2024 Year in Review

I am fairly sure this is the latest I have ever done a year in review. Let’s just say that I’ve been crazy busy. Anyway, here we go in the same format I’ve used for several years now.

The worst thing that happened in 2024 was the whole fiasco with the HVAC leak in late June / early July. Which turned out to be due to a blockage from a line in a unit above mine, so didn’t involve as much money as it might have, but it was still very stressful.

Beyond that, there was also some medical stuff. Having cataract surgery was actually a really good thing. It was quite miraculous the morning after the first eye was done when I could read titles of books across the bedroom without putting on my glasses. (The second eye also went well, but that was a less dramatic change.) The knee issues that I had later in the year were also a big deal. Let’s just say I have good days and I have bad days. Getting old sucks.


Books: I read only 36 books in 2024, which is pathetically few for me. That was 14 non-fiction books and 22 fiction books. Favorites were Sleeping With the Fishes by Mary Janice Davidson, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehotto Hindman, Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, and a couple of Dick Francis mysteries. The worst book I read during the year was The Naked Face by Sidney Sheldon, a suspense novel full of racism and homophobia.

I didn’t manage any used bookstore runs over the year, though I did give away 4 books. I have at least 60 waiting to go out.

I belonged to three book clubs, one of which has disbanded.

As for book-related events, I went to the Moby Dick Marathon in San Francisco in October and even read one chapter (Chapter 8, The Pulpit).

Ghoul Pool: I finished 6th out of 14 players with a final score of 117 points. People I scored on were Jimmy Carter, Daniel J. Evans (unique), Shannon Doherty, Janis Paige, Jean Malaurie (unique), Bud Harrelson (unique), and Faith Ringgold (unique).

Travel: My only international trip of the year was to Portugal (Porto and Lisbon) and the Azores in May / June. But I had plenty of domestic travel. I went to New York City in late January / early February. Then to Salt Lake City in late February / early March for Roots Tech. The total solar eclipse took me to Bruceville, Texas (near Dallas) in April, including an Israeli dance camp. Also in April, I had an overnight trip to Richmond for the Virginia Storytelling Alliance gathering. In May I went to Colorado for RhinoStock (a memorial for a friend) and also had a quick trip to Indianapolis to go to a baseball game, which unfortunately got rained out. I flew back to Dallas in July for the National Puzzlers League con, adding on a train trip to Oklahoma City to go to a baseball game. In August, I went to a Jewish genealogy convention in Philadelphia, and added in a couple of days in New York City for Lollapuzzoola (and theatre going, of course). And in October, I made a quick trip to San Francisco for their Moby Dick Marathon.

Genealogy: I’ve continued mentoring members of my local Jewish genealogy society on Lithuanian Jewish genealogy. As I’ve probably mentioned before, when I was starting to do genealogy research, other people helped me, so I feel happy to be able to help other people.

In February, I went to Roots Tech, which is a large genealogy conference held annually in Salt Lake City. The most interesting thing there was the presentation on using DNA from an old envelope - amazing, but not ready for the general public yet. I also went to the IAJGS convention in Philadelphia in August, at which I finally got to meet a cousin in person, as well as doing some volunteering.

Baseball: As I mentioned above, I had a failed attempt to go to a minor league game in Indianapolis (damn rain!) but a more successful game experience in Oklahoma City in July.

Culture: I went to 10 musicals and one non-musical play. My favorites for the year were Tick … Tick .. Boom at the Kennedy Center, Harmony on Broadway, Soft Power at Signature Theatre, and Suffs on Broadway.

I saw 7 movies in theaters and two on airplanes. Favorites were Next Goal Wins, Shari and Lamb Chop, and My Penguin Friend.

Storytelling: I performed in a Better Said Than Done show in February and emceed at the Women’s Storytelling Festival in March. I told a story at the Artists Standing Strong Together New Year’s Eve storytelling show. I went to several local story swaps (some in person, some over zoom), as well as zoom story swaps in Los Angeles and in Ottawa, Canada. I saw a friend’s storytelling show as part of Artomatic. And I participated in several discussions of Grimm fairy tales.

