2024 Year in Review

2024 is winding to a close. I thought this would be a good opportunity to look back at what Kathy and I did this year. I would love to write an amusing look at the news of 2024, but Dave Barry already does that much better than I could hope to do, so I’m writing strictly about my personal experiences

Rather than bloat this article with dozens of photographs, I posted the pictures to a separate location. You can see them on Smugmug or on Facebook. The pictures help illustrate some of the events written about here.

January

The year started with a trip to Colorado. In early January, we visited my parents in Fort Collins. We also got to see my brother-in-law and my nieces and nephew, who live nearby. My youngest son also flew up to join us on our trip.

After our visit, we hit the ski slopes in Winter Park. Our timing was good. There hadn’t been much snow until the week before we got there and during the week after we left, they had a blizzard and an avalanche that closed the road to the resort. We did a lot of snow biking on our Sno-gos. My son did his first black diamond. The one area I looked forward to the most was the Parsenn Bowl at the top of Winter Park, but it was closed because of extremely challenging weather. Maybe we’ll do that next year.

When we dropped off Erik at the airport, we had a couple of extra hours to kill, so we stopped by the Wildlife Drive at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. It’s an old military arsenal converted to a wildlife area. We saw a lot of local fauna from prairie dogs to bison. If you are looking for something to do near the airport, I recommend it.

February

We spent the month of February (and just a bit of March) in New Zealand. Late in 2023, we found an unusually low airfare and quickly booked flights before we knew what we were going to do there. In hindsight, I wish that we had added an extra couple of weeks, but it was still a great trip.

In New Zealand, we visited Auckland, Queenstown, Milford Sound, Wanaka, Fox Glacier, Dunedin, Oamaru, Christchurch, Wellington, Rotorua, and the Coromandel. It was a very active trip that included disc golf, luge, bungy jumping, visiting a working sheep ranch, taking a day cruise on the incredible Milford Sound, climbing a scary via ferrata, riding quad bikes through a rainforest, making Pounamu, paragliding along the Pacific Coast, jumping off a tower into a harbor, visiting Hobbiton and touring the inside of a hobbit hole, doing a ropes/bridge course high up in a redwood grove, rafting a crazy scary river, rafting another river with a 23’ waterfall, touring Hamilton’s amazing botanical gardens, snorkeling, hiking, and so much more. It was a great trip and, amazingly, we survived it.

March

A couple of years ago, I sold my beloved Caterham sports car to a photographer in LA. One day in March, I was surprised to see a calendar arrive in the mail. On the cover of the calendar was my beloved old Caterham!

We also spent the month enjoying local attractions. We visited the lovely Mercer Arboretum with my sister. We went to the Houston Zoo to see their new Galapagos exhibit. And we volunteered at the Texas State Championships disc golf tournament here in Houston, where I worked as a spotter and Kathy worked as a live scorer.

There is a relatively large Hindu Temple near us and they celebrate Holi every year with a lot of colored powders. For the last couple of years, Kathy and I have photographed the event for them. You can see the pictures of the 2024 Holi Festival here.

April

All year long, we’ve been working on our airplane. April was a good month for our project. We completed our vertical stabilizer and rudder. We were also able to get a lot of parts acid-washed and alodyne-coated before it got hot. We prefer to do that while wearing protective suits, so it isn’t a good task for the summertime here.

April was also the month of the total solar eclipse. We drove to Austin, picked up my oldest son, and, after checking weather forecasts, decided to try to see it in Waco. A lot of the state was covered by clouds, so we were gambling that the forecast for partly cloudy skies in Waco would work out for us. It did. And as a bonus, friends of Kathy’s from Michigan were also in Waco for the eclipse and we were able to meet them for lunch.

Closer to home, we had a little miracle of life in our backyard. A monarch hatched out of a chrysalis near our fence. We had a couple of other chrysalises, but they didn’t ever hatch.

April is also the time of the annual Woodlands Waterway Art Festival, which I highly recommend. Kathy and I worked Friday as gatekeepers and then toured the show on Sunday. We didn’t buy anything this year, but I love seeing all of the creative creations that artists bring to the event.

In addition to our eclipse trip, we also spent a weekend in Austin, visiting my son who lives in an apartment there. It was a nice visit. We enjoyed seeing him, his girlfriend, and her family.

May

Friends of ours have three adorable daughters who love to act. We went to their presentation of Madagascar in May and later went to see them perform in Annie in November. Kathy really likes these outings because I’m too cheap to take her to any plays performed by adults downtown.

