2023 in threes

End of year reflections, for the 10th time.

Three moments of 2023

Not getting Taylor Swift tickets. There was an entire shared national experience of staring at a lightweight HTML page on the Ticketek website that reloaded every few minutes; not counting the folks who did get tickets who you therefore could argue aren’t really Australian anymore. I didn’t even see the screen of anyone who did get tickets, but I do know a few people who got the VIP tickets in earlier and pricier sales. Those are committed people; one also flew to LA to see a concert there, and another bought VIP tickets to every Australian show. National loyalty isn’t their key loyalty.

About an hour after the main sale wrapped up, I got a phone call to say a family member was in hospital and I seriously wondered if somehow Taylor Swift had done it. (For the record: no, and also the family member is better.)

Sitting in a friend’s bathtub at a party. My family went to a friend’s birthday straight from the beach and she offered us a shower. I fell very hard and very suddenly, landing hard but neatly into a bathing position, and spent a few horrible minutes contemplating my mortality. My daughter and I shouted for help but weren’t heard or understood, so we collected ourselves slowly, dressed, and went back to the party.

Keeping my job. My son’s birthday, which every four years falls across the US presidential inauguration — on his seventh birthday we marked his progress in reading by his asking why someone had written “Trump” in the sky — was instead ushered in this year by my employer laying off 6000 US employees abruptly at about 9pm the night before in local time (early in the morning, US time). We talked about it into the midnight of his birthday, “we’ll just have to see, we’ll just have to see.”

I found out about the Australian layoffs some weeks later, on a bus, via a message from a very senior manager trying to confirm the warnings had gone out. You tell me!

I was not laid off, one of my former bosses, and at least one of my former employees, were.

Three meals of 2023

New Year’s at Infinity. Every third or fourth New Years we decide to join some kind of Sydney festivity for it. So a year ago Andrew and I went to Infinity, the rotating restaurant in Sydney Tower. I don’t, at this point, remember anything about the food, although it was fine. I remember that the table next to us was a Canadian couple; the man determined to have a terrible time come what may. They pause the rotation of the floor for the fireworks displays, so unless you are lucky you have to walk around the restaurant to see them. Our neighbour was specifically convinced that his table had been punitively chosen to have no view of the fireworks, and further believed that Chinese patrons had bribed the staff to get the view. And explained this all at length to both his wife and to whichever senior member of the staff drew the short straw that night.

The service was kind of slow and two courses were served this year, after midnight. They kept trying to comp us New Year’s wine, we weren’t sure whether it was for the slow service, the terrible table nearby, or just that they had a lot of leftover wine.

Watermelon and goat’s cheese salad. My mother and her cousins had a family reunion at the Marsden Brewhouse and I ordered this thinking it sounded like a light lunch of, say, cubes of watermelon tossed with crumbled goat’s cheese.

It was actually a rectangular slab of watermelon, like a piece of toast if it came from the world’s largest loaf and was cut three times as thick as toast, with an entire layer of goat’s cheese slathered over the top like peanut butter. No expenses spared level of goat’s cheese.

Quite good honestly, but unexpected.

Management dinner at Kid Kyoto. A few representatives of my management chain were in Sydney in early December and we had dinner at Kid Kyoto. Someone took a bet on ordering a large bottle of sake despite the denials of the table that we would drink that much sake. Again with the watermelon; this time watermelon sashimi. More thinly sliced than at the Marsden Brewhouse.

Three photos of 2023

Dawn over Sydney, from the Iron Cove bridge Autumn leaves As Gideon Nav

Three pleasures of 2023

Watching sunset reflect off Crown Towers. On the one hand, Crown Towers is evil; it took several years for it to be clean enough to begin to operate as a casino. And I don’t love the shape of it either (it’s known as Packer‘s Pecker for a reason).

But it’s all glass, and at sunset it begins by catching fire from top to bottom, and ends all black except for bright orange flame at the top. Someone paid enough money to bottle Sydney Harbour in that building, and Andrew and I paid enough money to watch it burn from the lower floors of the Sofitel mid-year.