Museums and Art: I went to an exhibit of Dorothea Lange’s photos at the National Gallery of Art with a friend (and looked at some other art in the museum afterwards). I saw a Judy Chicago retrospective at the New Museum in New York City. I went to much of Artomatic. And I went to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas and the American Banjo Museum in Oklahoma City.

During my trip to Portugal, I went to a stained glass museum in Porto, the Museo Nacional de Azulejo (National Tile Museum) and Oceanario (aquarium) in Lisbon, and the Museum of Myths and Legends in Sintra.

Other Stuff:

I participated in Lollapuzzoola (a crossword contest) in August. I played board games, sometimes with the National Puzzlers’ League, sometimes with people I know from the loser community. I also went to other loser events, including a few parties and a couple of brunches.

I went to Kochavim, an Israeli folk dance weekend (in association with the eclipse).

I did a tour of M&S Schmalburg’s fabric flower factory (via the New York Adventure Club).

I attended a few lectures in the Leading Jewish Minds at MIT series (over zoom). And I went to a reception for MIT president Sally Kornbluth.

I’ve probably forgotten something or other among this, but it was a weird and stressful year. And I think that compared to normal people, I still did a lot of things.

Goals: So how did I do on my 2024 goals? Frankly, not very well. I did not circumnavigate the globe going westward, though I did map out about half of a general plan for doing it, so I’ll give myself a 5% on that goal. I didn’t make it to any national parks. I also did nothing about cleaning out my saved files of genealogy emails. I read 37 books out of my goal of 80, so I get only 45% there. I did make some progress on organizing my bedroom, but I don’t have a good metric for that. I’ll estimate that I accomplished about 50%. I finished just about 2/3 of one afghan (out of a goal to finish 3 afghans) so I’ll give myself 22% on that goal. I still haven’t found my parents’ slides. I made it to one AAA ballpark (Oklahoma City), and had an attempt at going to a game in Indianapolis, which got rained out. So I’lll get 25% on my goal of 4 AAA ballparks. I did fairly well on exercise the first part of the year, but my knee injury meant that I did very little from August on, so I’ll give myself a 60%.

So, overall, I’ll give myself a rather pathetic 23% for the year.

Which brings me to goals for 2025:

• Circumnavigate the globe going westward. I think I have a plan for somewhere in the October / November time frame.
  
  
• Go to at least 4 minor league baseball games.
  
  
• Finish 4 crafts projects.
  
  
• Read 80 books, with a stretch goal of 100.
  
  
• Finish going through my parents’ photographs and slides.
  
  
• Revisit / update my life list.
  
  
• Organize genealogy files.
  
  
• Go to at least 3 national parks.
  
  
• Learn to read Hangul (Korean writing system).
  
  
• Sort through cassette tapes.
  
  

1st Quarter 2025 - Books, Movies, Goals

Books:

I’ve been doing National Just Read More Novels Month in January for several years now. So there’s a heavy dose of novels for the 1st quarter of the year, during which I read 10 books.

1. Jasper Fforde, The Constant Rabbit. Fforde is one of my favorite writers because of the sheer wildness of his imagination. The premise of this novel is that there was an anthropomorphic event that turned some rabbits (and some other animals) into being human-sized. There’s a lot of political parody involved, including an anti-rabbit party and attempts to segregate the rabbits in their own community. There are lots of fun details, including several references to the movie The Court Jester, as well as a bi-weekly event called “Speed Librarianship” which compresses two weeks of library work into six minutes. This was a very enjoyable read, even if I did find myself singing the Allen Sherman song “You’re Getting to Be a Rabbit With Me” for the next couple of weeks.
   
   
2. David Lagercrantz, The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Lagercrantz wrote three sequels to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series, featuring Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomqvist. This was the first of those three, and had to do with Russian cybercrime, as well as attempts on the life of an autistic boy who Salander tries to protect. It is very violent, but the violence is not gratuitous and makes sense in context. I thought Lagercrantz did an excellent job of following Larsson’s style and I found this to be a real page-turner. Highly recommended.
   
