2024 In Review - The Not-So-Great Parts

 

Right now I'm sitting in the guest room with the stray kitty we found, giving him some love and attention after just dropping $100 to have him have an initial vet visit and get an FIV/FeLV test. Because his owners have not shown up yet despite posting everywhere and checking twice for a microchip and I don't know that finding him a home even begins to be possible without at least that. 

Taking in this cat was the right thing to do but also an expensive conundrum we find ourself in (similar to a situation this summer where I tried to help a friend by paying to regain some of their stuff and and only apparently made the whole thing worse). And if that's not a summary for this year — the bad and the good completely intertwined — I don't know what is.

I mean, the election totally sucked, so there's no confusion there.

And our neighbor, John McCormick, pretty much the best neighbor you could ever hope to have, dying this summer is also a terrible thing and he is missed every day.

And Brutus, my heart dog, almost drowning and then actually dying six weeks later was unilaterally awful.

And Coya is aging, which makes my heart break a little every day to watch. My friend Dwight lost his Sheldon, a keeshond of similar age to her, a few weeks back and his heart is broken.

But most other things were not great but kind of mixed. Like a client spilled coffee on my computer, so I had to immediately get a new one (which I don't love like I loved my rose gold one), but at least I had room on my credit card to do so and got one before the tariffs set in next month.

My car died in a spectacular manner and it cost a lot of money and it took a month to find a new one, but my friend Tracy was amazing and let me borrow her daughter's, and now I have a new-to-me car. 

Right after my car died we had an ENORMOUS tax bill that was immediately due because we had extended to the last possible minute and also due the same time as our ENORMOUS (and getting higher by the day) Saint Paul property tax bill was due — but honestly that pales in terms of the fact that my tax guy's house had burned to the ground just a few days before (he and his wife and dog are fine, you should buy his book, A Season for That because as well as a tax guy he's a james-Beard-award-winning food writer and it's fantastic and that would help him out.)

I had some client and also some significant Cultural STAR stressors, which are hard because I genuinely adore my clients and want everything to be rainbows and ponies for them all the time. I have been under SUPER STRESS the last few weeks for a Rochester preservation project, which I am significantly behind on, but I am grateful to have the contract.

I got covid six hours before we left to drive to New Orleans for Thanskgiving (but went anyway) and Patrick had it the week before Christmas and still does not feel great and I feel really bad for him. I have constant tinnitus which no one can seem to solve.

The general feeling of "meh" carries through in that I don't feel like I had enough time with friends and family, and I wish I had had more and had been a better friend. Several of my friends struggled this year and I don't think I did enough for them.

None of this are "worst year ever" items — as in, none of them were 2004, which other than being the year I met Patrick was unilaterally awful. 

And this isn't a pity post, but more of a way for me to round up all these items and put them together and leave them in 2024 and move ahead, where possibly I can learn from them and do better.

Onward!