Three moments of 2024
I paddled a kayak on Budgewoi Lake, and the family glided up to the next group of black swans as the sun reflected off the water. The kids were squabbling to various degrees on their shared paddleboard, neither agreeing to transfer to the kayak to get away from the other though.
We had been in Canada for an entire recovery day after the flights from Australia — my daughter airsick nearly the whole nineteen hours of flying — and had driven east for hours just barely out-running the cloud cover that would have hidden the eclipse from us in Ontario. With the partial eclipse already in progress, we made it to a gas station car park in Mont-Saint-Grégoire, and, both remembering that any automatically triggered outdoor lights will come on during total eclipses, and thinking that a gas station car park wasn’t quite the vibe, anyway I suggested a short walk up the street into the deserted churchyard of Église de Saint-Grégoire-le-Grand. Through the barest of cloud, we saw the sun wink off. A semitrailer rattled by, covered in night lights.
My boss and I passed a car wreck driving on a San Francisco Bay Area highway, with someone slumped motionless behind the wheel. We had an argument about whether to stop and help — aside from the risk of being hit as well, which exists in Australia too, I failed to consider the apparently real risk of getting shot, which is quite a lot lower in Australia — and also about whether to call emergency services at all. (No to stopping, yes to emergency services. I do not know whether the person in the car lived.)
Three meals of 2024
Not even meals I ate, and so not in the three, but Andrew ate a large heaped plate of poutine with copious jalapeños in Montreal and backed it up a week or so later with a Rochester trash plate, and not a small one of those. Those particular meals are etched in several people’s memories, especially people who are unused to his ability to happily eat about three meals at once and then just not eat for about a day following.
Mine:
My birthday dinner in Montreal, mostly the cheese plate which came out with a birthday sparkler on it.
A wildly overcatered group dinner at The Fenwick with many visitors to Australia; we actually started with a water taxi over to the Opera House for a million selfies. Several people including me took home a lot of lamb.
ester, for the second time this year. Kefir and fat salmon roe on potato bread to start. I usually prefer entrées to mains at fine dining places, but the duck with — plums? cherries? — was the highlight.
Three photos of 2024
Three pleasures of 2024
My increasingly giant children, always. Increasingly practical, always thoughtful, still cuddly. A week or so ago I showed them MyNoise on my phone when they visited me in bed in the dark, and after the elder who loves rain like me developed a “storm on the roof” mix, the younger made a mix of all of the worst parts of the Hurricane Irma recordings while the elder rolled around laughing in the dark.
I bought a digital photo frame for my desk at work. It’s a Google Nest Hub Max, which is overkill for the task, but most of the digital photo frame market is a “subscribe for $90 a month to display 10 photographs at 1024×768” mess, so overkill it is. I set up a dedicated album for pictures of my family and let it run, and it’s been heartwarming and good inspo to get through the photo backlog, of which more to come. A new memory every 10 minutes. Really, I’ve managed to make my children count twice.
Sportswear that fits. Simple pleasures, but I have enjoyed sliding into my Under Armour workout bras and my Beefcake one pieces ready to face the world. where the world is variously deadlifts, mid-intermediate ski slopes, or a pool.
Three news stories from 2024
As of November, Richard Scolyer remained free of recurrence of his glioblastoma, following immunetherapy treatments based on his work treating melanoma. Scolyer’s therapy isn’t yet in trials for glioblastoma (he’s self-experimenting); in many ways the story is the radical improvement in melanoma survival for patients with later stage disease that in part comes from his work with Georgina Long. Long and Scolyer are Australians of the Year.
Rural and regional abortion access in NSW was spotlighted, it was variously restricted and unrestricted by multiple public hospitals, including Orange and Queanbeyan.
The CrowdStrike outage was big news in Australia because, unlike in much of the world, it occurred in business hours here, and it affected the operation of (at least) the ABC quite significantly, so we had rolling and fairly apocalyptic coverage. It wasn’t easy to spend money in Coles supermarkets that afternoon, and my husband was part of a rental car expedition from the Sunshine Coast to Sydney the next day due to Jetstar being affected, but it faded quite quickly.
Three sensations from 2024
The SkiErg machine is not very popular at the work gym I go to, which means that I have pretty free access to it during cardio blocks in my classes. I turn on the fan that sits next to it, and in the rest periods I walk in front of the fan and enjoy not being strapped to a rowing machine unlike everyone else who made poor choices that day.
Driving back to Santa Clara from Los Gatos after dinner, the same night as the aforementioned car wreck but much later, trying to deal with poorly lit or absent lane markings and the general poor state of Californian freeways. My eyes burned with conscious alertness. Never again without glasses! My contact lenses don’t have astigmatism correction, which I normally don’t notice, but for Californian night driving I will take all the help I can get.
Splashing in warm water fountains at SeaWorld, a pre-cheerleading nationals outing. Not unpleasant, but not as refreshing as I needed on a warm and humid Queensland day. An extremely mid-cool off.
Three plans for 2025
In a few weeks, we are heading to Japan for a few days in Tokyo, skiing Myoko Kagen, and finally Kyoto. I wanted to avoid the Australian thing of arrive, ski, leave, so instead we will do Japanese cities in the off-season.
I already have tickets booked for a work trip to California in March, where I guess I will wear glasses for night driving. The correct number of California work trips for me in 2025 is likely three, but settled plans are only one so far and I’m not exactly excited for two, let alone three. I’ve been to California five times already since the Australian border re-opened in 2022, and the trips are all very settled now; arrive Monday for ten or eleven nights, stay in South Bay, commit to at least one weekend excursion elsewhere. It’s a long way to go.
This year I am taking on a wider strategic responsibility at work. This is mostly a plan to plan; the first step is that I am to write the strategic plan!
Three hopes for 2025
Two family intercontinental trips in nine months is a lot! Yes, obviously a good lot, but a lot. So I hope for a local holiday that is more lying around on a porch in the golden hour, reading.
There’s always some left-by-the-wayside hobby that I put in these, and the return is frankly low, but this year I will nominate wanting to do a few scuba dives, as part of building up to a snorkel/dive trip before my children are adults; I’ve tended to treat this as the time they vanish into a puff of smoke, all evidence of other people holidaying with their adult children to the contrary.
I spent a lot of the year re-arranging how I stored my backlog of photographs, and it has, actually, started to pay off in getting through sorting and uploading the backlog, which is how I got through May 2020 to August 2020 in about a month’s work. My hope for the end of 2025 is to be… caught up to the end of 2022. Three years behind beats four and a half. The huge number of photos of Europe in mid-2022 are where the pain is lurking. (This is also the third year running that catching up on the photography backlog has been a hope for the following year! I am genuinely happy to have made progress in 2024 and to have unearthed some beautiful 2020-era shots.)