2024 : Year summary
2024-12-31
So, It's the last day of 2024 and I would like to recount a bit of the major events that transcurred this year in cronological order.
January
Lena (my gf) came to live with me in January, and while I thought it would be a bit challenging at first, we seem to be having a fantastic time so far. We've had our ups and downs, of course; but most importantly we have managed to resolve conflicts by speaking to each other and listening. Not much else happened I believe.
February
I don't quite remember what happened this month, mustn't have been important.
March
We took in a pregnant cat from the streets temporarily. She was a terrible guest and got into constant arguments
with our beloved cats. We decided to completely separate them and she had her babies in our room, while our cats
lived peacefully in the rest of the house.
In hindsight, while the intention was noble, the execution was rather terrible. We should have researched better
on cat behaviour and stuff, and perhaps finding her a better temporary home would have been ideal. We kept one of
the babies for ourselves and gave the rest of the cats away. Even the mum found a better home. We named our new
member of the family "bebé" (baby) since we always kept referring to her as such. "Where's the baby?", "Look at
what baby is doing!", "Baby is sooooo cute!". And thus she kept the name. Nowadays bebé plays a lot with her
sisters and is an absolute tornado of a cat.
April
Got an absolute unit of a pc.
A couple of months prior, I purchased a motherboard on Aliexpress. I was looking for something powerful so that I
could do some experiments with virtual machines, and so that I could also use it as a gaming computer. The motherboard
arrived without any issues and I immediately got to assembling it. I named her Makiiimoto, since the brand is
MACHINIST and I like to name my devices as if they are family members. She's currently hosting this website
and I might use her for self-hosting future projects. I shall write more about her on the hardware section.
May
Not much happened I believe. Or I don't remember much from May.
June
My best friend Dana was diagnosed with leukemia again. She asked me personally to be with her while she was hospitalized. I first met her when she was recovering from the first time she got leukemia, she was already out and about, and we had lots of fun watching movies and listening to music, we went to many places together and were really close. There was some romance here and there but in the end we were really good friends. She got into arts and was attending university when she got the second diagnose. It was gut-wrenching to say the least.
July
The company I work for (let's call it Mataphy) got involved in a new project. Well, this was happening way before,
but in July this became relevant to me. The project consisted of teaching basic informatics and programming (in Java) to highschool tweens,
and it was a joint effort between my company and a local highschool for children in vulnerable situations.
The reason why this became relevant to me was because I was selected to become a mentor (teacher) to these kids, and
I was really happy and excited to take on such a responsibility. I had already had previous experience working as a
teacher, since I had taught english to teenagers and adults at a local language school for two years before that,
so I already knew how to behave in front of a group and how to maintain control. However, I had only worked with one
or two tweens of that age at a time, never with a whole group of them, so I was a bit nervous.
I spent most of July going in and out of the hospital, visiting Dana and seeing her slowly deteriorate due to her staying there for an increasingly longer amount of time. Her arms were bruised everywhere from the constant injections to draw blood, and administer medicine. She was barely eating much because she was constantly nauseous and didn't have much appetite. Besides, she was in an isolated room because thanks to the cancer treatment her immune system was very vulnerable, so we (her family and I) had to be very careful to clean ourselves before entering, and we wore masks alongside a special medical apron / coat thing.
August
On the second day of August at 9:03 in the morning, three hours after I had left her side to attend a work related meeting, Dana died of a pulmonary infection that she had caught a couple of days earlier. She was with her family and friends.
Her family, her boyfriend, her friends. We were all completely devastated.
September
I kept myself busy working as a teacher, those children were my responsibility and I wanted them to learn and have a better life, so I did my best to explain and re-explain things so that they could comprehend better.
October
Lena had a very important ceremony at the university where she studied, she swore an oath to the university and her profession. Her family and I were there to support her. She was very happy, and I was very proud of her.
Also, a friend asked me as a favour to take her to a rural town in another state for a wedding. I invited Lena to come with us on this road-trip. We visited my family on the way back since they lived relatively close and hit the road again the next day. We had tacos for breakfast at a restaurant named after the rural town we went to for a laugh. It was fun.
November
Kept working hard as a teacher, I almost forgot I had other work to do at Mataphy.
I actually got them in trouble because I was doing cool things the other teachers weren't (despite my recommendations), and
I apparently set the bar too high. In reality I was just following the guidelines and recommendations set up by Lena,
who is working with us as an educational psycologist. She designed the whole teaching methodology of the project and I took
note of it. I liked it a lot because it teaches children not to be dependent on the teacher, but instead, they learn to be
self-sufficient and learn on their own. I'm incredibly thankful she was in charge of that.
December
I did a lot of cool stuff in December.
Lena and I went to the International Book Fair together, we stayed with my family and we had a really good time. At this
point, Lena has read the whole "Doctorate of vampiric domination", and "The scoundrelous Rapscallion's Auto-Recovery System"
alongside "The journal of the pharmacist" sagas. So she was incredibly happy when she got to meet her beautiful Lien Xia
in person, or at least a massive cardboard cutout of the character art. I bought her four books, including some from one
of the previously mentioned sagas. She was incredibly happy.
She also bought me a book! She got me an "Advanced Unix Programming" book that I found.
I was finally able to set-up my own blog.
I had been looking for ways to achieve this for a while, since I've always wanted my "basic-html-css blog" from the 90's.
I got a lot of help from people on Lemmy, and I'm incredibly thankful. I've learned a lot through this little
project of mine and I'm very happy. I also just set up Lena's blog, which you can visit at
JustASweetbean.com. You might realise that we are polar oposites
in terms of design.
Lena and I went on our yearly winter-solstice camping trip. As per our tradition, I disassembled old wooden crates that we use as pots for our vegetable garden and packed the car full of camping supplies, including our trusty tetsubin, tent, sleeping sacks and our new addition to the family, a massive pot for cooking. When we arrived it was raining and we had some issues setting up the tent. Lena kept crying for us to leave, but we endured. Despite all trials and tribulations we had lots of fun; the food was really good (except the burgers) and we lit a beautiful campfire, where we burned all the paper that we collected during the year. The very next day I picked up the ashes so that we might use them in the garden as nutrients for the plants.
This year Lena couldn't come with me to spend christmass with my family, so I took her to her family and drove on towards the sunset.
Thoughts
This was something of an eventful year, the world lost an incredible person that could have done so many wonderful things. I personally lost my very best friend, who left a huge crater in my and many other people's lives. I shall forever remember her and keep her legacy alive. I hope to bring happiness to wherever I go and help as many people as I can in whichever way I can. Thanks to her, every three years I give my hair away to a cancer foundation so that they can make wigs. I did that twice while she was alive, and I'm not going to stop doing so.
I have learned a lot during this year, and man, do I wish I had taken this path a lot sooner. There is a lot of things to learn, and do, and every year I keep getting older. Whenever I want to start something I feel like I need to learn everything and I don't even know where to start. I feel like every second I spend not learning something is wasted time and I've already wasted a lot of time. Yet at the same time I keep procrastinating on projects and work, and I spend a lot of time playing videogames and watching videos on youtube. Some day, perhaps, I'll reconcile these two oposite sides of my essence.
I hope I get to do more cool stuff next year. My next objective is to set up an email server and learn how to protect my
stuff online.
That's it, Happy new year!