I have a niece who lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She and her husband are schoolteachers and they had their first child in February this year. They didn’t have quite enough time off to get to the summer break, so we volunteered to babysit for a couple of weeks this May to help bridge the gap. Their baby Nico is the most adorable baby ever. Quick to smile. Very friendly and not very fussy. He charmed us from the moment we met him. We took him on lots of walks, visited a historical park and some nature parks, read books to him, played with him, and took him on his first pilgrimage - a tour of Packer Stadium.

During our Wisconsin trip, we also spent a weekend in Madison. We played a couple of rounds of disc golf, visited their farmer’s market, toured their botanical gardens, went to their zoo in the pouring rain, and more. It was a fun weekend.

June

Many years ago, Kathy got involved with a group of people starting a makerspace. She joined the group well before they were ready to open for business and helped them renovate an old barn to make it suitable as a makerspace. She’s been heavily involved with them ever since and took over as President a couple of years ago. For those not familiar with The MakerBarn, it is a place where people can go to do woodwork, welding, machining, sewing, quilting, pottery, laser cutting, 3D printing, dye sublimation, and much more. It’s a great place for people who want to make things or want to learn how to make things. They celebrated their 8th anniversary this summer with a party.

Another activity at The MakerBarn that kept Kathy busy this summer was their day camps for kids. They hosted the children of members for workshops covering a variety of projects, like building a toolbox, and interesting topics, like seeing how liquid nitrogen affects everyday objects. I taught a class on programming Arduino microcontrollers.

Kathy and I also spent a week taking a CNC machining class. We learned how to take a 3D model and prepare it for machining on a 3-axis CNC machine and an automated lathe. Then we learned how to operate the $60,000 CNC machine. The class was designed to help people become machine operators, but it was free and open to the public so we jumped at the chance. Who wouldn’t want the opportunity to play with an expensive CNC machine? Plus, they had free snacks.

July

For the first time in years, Kathy and I attended the local 4th of July Parade. I miss the days when we would decorate my Caterham and be a part of the parade, but we enjoyed being spectators.

July was going well until Hurricane Beryl came to town. As hurricanes go, it didn’t seem like it was going to be a particularly bad one, but it left us powerless for about a week. For the first day, we just sucked it up and went about our business in the dark. But on day 2, when it got hot, we packed up and left town. We were already planning a trip to Colorado, so we drove up there a few days earlier.

In Colorado, we spent time with my parents. We also went to the Colorado Renaissance Festival with my Brother-In-Law. On the way home, we took him for his first visit to their new Buc-ee’s!

When we got home, Kathy was once again busy with the summer camp days at The MakerBarn and her usual responsibilities as President. I was mostly just busy staying inside and avoiding the scorching heat. I’m not a fan of Houston summers.

August

August didn’t start well. I was minding my own business driving down the road when the car ahead of me suddenly hit its brakes hard. Naturally, I did the same thing as quickly as I could. In fact, I think my car started braking on its own even before I smashed my brakes. Sadly, the person behind me lacked the same reflexes and hit me from behind. Nobody was injured, but my car needed expensive repairs. To be fair, with modern cars, any repairs are expensive repairs. I have since equipped my car with front and rear 4K dashcams.

September

As August was coming to a close, my ability to tolerate Houston's summer heat was running low, so we hopped on a plane for the Swiss mountains. We spent all of September on our first trip to Switzerland (with a few side trips to France, Italy, and Liechtenstein). The first stop of our trip was Geneva but we also stayed in Gstaad, Interlaken, Lucerne, Zurich, and Zermatt. We did day trips to many other towns, like Yvoire, Bern, St Gallen, Lausanne, Montreux, Lauterbrunnen, Brienz, and more. We didn’t have the wild adventures of our New Zealand trip, but we saw lots of museums, went on beautiful hikes, and took gondolas and cogwheel trains to the tops of mountains. We did have one crazy adventure - a scary via ferrata that involved climbing along a cliff over Lauterbrunnen with a 1,000’ sheer drop. I’m still working on videos from the trip, so I don’t have much to link to.

After we finished with Switzerland, we spent a couple of nights in Milan, Italy, and then went to the South of France. There, we stayed in Nice and visited Monaco, Eze, and Menton. Then we relocated to Marseille where we went to the Chateau D’If and Avignon. We also took a boat tour of the Calanques with a Turkish friend we met on our Chateau D’If visit. Our trip finished in early October. And when we got home, Houston was still stupidly hot. Sigh.

October

When we were in Milan, we made two great food stops. First, we ate at Pizzium, which was the first place we ever had authentic Neapolitan pizza. I still vividly remember sitting inside with the boys sharing our first overseas meal. That restaurant has a special place in my heart. After that, we stopped at Il Massimo del Gelato, which is my favorite gelato shop in the world. It was so good that I was almost in tears. I can never find even halfway decent gelato back in the States, so when we got back home, I imported a real gelato machine from Italy so that we could make our own gelato. We’re still learning, but we’ve made some really good stracciatella, pistachio, and other flavors. Sadly, we can’t eat all of the gelato that we make, so we keep foisting it off on the neighbors.

