Which means going to bed before 11 p.m. Technically, I might still be up reading at midnight, so I might be awake for the calendar to flip from 2024 to 2025, the year in which flying cars and baby machines become reality.
I am surprised as I type this that I haven’t heard any fireworks. Maybe people are just quietly drinking heavily instead.
Happy new year.
UPDATE: It seems one person had a small cache of fireworks, and they set them off precisely at midnight. It lasted less than a minute, so my drinking heavily theory was probably correct.
Here’s hoping that 2025 will be better than 2024. I mean, maybe aliens will save us. FOR DINNER. Or maybe they’ll save us because they find us worth saving. It could happen.
And if it doesn’t, then maybe 2025 will be better in other ways. I can’t think of them right now, but I am optimistic that they will come to me in time. Presumably before 2025 concludes one year from today.
Clearing skies, as captured by me on my officially ancient iPhone 12, December 28, 2024
I wasn’t sure how to summarize the year. It was not a good year. Bad things happened, and the stage is set for more bad things to happen in 2025. Global politics are a mess and fascism is on the rise.
I won’t even mention the U.S. election except to say that Americans have given themselves a generational black eye by putting Trump back in the White House when he belongs in jail. So much for accountability and consequences.
For me, the year was a series of health-related issues. I got sick twice for the first time in years, one minor illness, one that lingered a bit. I hurt my right knee again, but managed to bounce back and resumed running sooner than I had in 2023. I even posted some of my best run times in two years, which was nice. But health problems dogged me right to the end. I am only a day out from weeks of antibiotics to deal with a bacteria infection. This wiped out most of December, but I did manage to lose weight and keep most of it off as a result.
My return to running yesterday ended in disaster, as noted in an earlier post, when I tripped and fell hard on a sidewalk. A day later and I feel like I’m recovering from a car crash. Do not recommend.
Strata nonsense consumed much of my time. Too much. Stress was a constant companion. I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel, or dark. I just see the tunnel and it is very long.
Hopefully I’ll emerge from it in 2025.
May we all get through the next year intact.
Good riddance to 2024.
A cat trying, symbolically, to run from the year that was:
EDIT: Comics Outta Context had an apt choice to ring in the new year:
