2024 was a year of travel, challenges, endings, and beginnings. I went on five trips, four of which were for recreation and the fifth of which was almost a move to a different state. My fitness and health suffered, and Silver Gryphon Games shut down. However, I began taking music lessons, won an award at work, and regularly ran an RPG campaign for once.
Winning an Award at Apiture
At my day job, I won an award for my work on Apiture’s hosted sites service. I continued to be the sole infrastructure person for hosted sites, despite their quantity at the end of the year. My automation for them made it much easier for the designers to spin up new sites without requiring work from the platform engineering team.
Collapse of Exercise Habit
My exercise habit fell apart. I started the year strong, going to the gym regularly and focusing on a bodybuilding routine that was slowly starting to show progress. Then, I went to my annual physical, and the doctor was less than enthusiastic about my chosen exercise path. For some reason, I let that discourage me from exercising at all the rest of the year.
Towards the end of the year, though, I started going for longer walks occasionally. I have it as a daily to-do item, but I'm not consistent in doing it daily yet.
Alcohol-Free Months
At the beginning of the year I set out to have three full alcohol-free months in 2024. I achieved two full months and two half months. That is sort of a success, I guess, but I think I can do better. Next year will have a more ambitious goal. My interest in going alcohol-free has increased.
I've attempted to completely quit drinking a couple times before. This is not that, not yet. I can see this evolving into that though. Past attempts were not based on a holistic lifestyle change. Now, going without alcohol is an accessory to other changes I have made or am planning to make.
The Death of Silver Gryphon Games
While we tried to resurrect the company, neither Kevin nor I had the time or motivation to work on it. I formally shuttered the business in December. The second editions of both Aether and Ingenium will never be published, sadly. That’s too bad, because the cover art for both was awesome, and they fixed a lot of the problems with the first editions. However, a business needs sustained work in order to function, and that won’t happen for SGG.
Journaling About Trips
In 2024 I went on three major trips and I promised to journal about all of them. I wrote about the Cancun trip and the cruise, but I did not write about the eclipse trip. I thought I did, but I can’t find a journal entry for it. Two out of three, but not enough to count this goal achieved.
The journal entries that exist are nice and detailed, though. They'll be a good reminder in days to come.
Journaling Habit
While I did keep a regular work journal each week, I didn’t write a regular personal journal. Part of the problem is that I never set up the habit like I did with the work journal; there was no specific trigger. This is something I can fix in 2025.
I did start keeping a gaming journal just a few days ago. If I keep up with this, then I will have four different journals that I update: a personal journal, a work journal, a gaming journal, and a spiritual journal. Perhaps if I write regularly for all of them, that will start to bleed through into blogging, and I'll update this site more frequently.
Books Read
I didn’t read nearly as many books in 2024 as I did in 2023. Also, the variety was less, with 8 different authors in 2024 and 11 in 2023. I’m not sure why, but I imagine losing almost a full month of the year to trips where I didn’t read at all didn’t help.
My queue of books to read is growing. I have quite a few on my shelves. I may hold off on buying any more books until I've worked through that backlog a bit.
RPG Campaign
In November I started running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in-person for a few random people. It is now the longest-running regular campaign I’ve ever run. It’s also the most difficult to run, as several of the players remember throwaway comments I make about setting flavor and accept that as canon. This means I have to take notes on everything I decide. On the other hand, though, these notes are making it easier to plan sessions and review what happened in past sessions.
The next session will be on January 6, after a several-week break for the holidays.
Beginning of Music Lessons
In December I began taking guitar lessons. This is the first time since I was a teenager that I’ve taken music lessons. I’ve been good about practicing almost every day, too; the only days I haven’t practiced were Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
I've been practicing the usual beginner songs from a Hal Leonard book. As I get better, I want to try a few different styles, including Spanish guitar. I have a list of songs to attempt once I get good enough.