As is traditional at the end of each year, I review what I’ve been up to over the past 12 months.
You can read my previous posts from 2023, 2022, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009.
January
January started with a trip to the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, to have a look at their Operation Ouch exhibition about food and, um, poo. They have another exhibition about brains and bogeys in 2025 so I’m sure we’ll be back there soon. We also went to Eureka in Halifax; despite having an excellent children’s museum practically on our doorstep, we don’t go there that often. And there was also a brief trip to the Royal Armouries in Leeds.
On the blog, I wrote one of my perennially popular blog posts about installing Home Assistant Supervised on a Raspberry Pi and how I’d switched to using Simplenote for note-taking. I now take many more notes than I used to with Evernote. I also finally started regularly backing up my blog. January is my blogiversary month and 2024 marked 22 years.
February
After the Januariest January that ever Januaried, we made it to February. We had a bat in our cellar, which a kind volunteer rescued for us, and trips to the Trafford Centre and Beaumont Park in Huddersfield. Meanwhile, I cancelled Disney+ as we were no longer using it.
We ended February on our way down to London for a long weekend.
March
Whilst in London, we went to the Bank of England Museum, the Cute exhibition at Somerset House, the Young V&A and the Cartoon Museum. We also had dinner in Chinatown one night, and Christine stayed an extra night to see Book of Mormon in the West End.
As usual in March, we went to Sci-Fi Weekender in Great Yarmouth, although this time we had friends in the car with us. This made the eight hour round trip much more enjoyable. And over the Easter Weekend, we went to East Riddlesden Hall, and went on the Snooks trail around York.
On the blog, I replaced Automattic’s Jetpack plugin with the much lighter Toolbelt.
April
In April, we went to see Unfortunate at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford, and I moaned about our car needing more work on it again. I had the car serviced again earlier this month and needed four new tyres, new brake pads and brake discs, and some additional work which was another four figure sum. We probably could have bought a new car for the amount we’ve spent on keeping this one on the road over the past 18 months.
Christine and I had a child-free day out shopping in Manchester, which was nice.
May
May is my birthday month, and I turned 40 this year. For my birthday, we went to Dudley, and visited Dudley Zoo and the Black Country Living Museum. We also had a day out at Jodrell Bank to use our annual passes before they expired, and another visit to the Tropical Butterfly House near Sheffield.
I added a newsletter to the blog in May, which is a weekly list of new blog posts. So far, a grand total of four people are fully subscribed, although two were in December so maybe it’s picking up momentum?
I also switched my bank account, but didn’t write about it until October.
June
In 2023, my dad had some health issues which persisted for some time into 2024, ultimately resulting in him going back into hospital again in June this year. Thankfully, this time the doctors treating him seemed to get on top of the issue, and so he’s now much better than he’s been in a while.
Our eight-year-old had an overnight residential school trip, giving Christine and I a rare chance to have a date night towards the end of the month. Meanwhile, we were in the run up to a General Election, and I wrote about the candidates that I could vote for in our constituency.
July
The General Election happened, and for once, the bad guys didn’t win, which was nice. I also made some predictions for 2029, when the next General Election is likely to be.
I fitted my Raspberry Pi with a new case and fan, and started using an SSD with it rather than an SD card.
As usual in July, we went on holiday with my parents. Though my Dad made a good recovery, we decided to have a holiday in the UK, and spent a week in Northumberland. Amongst the places we visited were Bamburgh Castle, The Alnwick Garden, a boat trip to The Farne Islands to see the puffins and seals, Warkworth Castle, Lindisfarne, Cragside, and Beamish on the way home.
August
Writing about our holiday took me well into August, and I also noted all the places we’d considered but didn’t visit. Storm Lillian visited us, cutting off our power for a few hours, and I wrote about our four most-used cookbooks. We also had a day out at the National Coal Mining Museum for England. At the end of the month, we went to Gawthorpe Hall and Mr Fitzpatrick’s Temperance Bar.
August is always my busiest month at work, and this year was no exception.
September
In September, I made Bluesky my primary social media presence and made my Twitter/X account private. Whilst I’ve logged in to X from time to time, I’ve not posted anything since.
Apple announced that its AirPods Pro could be used as hearing aids, and I wrote about how this could be a game-changer for people with mild or moderate hearing loss.
We didn’t have any days out in September (bar a trip to the cinema to see Inside Out 2), but I did write about travel more generally in a blog post about furthest compass points.
October
Christine and I went back to the cinema to watch Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, having watched the first film that morning – in my case for the first time. I also got my Covid-19 and Flu vaccines. We went to visit the new Eureka museum for older kids in Wirral, and then took a ferry across the Mersey and visited the Museum of Liverpool.
I had a grumble about parking apps, and why we can’t just have one app that works everywhere, and I summarised my adult life using the various railcards we’ve had over the years. For Halloween, we went to Lotherton Hall, which was full of dressed up skeletons.
November
Another cinema trip, this time to bawl our eyes out at The Wild Robot which is as good as everyone says it is. Our (now) nine-year-old got one of the follow-on books as a birthday present. We also went to Bolling Hall Museum with friends, and had a return visit to the Askham Bryan Wildlife & Conservation Park (which I wrote about in 2017 when it first opened).
America voted for the bad guy again (seriously guys?), and I successfully migrated this blog to a new hosting company, seemingly without anyone noticing. Considering my track record with losing data when doing this sort of thing, I consider this to be a massive win. We did our first Costco visit; we haven’t been back yet but planning a trip in the new year, probably with friends. I also wrote about my home working setup, and how it’s evolved over the past (almost) five years.
December
And so to this month. I wrote a long post about step-free access on the Waterloo & City Line, which pleasingly got picked up by a couple of London blogs and resulted in a few click-throughs. Which I knew about thanks to using Koko Analytics with WordPress.
Throughout the year, I mostly stuck with my target of publishing a new blog post every other day, which I’m really pleased about. I don’t have the time to contribute something every day – I’ve tried that in the past and I just end up writing waffle to fill up space. And, as we’re a family of two full-time working parents, our ability to have fun days out is mostly limited to weekends and holidays. But we did have the opportunity to do a few fun things this year, and have some new experiences. Whilst we didn’t go abroad this year, we squeezed a lot into our summer holiday to Northumberland, and seeing thousands of puffins on the Farne Islands will be something I hope to remember for a long time.
