2024 was a year of doing stuff. It’s entirely appropriate that I’m finishing this post on New Year’s Eve sitting in Logan airport getting ready to head home from the last trip of the year. In retrospect, it’s entirely plausible that after COVID restricted our activity we overcorrected slightly.

Maybe more than slightly.

Maybe even a lot.

In all, I spent 90 days at or traveling to/from a significant, out of the ordinary event. What sort of events? 28 concerts and 1 music festival resulting in around 120 hours of live music from around 97 bands (I had to miss 6 shows for various reasons, a thing that I regret and that might have saved me), 21 hockey games (most on the road), 5 musicals or plays, a standup set, a class, a book convention, a tattoo convention, 53 days in a hotel, 24 flights, and a partridge in a pear tree (plus or minus on bird/tree combo).

In addition to going out and doing stuff, we also hosted nearly 70 gaming sessions accounting for more than 200 hours of tabletop gaming, parties, gatherings, and dinners.

Even beyond “doing stuff” it was a year of substantial churn. My employer filing for bankruptcy and being acquired by a MUCH larger company occupied a ton of my head space for the year, and events both personal and global took up most of the rest. It was an enjoyable, satisfying, exhausting year. More than once Ger and I looked at the week ahead and thought, “did this seem like a good idea at some point?”

My goal for 2025 is to slow down. I’m limiting concerts to about a dozen, travel to about half that, and spending considerably!

Hopefully your 2024 can end peacefully and your 2025 can begin with only the most minimal of hangovers. Time for me to put my phone into airplane mode and go home!