The best thing about being home in October is the annual reappearance of Holiday Grapes. Living in Houston, I long for the Fall when the heat becomes less oppressive and Holiday Grapes appear. What more could you want?

There was one dark side to October. My 97-year-old father had a heart attack. He seems to have fully recovered, but it was quite a scare. Fortunately, my brother, his wife, and my brother-in-law live close enough that they were able to help out.

November

November started well. Kathy took a Holga camera class at the MakerBarn. She shot black and white images on large negatives. Then she went into the darkroom and developed and printed her images. She thoroughly enjoyed the class. I don’t understand why someone would want to use antiquated film technology instead of a modern digital camera, but it made her happy.

Later that month, I was sitting at my computer one evening minding my own business and feeling fine for one minute. Literally two minutes later, I was in bed shivering like I was caught in an ice storm. I spent the rest of the week toggling between feeling like I was going to freeze to death or like I was going to sweat away every drop of water in my body. It was not a good time. When I went to the doctor, they ruled out COVID, the flu, RSV, and strep, and running out of options, they declared that it was a bacterial respiratory infection. They gave me antibiotics and said that if it got any worse or if it didn’t improve in a day or two, I was to not bother them and instead I should check myself into the ER. The cost of an ER visit was a strong motivation to feel better.

The saddest part is that my eldest son and his girlfriend were planning on visiting that weekend. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near me at that time, so they scrapped that part of their plan. They were in town for a show, so they stayed in a hotel instead. Fortunately, Kathy was able to meet them for a meal while they were in town.

The illness had me virtually bedridden for a week, and it took another couple of weeks for me to recover. It pretty much gutted my November. Getting sick seems to be a bigger deal as I get older. But it’s in the past now and I feel fine. And I’ve been collecting new vaccines in the hope of avoiding a repeat of being deathly ill again.

Thanksgiving was a low-key affair for us. My youngest son and his girlfriend joined us for a traditional Thanksgiving meal of salmon. I had pizza.

December

Our December started with a trip to Florida. My sister-in-law and her husband were renting a house in Panama City, so we drove out to spend a couple of days with them. He was quite a character. I learned that you shouldn’t drink purified water (chemicals) and should opt for only spring water. I was also a little surprised that he remains unconvinced that Ukraine is actually fighting a war with Russia because neither he nor anyone he knows and trusts has seen the war.

After the Florida trip, we spent a lot of time cleaning out some of the rooms upstairs. It had been years and years since I’d gone through my “hobby” room. I had to get myself out of the “is there a chance that we’ll ever use this” mindset and into a mood to get rid of stuff. Our goal, which we accomplished, was to get everything out of our guest room (which is almost always available, hint, hint) and to get our plane parts moved to our “hobby” room.

Kathy was also very busy with The MakerBarn’s latest expansion. They moved their classroom to a newly leased space across the parking lot and converted the old classroom into a glass and pottery studio complete with throwing wheels, kilns, tables, and other pottery-related stuff that I don’t understand.

The rest of December was pretty relaxing. Our kids and their girlfriends joined us for Christmas. It was great having everyone together. We exchanged gifts and played games. I think I lost every game we played except a pop culture trivia game, which is the type of game that I’m usually the worst at. We went for walks together, including a delightful stroll through the Christmas lights along The Woodlands Waterway. Having all of us together was a nice way to end the year.

Emotional Impacts

That’s a reasonably comprehensive catalog of the main things we did during the year, but I thought I’d add a section for the most emotionally impactful events of the year. This isn’t necessarily a list of the best or worst things or the year. These are the things that evoked an incredibly strong emotional response; one so strong that I can practically taste the emotion just thinking about them.

The first one on that list was my bungy jumping escapade in New Zealand. It’s hard to overstate how difficult it was to shuffle to the edge of the platform and then throw myself into the abyss when they said to jump. I think making that leap was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m not sure whether I could force myself to do it again, and I’m pretty sure that I won’t even try. Honestly, it wasn’t that much fun.

