Yearnotes 2024

For Christmas 2023 I bought A- some more rollerskating lessons. On the first lesson back in 2024 she fell and broke her leg in two places. This had a pretty big impact on the first half of 2024! The surgery went well and she was able to make it home to us after a week in hospital. As soon as her Mum heard she flew over to us and stayed for several weeks. We were extremely grateful for this as handling the day-to-day with the boys as well as looking after A- was a lot for me to take on. It was really hard to watch A- in pain, and as the pain gave way to the frustration of being immobile it was hard to find things to keep spirits up. But as the year went on with some physiotherapy and a hard work on A-‘s part she started to become more mobile and able to handle the day-to-day routine. Her parents visited us during the school summer holidays and we were able to explore Cornwall together for a week.

I spent a lot more time indoors in the first part of the year than I would otherwise. I spent some of that time working on jam.coop and made a little progress, but I soon got quite burned out. I find it mentally harder now to work on “serious” side projects alongside the (programming) day job. I think the reality of jam.coop is that it is only likely to gain traction if there is a serious move away from Bandcamp. In the meantime, there’s features I know I need to build and conversations I know I need to have, but finding the motivation is hard. Despite this, I’m proud that it more-or-less runs without too much intervention. Later in the year I found some time to improve the design and make some other improvements.

Another consequence of spending time indoors was that I fell into a chess rabbit hole. N- had started to show a bit of interest in the game and I decided to “brush up” a bit so that I didn’t pass on too many bad habits. Soon I’d started playing regularly myself on chess.com (and later on lichess). I even played a tournament at the local chess club where I was roundly humbled by a parade of kids. I really enjoy solving chess puzzles, and that - combined with a less helpful interest in chess drama - turned out to be surprisingly useful when I needed a distraction from global events.

I spent less time making music this year, but still kept up a bit of a habit. I’ve been enjoying a few music-making apps on the iPad - in particular Samplr and Borderlands which really make the most of the touch screen.

Work was mostly enjoyable too. We worked with the Government Digital Service and the Raspberry Pi Foundation again, as well as a fun shorter project doing some client-side-only prototyping. It was a more stressful end to the year than we’d hoped when work dried up and it seemed very hard to find something new. Fortunately we agreed a new project for 2025 just as we broke up for Christmas.

I’ve continued to make regular visits to the hospital as part of the clinical trial and on the whole I feel well. The new medicine is proving to be very effective in a scientific sense, and is also working well for me personally.

I spent the Christmas holiday’s in Colombia visiting family. A- and I were able to sneak away for a fun couple of days in Medellín and the whole family had a relaxing few days just outside Bogotá in Anapoima. I say relaxing. F-‘s first action upon arriving at the holiday house was to take his clothes off and jump into the swimming pool. F- can’t swim. After an unscheduled, fully-clothed dip to rescue him I was grateful of the glass of whisky my father-in-law passed me.