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Now that we are past Christmas, it is time to think about how tomorrow kicks off a completely arbitrary time marker new year, which means that we have a tendency to look back on the current-yet-soon-to-be old year and figure out if we did it right or not. I think overall I did 2024 just fine, but one thing I definitely wasn’t great at was carving out time to write, which is something that I keep thinking I should get better at while not really getting any better at it. Oh well.

I think I did a pretty good year in review on this year’s annual(ish) birthday post so I don’t need to rehash it. After my birthday this year, I went to a work conference in North Carolina, which was fine, then we went to Stratford again in Canada to watch some plays (this year’s selections were both Shakespeare: Cymbeline and Twelfth Night, both of which were fantastic), then I got covid which is always a delight, by which I mean not a delight in case you were wondering, then we went to Wisconsin and stayed in a cabin and ate pancakes and went to a winery and a brewery and also went on a boat tour, then we stayed home for a little while before traveling all the way to the other end of Michigan to the Porcupine Mountains/Lake Superior for a few days to Just Fucking Chill (photo above is of my dog on this trip: he has 0 chill — please note the crazy eyes). Since then we’ve mostly been home, had a couple of holidays, and here we are.

In the coming year, I don’t know what I’ll get up to. Gonna continue to try to work in writing time; maybe if I do less of the not being at home I will write more? Maybe? Not sure. It’s a mystery we can all unravel together.

Something.

Books

In addition to not meeting my goal of a weekly post here, I also didn’t meet my goal of… I forgot how many books I said I was going to read this year, but I only got through 10. I am working on #11, and I might make it by the end of the year — we shall see. The reason I read so few was because I spent 3 months halfheartedly trying to read Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, which I simultaneously thought was pretty good, but it was also just so… dense. Like every page was a wall of prose. I really did want to know how it turned out, but I just also didn’t want to read it. I tried (in fits and starts) from July – September until finally admitting that I was never going to finish it and moving on.

I mentioned in an earlier post some of my reading (Evil Eye and Demon Copperhead). I would say that the best book I read this year was Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver because goddamn, and the other best book I read this year was The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Message is very worth your time if you haven’t read it yet — I have always admired Coates’s writing, and this book reinforced my admiration. It has haunted my thoughts since finishing it — he did his job beautifully.

Food Ham

Many years ago, I watched an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown where I think he went to Salamanca, Spain. In that episode, which feels maybe like I dreamed it, he went to a place that cures hams in a cave because the air in the cave has the right bacterial composition to perfectly cure a ham. And I think he was with Mario Batali? Maybe? Anyway they went and bought a cave ham and the proprietor of the cave ham store sewed the ham into a bladder and hung it up in the cave and then Bourdain could go back in a year and his cave ham would be ready. And all of that sounds terribly unpleasant but I swear to you that I think about cave ham regularly, mostly because I am fascinated by the idea that somebody figured out that process and… how?

Anyway I went to Spain this year, which was my favorite vacation ever and I don’t know if I had any cave ham while I was there, but I did eat a lot of serrano ham. My husband took a picture of me eating a piece of it and guys, it like… melts. Anyway, my face in the picture is not staged, I was just really enjoying it that much.

You can’t bring a ham through customs, anyway. I checked.

Memories

Mentioned previously: this year I had to sell my childhood home, which turned out to be just fine, though I found lots of stuff. My mom apparently decided at some point that one way to deal with stuff was just to put it all in unlabeled plastic bins in the basement, which was like… thanks, now I have to go through about 20 bins of things that are haphazardly filled with things that are both awesome and garbage. It was very time-consuming and I spent pretty much the whole spring doing it. (Well, not just me, the whole family helped with clearing out the house, but I had to evaluate the bins because I was the only person who would be able to tell if something was in any way significant to me or not.)

You know how you remember things a certain way, and then evidence pops up to show you that what you remember is missing details? Yeah?

All of that to say:

How is it that I forgot that when I was in 11th grade I apparently watched Baywatch every afternoon when I got home from school?

(I know this because my youth pastor at the time had me do a time study for two weeks and literally every weekday I mentioned watching Baywatch. I found this time study written on loose leaf notebook paper in a random binder.)

Art

Busy year in many ways. I already mentioned that I am bad about finding time to write but always hoping to get better. It’s probably going to get more challenging, since my workplace is sending us back to the office for 60% of the workweek, which also will add 6 hours of driving back to my life (thanks guys), and one thing I know for sure is that commuting doesn’t make me come home ready to do anything other than stare into space for awhile and perhaps also be mad about how dumb it is that I still have to drive a car an hour to get home instead of being able to teleport because I thought I was supposed to be living in the future.

Anyway, I did take a LOT of photos this year of all sorts of things but I also don’t really ever do anything with them. What am I supposed to do with photos I’ve taken, you guys?

One thing I don’t do is post them to Flickr. (Sharing because I’ve gotten several emails about MyFlickrYear so I finally opened it and had a chuckle. I Am Obviously Killing It.)

I used to post to Flickr once a day or so but everyone left for Facebook, I think. Overall that was a bad idea, guys. Facebook is… well fun isn’t a word I’d use for it. I lump Instagram into that as well. Just… nearly unusable with all the ads and suggested posts.

Anyway, what do we do with the stuff that we create that we’d like to share, and maybe even discuss, but social media is a dumpster fire? Genuine question to anyone who reads this. I miss when we had discussions online and now we just maybe hit like on each other’s posts if the algorithm gods allow us to see each other’s posts and move on.

I think this section was supposed to be about art and not about things that annoy and/or frustrate me, but a lot about how we share and talk about art annoys and/or frustrates me, so there’s that.

I would like to make more art this year, or share the art I made. I hesitate to call my photographs art, but then, they’re not all bad either, so maybe they count. I would like to get out at night more and see more stars. By the end of 2025, I would like to take a sweet photo of the Milky Way. I would like to see more dark skies.

An aside:

One of my favorite memories is of the night Terry and I got engaged. The engagement part was cool, but then we drove back to our motel in the Grand Canyon and by the time we got there the last light of the day had gone and the stars and started really coming out, and I got out of the car and said something brilliant like “Oh my God would you look at that?” Our motel had lawn chairs on the porch outside the door and we dragged them out to the parking lot and just… looked up in reverent silence. I think maybe we were also holding hands, because we had just gotten engaged and we are nothing if not just so cute.

Then maybe 10 minutes later another person arrived at the motel, and his family all went inside, but he looked up and said “OH MY GOD YOU GUYS” and then tried to drag his family outside but they weren’t having it.

The number of stars you can see in the Grand Canyon is unbelievable.

End aside.

I would like to do more theater. Last year nearly every time a play was on I was either traveling or too busy trying to sell mom’s house, but this year my travel schedule is lighter (so far) and mom’s house is sold so I don’t have to do that again. (I am in a play right now that is going up in February but we haven’t rehearsed yet.)

I don’t really do resolutions but I would like to be intentional about making the time to create more things that I enjoy. That seems good enough.

A poem

i am running into a new year

By Lucille Clifton

i am running into a new year

and the old years blow back

like a wind

that i catch in my hair

like strong fingers like

all my old promises and

it will be hard to let go

of what i said to myself

about myself

when i was sixteen and

twenty-six and thirty-six

even thirty-six but

i am running into a new year

and i beg what i love and

i leave to forgive me