Highs
The highlight of 2024 for me was spending time with friends and family. We started 2024 with a fantastic trip to visit my wife’s family in Shenzhen, our first visit to China since before Covid. Over the summer, my wife’s mother traveled to Belfast to spend several weeks with us, and we enjoyed several short breaks and day trips with her across Northern Ireland.
We also enjoyed a weekend break in London in March, as well as a holiday in Spain in November. Our son’s highlight of the London trip was a tour of the Arsenal stadium, while my highlight of the Spanish trip was walking a mile carrying an inflatable lobster on my head…
One highlight of the year was attending the UEFA U19 tournament in Belfast with Matthew, and watching some great football games (so good that even a football hater like myself enjoyed them).
I have taken up playing Hex and Counter wargames as a hobby. I’ve been looking around for something to do other than just doom scrolling, and I came across the Battle of Moscow online game. After wasting investing many hours on this, I have also bought a few physical games. I’m hoping to start attending gaming clubs and meetups this year.
Another joy in the past year has been reading with Matthew at bedtime. As he is now 8, he is able to pick the books he wants to read, so we have been working our way through the Harry Potter series, as well as reading several Roald Dahl books.
I’ve started running again, and ran a couple of races at the end of the year. At the Laganside 10K race, I ran in the 10K while Matthew ran in the children’s 1 mile race. My race times weren’t great, but I’m hoping to improve in the coming year, and have already put together a rough running plan with target races for 2025.
Lows
One of the major lows that we experienced was my son having to leave his school mid-year. He had been well settled in school with great teachers and friends, We’ve been very fortunate to place him in a local school and he has settled well there, but we all had a very stressful few months while this being resolved.
During the year, our family also started attending a new church. We had been growing a bit disillusioned at our old church, which we had been attending for over 4 years, and we decided it was time for a change. So far we are happy in our new church and we’re starting to get to know others in the congregation.
A personal low was gaining weight despite running and exercising regularly. I’ve got distinctly chubby but I’m working to get back into shape.
And also
Other things that occurred in the year:
- I restarted blogging. I haven’t blogged as much as I had hoped, but I do have some interesting projects coming up that will give me some useful content for posts. I’m also looking at migrating content from my old blog to this one.
- I have slowly but surely working to decorate and fix up our house. Progress slowed to a stop over the summer when Mei’s mum visited, but I’ll be planning to get the decorating (finally) finished for this summer
- I started a new job in February with the Ulster University. There have been a few up and downs with the job, but I’m still there. It is a developer role and the initial focus has been on taking on the support of legacy applications and data feeds. Many of the applications were previously outsourced, and our team is onboarding these apps, and working to migrate them from legacy servers to containers. I’ve also started developing in Python and hopefully there will be more significant solution development this year
In the coming year
I’ve no major plans for the coming year. I do see myself doing a lot more running and decorating, and possibly starting a martial art. As I mentioned, I have a few personal technical projects that I hope to start this year, and I want to continue blogging as well.