   
3. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited I first read Waugh in the late 1970’s when Vile Bodies was on the reading list for a class I took titled Evil and Decadence in Literature. I went on to read several other books by him and mostly enjoyed them. This is one of his best-known books, since it was turned into a TV miniseries and, sad to say, I found it extremely disappointing. My problem with it is that nothing really happens except lots of drunkenness and adultery. Even Aloysius (Sebastian Flyte's teddy bear, who is, frankly, the most likable character) vanished after maybe a third of the book. Don’t waste your time.
   
   
4. David Lagercrantz, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye. Lisbeth Salander encounters another woman in prison, who is being terrorized by a gang. That story is tied into experiments with twins, including Lisbeth and her fraternal twin sister. Again, there is a lot of suspense and violence (including the murder of Lisbeth’s former guardian) but, if you can handle that, it’s another page turner.
   
   
5. Bran Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm. Stoker is, of course, best known as the author of Dracula, which I consider an excellent treatise on feminism, largely because Mina Harker is such a strong character. This book, alas, was more predictable horror novel fare. A young man comes from Australia to meet his family and gets entangled in odd goings-on in a neighboring house. There’s a woman pursuing the wealthy next door neighbor, but is she really a large white snake? And why does every mongoose he buys meet a horrible death? Horror alone is just not sufficient for me.
   
   
6. David Lagercrantz, The Girl Who Lived Twice. This is the conclusion of Lagercrantz’s contributions to the Millennium series and is just as good as his other two novels in the series. There’s a mysterious death in Stockholm, which turns out to be tied to an Everest expedition. There’s some fascinating info about Sherpa DNA and a horrifying attempt to kill Mikael Blomqvist. I found this both thoroughly absorbing and completely frightening. Well done!
   
   
7. Marilynne Robinson, Home. I read this for my book club. I’d really liked Robinson’s 1980-ish book Housekeeping and the movie based on it. She went back to writing novels around 2005 and won a Pulitzer Prize for Gilead. This novel was a sequel to that and involves the attempt of the bad son of the Boughton family to return home after an absence of 20 years. Not a lot actually happens as he attempts to reconcile with his dying father and spinster sister, but I did think it was interesting and well-written.
   
   
8. David Gibbons, A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks. This was for my travel book club and provides an interesting approach to history. Gibbons is a maritime archaeologist and uses shipwrecks as an avenue into discussing what was going on in the world at the time that a given ship was destroyed. Unfortunately, his writing tends to be too technical for the general audience. And the lack of maps makes it hard to tie the different event together. But I did learn a fair amount, so I’m glad I persisted through it.
   
   
9. Piers Paul Read, Alive. This was another travel book club selection. I think I had read a Readers’ Digest Condensed Books version of this ages ago. And I’ve been to the museum in Montevideo, Uruguay which has to do with the plane wreck that killed several members of the Uruguayan rugby team in 1972. The author did a good job of capturing the stories of the people who died and the survivors, who had to resort to eating the bodies of some of the victims to keep themselves alive. It’s an absorbing and well-written book and made for good discussion.
   
   
10. Marilyn Wallace (editor), Sisters in Crime. This 1989 collection of short stories by several women was, frankly, disappointing. A few of the authors (especially Marcia Muller) were successful, but a lot of the stories left me wanting something more fully developed than the space limits allowed for.
    
    

Movies: I only saw one movie during this quarter, which I saw on an airplane.

1. Between the Temples: I’d thought of seeing this movie in a theatre and, frankly, I’m glad I didn’t because I hated it. The premise is that a cantor at a synagogue is suffering from a vocal block related to the death of his wife. He gets involved in a relationship with his elementary school music teacher who signs up to be an adult bat mitzvah student, despite not actually being Jewish. Some people apparently found Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane quirky and fun, but I found the characters they played cringy and completely off-putting.
   

Goals:

Since I really just wrote out my goals for 2025, the only one I can comment on is reading and I only made it about halfway where I should have to meet my reading goal. But I did also make a dent in clearing out household clutter. Goodbye to an Art League class catalogue from, um,2014! Goodbye to expired supermarket coupons dating as far back as 2011! (To be fair, that was buried under something else in my den, otherwise known as the Black Hole of Vienna.) Isn’t living room archaeology fun?