Hanging out with my kids in bed. They’ve very large now, and they like to show up in our bed a few times a week to cuddle me, tease each other, and really disturb the peace.

Snorkeling Byron Bay. We dived Julian Rocks in the morning, which was less fun because I hate diving shallower than 5 metres since buoyancy is a pain. We then went back out to snorkel it with the kids in the afternoon, having perhaps optimistically represented the younger one’s swimming ability to the dive shop. But the snorkelling was in the lee of the rocks, and led by a freediver who made it her business to go down and point out the turtles. My younger child refused to be towed and we all swam out over the sharks together.

Three news stories from 2023

The death toll in Gaza will pass 10,000 children alone, early in 2024.

The Indigenous Voice referendum failed. Since this was thought to be doomed weeks and months in advance — referenda rarely pass in Australia without the support of the Opposition, and it was polling poorly — I think there was considerable government appetite to quietly move on, and so it did, right into the NZYQ v Minister for Immigration pit. A thoroughly ignoble and unoptimistic year in Australian race politics. What now?

The trial of Sam Bankman-Fried served as a rare moment when the villain was pretty obvious and the system recognised such.

Three sensations from 2023

Wind from the south. 2022 was a year without Sydney’s southerly busters but with the return of more normal summer weather, so too the southerly returned in 2023 and with it the 5 seconds of relief between opening the humid still house to the cool wind and closing it up again because the wind is now a gale.

Bruises on my wrists from dumbbells. I’ve been taking weights classes for about a year and a half, which normally use dumbells because it’s quicker to set them up than it is to set up a bar. But I now deadlift into a weight range where if I don’t balance the dumbbells exactly right in my hands, they lean onto my wrists and leave bruises.

Pain in my right heel. I’m more than 12 months into a bout of plantar fasciitis, which largely killed my long walks, one of my best stress relief activities. It ranges from “have to steel myself to get out of bed” through to “niggles after walking several kilometres”, largely depending on how recently I have embraced my fated destiny to spend the rest of my life in shoes mostly made out of foam.

Three sadnesses of 2023

Family funerals in my family tend to fall on the bluest and clearest of days, and my mother’s uncle’s was no different. His widow, my grandmother’s last living sister, sat crying in the front row, when she had enough energy to be awake at all.

Almost everyone I know has left the California Bay Area. It’s still my main business travel destination, but no more Muir Wood magic or rainy weekends in Sonoma. I went to the Bay Area only briefly this year, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been to California but not San Francisco.

My son can’t catch a break. First year in three without a major ear surgery (“I was right up near his brain!” in the post surgical briefing) involved a bad bout of influenza, another bad bout of some other respiratory thing that a RAT couldn’t help us with, a concussion from a schoolmate, and a knee dislocation, all up not far off an entire missed school term.

Three plans for 2024

Eclipse. We’ll see the eclipse of April 8 from Ontario and then do an as yet poorly planned roadtrip to New York City over the course of 3 weeks. The flights are booked, at least.

One million cheer meets and cricket games. Much like in 2023. And 2022. And so it is to be in 2024. It emerges, much to everyone’s surprise, that we are not the same people as our children, and they are going to spend their childhood perfecting back handsprings and cut shots, and probably not any dialect of the BASIC programming language.

Stand-up paddleboarding. Not as a regular thing, it’s just that my children enjoy it enough that we occasionally plan an outing around it. Again with the schism between generations; I am more of a kayak person.

Three hopes for 2024

Changing house. Either moving or beginning some renovations. How very Sydney.

Photo backlog. I’d really like to do this. Just like I would have liked to do it this past year. But I’d still really like to do it.

Some form of music. This is even worse than the photo backlog, I’ve been claiming to want to do some form of music or dance lessons for 10 years now. But if my daughter can do two dance troupes and two cheer teams, surely I can do one choir or something. That’s the dream.

I’ll add one bonus. I’m just going to say it, from my lips to the universe’s ears: I want a supernova visible to the naked eye in 2024.

2024 in threes

End of year reflections.

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

Droplets on trees, Letchworth State Park Tulips, Governors Island Beachgoers and whale watchers, Bondi

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.)