My second impactful adventure was our raft trip down the Wairoa River. Kathy and I have canoed, kayaked, boated, and rafted down some pretty amazing rivers. Just last year, we rode dories through the Grand Canyon. After a while, you start to think of big rapids as something like a roller coaster, but roller coasters are carefully engineered and inspected and are safer than the car ride you took to the amusement park. Whitewater rapids are wild beasts that could turn on you at any time. The Wairoa was one of the most intense and technically demanding rivers we’ve been on and, while our boat captains were highly skilled and very experienced, that didn’t stop one of the rafts from completely flipping over in one of the rapids, dumping it’s occupants into the river. Suddenly those instructions about what to do and where to swim if we flip in this rapid or that rapid took on another level of seriousness. Nobody was seriously injured in the incident, but seeing the fear on their faces and listening to them discuss options for quitting the trip (which wasn’t possible) sure got me focused. I was deeply aware that when my captain shouted a command like “left side forward two strokes,” my failure to respond quickly and appropriately could have led to a catastrophe. It was a fun outing, but after watching that boat flip up and smash its passengers into the water, it was also a serious outing. And it was raining, which added to the drama.

My last emotional impact activity in New Zealand was less scary. We rappelled down into a dark cave. Then we stood on a ledge, grabbed an innertube, and hopped into an underground river. As we floated down that river in near-total darkness, you could see glowworms radiating a magical blue glow on the walls and ceilings of the cave. It was an awe-inspiring sight that I’ll never forget. I’m still looking forward to seeing bioluminescent surf and synchronized fireflies, but this was one of nature's miracles that I was delighted to experience.

Before I go further with this list, I want to stress again that we experienced plenty of amazing things over the year. This isn’t a list of my favorite things or places. Don’t interpret the absence of a place like the Milford Sound, which is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, from the list as an indication that it isn’t incredible. There are a lot of incredibly beautiful places we visited that aren’t on this list. This is a list of the things that hit me hard emotionally, much more than I expected. These are things that left me speechless, whether that was from fear, delight, or some other emotion.

My next emotionally impactful experience happened closer to home in Waco, Texas. It was the solar eclipse. I’d seen plenty of lunar eclipses and partial solar eclipses, so I thought it would be mildly interesting like those were, or perhaps a little more interesting. It wasn’t. A complete solar eclipse is on a completely different level. The world suddenly gets dark. The sun becomes a bright fringe. It felt apocalyptic and otherworldly. I can’t adequately describe it, but I highly recommend it. There is nothing like it.

The next three emotionally impactful experiences were in Switzerland. The first was the Choco Pass in Geneva (and the chocolate in Switzerland in general). We spent the better part of a day walking from chocolatier to chocolatier tasting amazing chocolates. We’ve taken chocolate classes in France and New Zealand and aren’t strangers to artisanal chocolate, but everything we had that day was among the best we’d ever tasted and there was so much variety around town. I’m drooling just thinking about it. If you like chocolate, you’ll love the Geneva Choco Pass. And when we got home we found that upscale Swiss chocolatier Läderach opened up a store in our town, which is scary both because of how expensive their chocolate is and how good it tastes. I spent hundreds of dollars there on Christmas gifts and don’t regret a penny of it, but don’t tell my endocrinologist.

While we were on our Swiss trip, we made a last-minute alteration to our travel plans at the advice of ChatGPT. It alerted us to the fact that Gstaad would be having its annual cow parade during our trip. I didn’t really understand what a cow parade was, but we thought we’d give it a try. It was nothing short of amazing. Imagine cows, which are cuter animals than most people realize, dressed in their finest flower headdresses and wearing enormous bells strutting proudly right through the center of town with their human partners guiding them (cows aren’t good with maps). It was so cute and so much fun. One thing I’ve learned this year is that I won’t easily pass up future opportunities to see full solar eclipses or Swiss cow parades.

We spent a rainy day in the Swiss town of St Gallen. One of the places to visit there was an abbey and one of the sights at the abbey was a library. I was expecting it to be nice, but when we stepped through the doors, in the slippers they provide and require you to wear, I was awestruck. I am not exaggerating at all when I say that it was the most beautiful room I’ve ever seen. The architecture, the woodwork, the art, the books, the lighting - they all worked together in an amazing harmony that I can’t describe. If you are ever near St Gallen, I can recommend the Abbey Library of Saint Gall. It looks nice in pictures, but they don’t do it justice. It is something you want to experience yourself.

I saved the best for last. Let me first say that while I love children, I’m not generally a big fan of babies. Until they can walk and talk, they generally aren’t very interesting. When we went to babysit my 3-month-old grandnephew for a couple of weeks, I expected him to be pleasant but not particularly interesting. I was wrong. He was the most adorable, lovable, wonderful baby I’ve met since we had boys of our own. Kathy and I were both head-over-heels in love with him from the first day that we got there. What I thought was the fulfillment of a family obligation turned into a delightful time. The two weeks went by so quickly that I was sad that our time was up and we had to leave. We’re looking forward to spending more time with Nico in the future. Meeting him was the top moment of 2024 for me.