focused all that much on lifting. I’m not feeling like I’m losing my strength, I just haven’t been gaining as much as I had previously. I’m okay with that. The winter months are upon us so the weather might necessitate some more indoor activities.
Running was good to me this year. After finding a better way to run, I’ve been able to get out more and feel better afterwards. I’ve been able to break past the distance plateaus I was dealing with and not feel like death after. I’m hoping the winter doesn’t stop me from running altogether.
Development Skills
I started the year working a lot with Blazor both at work and at home. I’ve been enjoying working with it for bigger projects. I’ve also been delving back into the basics with my media repository. I’ve got it running pure HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript. I’ve even sprinkled in some web components for good measure. It’s also a good reminder of how good the core standards of web development really are.
Travel
My wife and I didn’t travel as far as we had previous years, but we still managed some fun trips. We went out to Hershey in February to wander around and check out some of the local breweries and distilleries. We went to Cape May (of course) a few times, and celebrated my 40th birthday with a trip to New York City where we were able to stay near Bryant Park and enjoy some coffee, pastries, and some quiet time to start each day before venturing out. We also spent a long(ish) weekend in Stroudsburg while there to see two of my favorite bands headline what was an amazing concert.
Everything Else
The one thing I’ve started to do more of this year is play the guitar. I still need improvement, but I’m slowly getting better and even have figured out how to play some songs by my favorite artists, albeit poorly.
I’ve continued journaling the analog way with a fountain pen and a little notebook. I find it’s a good way to end the night with some reflection on the day.
I also spent more time catching up on my video game backlog than I have in the last several years. I finished the Horizon, Mass Effect Trilogy, and Last of Us games, and have started on the new God of War games. More on that in one of my next posts.
My 2024 Aspirations
Looking back at the aspirations I had to start the year, I didn’t complete everything, but that’s okay. I feel good about all of it.
Average 5 Days a Week Working Out
I was able to average 5.6 days a week working out, so this was a success. I regressed a little bit in December, but I was able to continue to stay active. It was a slog sometimes, but it’s important to me.
Finish a Side Project
I went into this year with two ideas of what to work on, hoping to finish one. As it turns out, I didn’t finish either of them, but instead started and finished a third.
I was getting annoyed by the long build times on 11ty because it was fetching data from Notion’s API. To speed it up, I built my own system to manage my media pages. I called it Wags Media Repository. It’s kind of a simple CRUD (Create, Read, Update & Delete) web application, but it does the job. As I build my site, I pull the data into JSON files and they build the pages. It might not be quite as dynamic as Notion’s API, but it works well for me.
I even built it three times. Once in Blazor thinking that my NAS could run Docker (spoiler, it could not), a second time with a Node.js API and a React frontend. A third time, keeping the Node.js backend, but sticking with a plain HTML/CSS/JS frontend. It helped that I used a SQLite database so I just had to adjust how I interface with it. I’m running it off my NAS and am making the occasional tweaks to it to improve it based on my usage.
Write 100 Blog Posts
I’m at 109 posts this year, so I can call this a success. I’ve been wanting to write and share more so this aspiration has helped give me the oomph I needed.
Finish my Story
I didn’t finish my story this year. I tried to spend more time writing in November, but lost the motivation when I couldn’t concentrate after the election results. The only thing I can say is that the story was going to start off as a short story, but now it’s extended itself into the novella and maybe even novel territory. I’ve written a decent amount, just not enough, and not enough to get it near completion.
Finish the Sunroom
With everything going on in my life, I just never got around to working on the sunroom. 2025 will hopefully bring different results.
Read 40 Books
I read 44 books in 2024 so this was a success for me. Some books were short, some were longer. Some books I flew through, others required more focus. Either way, I continued to finish most days on the couch with a book in my hand and that makes me happy.
Here’s to a good 2025.