2024 Out the Door...

Goodbye 2024, you were most certainly a year. Let's skip the shit show that was our national politics and just go personal recap, shall we?

So normally I open up my January 1 post and mark off how I did with goals, but as you all know my January 1 post was all about how I wasn't doing goals this year. That I didn't see the need. It was just going to be a year of doing instead of counting. And it was going to be great...

Okay, so I opened up the March post where I set my goals for the rest of the year. Let's see how I did.

First off no goals was no bueno. So that January whole no goal deal has to be marked as a fail right? Except for the fact that I left open the option that if it wasn't working for me I could go back and add them in later. Boom! Saved by a technicality! Works for me.

Actual reset goals:

Reading I was aiming for 75 books with one nonfiction a month. I read 79 books and 26 of them were nonfiction so a few more than one a month. The other thing I decided to do was switch from Goodreads to Storygraph. Amazon bought Goodreads a few years ago and has been terrible about maintaining it and moderating it. You see review bombing and book drama that is just unnecessary. And honestly, I'm tired of Amazon as a whole so the switch is good. I finished out the year posting on both just to have a tidy wrap up for Goodreads but I won't post on them again. Finished my last book for 2024 last night so it was about perfect.

Storygraph is great and has a ton of features I'm not using but might start. I like them, and you can transfer your Goodreads history if you decide to make the switch.

I actually set a couple fitness goals. One was to lose weight. As you all know that didn't happen as my thyroid was behind the scenes messing with things. But the good news is I found out my thyroid was failing and am now on what seems to be the correct dosage of pretend thyroid juice so hopefully that will all even out. The other thing was I wanted to be able to run a 5K the whole way through, no walking. I say run but I mean jog. I'm slow. But it still counts and I did it. Then I decided to try and get faster and then realized I don't want to be faster. And I actually like jogging/walking splits the best so I'm sticking with that.

Brought back out my calendars to write things down and that works. Brent had me start making checklists on our shared Notes program while he was on sabbatical. I know what I do everyday but he had no clue. And he wanted to help me with the chore list so we both had free time together. I ended up really liking the checklists so I kept them for the rest of the year.

And writing. The goal I set was 208 blogs, 52 fiction, 156 nonfiction. I figured with the start being with a quarter of the year over that was a good stretch goal. But then as the year started to progress I noticed I was on pace to hit that and possible hit the amount I did last year so...I wrote (counting this one) 260 total blog pieces, which is 17 more than I published last year. In that breakdown were 182 nonfiction and 78 fiction posted. It works out to more fiction than 2023 but fewer nonfiction. Breaking down the fiction even more there was a chunk I wrote in 2023 that I posted in 2024 but I also wrote a chunk in 2024 that didn't get posted to the blog so overall I wrote 75 new fiction pieces. I wrote 74 in 2023 so... yeah, I made sure to write one more to count because...

Another switch. I moved (as you know) from using Blogger to using Ghost.Io. Blogger has always broken down how much I post in month and how much I post in a year. Just a little running tally over to the side of my posts. Ghost doesn't do that. So I made sure to double post for the last month here and there so I could wrap that up nice and tidy as well. I won't post on Blogger again, which is crazy. I've used them for 15 years. But this system of being able to mail notifications seems to be working a lot better. Especially since...

After years of waffling I'm finally mostly walking away from Facebook. I couldn't push the button and delete it completely. I wrote a lot about my whys but I also have settled into the routine of not posting on it. It's still there, I went and checked it today and saw a few year end wrap ups and new year wishes. I still need it for Messenger and kept Instagram to check in on family, though I'm not posting there either. Bluesky isn't a perfect replacement but it's okay. I used it like I would have Facebook for December, finished out the POD there, because I like things tidy, but I'll probably figure out a better use for it in 2025.

Which is less than 12 hours away for me.

Happy New Year!