As I mentioned in a previous post, 2024 will go down as the year of least travels. As of today – December 31, 2024 – there are less than 1,200 photos in my Lightroom library taken in 2024. That’s a over 50% in reduction from 2023, so that should tell you something.

January

I cannot be the only person who can barely recall what happened in January. January has always been one of the hardest months for me because 1) the weather and 2) being stuck at home because of the weather.

Looking through my pictures and blog posts, it looks like the only interesting thing I did in January was seed starting. Yeah, that’s a bit early but with the southern exposure in my front yard, I have to be at least a month ahead of the normal schedule.

February

I am absolutely going to get the date right this year to go bald eagle spotting. When we went in 2024, we were a week off and most of the bald eagle had already flown away. I only saw this one bird sitting stubbornly on a tree branch.

March – May

I will mash these months together to make this post shorter for audience-sake. Nothing much happened in these months anyway, except the garden. It’s all about the garden. I feel when it comes to the spring garden, I still need to work on the timing of planting everything. The thing is, though, every time I think of timing, my anxiety would be triggered because in my mind, every second passed felt like another second was lost in not sowing seeds.

Looking at my photo library, I did travel to Malad, Idaho in March and attended the Tulip festival in April, which it is possible that I will go again in 2025. Here are some of the photos from the trips and flowers from the garden.

June – August

There were a few day trips sprinkled in those months but mostly, I was at home, tackling garden projects and caring for the garden. I still can’t believe how many projects I completed during the short time when my mom was away. It was so refreshing that I could do my projects without somebody scolding me until the entire neighborhood can hear. I should also add that I added 2 new raised beds in the front yard in 2024.

In June, I attended the biennial air show. I think what made this air show more enjoyable than the previous one from 2022 was the absence of my mom, who was in Asia for a conference. I had so much fun photographing the planes in motion. I typically photograph landscapes and things that don’t move, so photographing planes doing the loop-de-loops in the sky was a great challenge.

If you ask me what my favorite trip of 2024, it would be the 4th of July day trip. I think I drove about 200 miles that day as I drove along northern Utah’s scenic backways. Scenic Backways are roads that are not up to the standards of Scenic byways and in my opinion, the scenery of the scenic backways are much prettier.

I was all over the map that day as I started in the mountains of Salt Lake City and visited the famous Guardsman Pass before I traversed the narrow, twist backroads to Midway before getting on highway 189 and ended up in Provo and finally, called it a day in Midway.

September – December

Not a lot went on since September.

My mom had her back surgery in September, which is still in the midst of healing. This delayed in healing was her fault. She put so much creams and ointments on it that it prevented the wound from closing. Also, let’s not forget to factor in the fact that she was walking and running on the treadmill when she wasn’t supposed to.

Anyway, the only thing exciting during those months were probably the soccer game and the Christmas parties. It was my first time ever seeing a live soccer match. Somehow, seeing the game live made soccer a fun sport again.

Of course, I can’t say autumn is my favorite season and not go color chasing. The autumn colors in the mountains nearby were a bit disappointed this year because of the lack of rain. I did wish I could’ve gone a bit further south but being the Queen of “no”, my mom “forbade” me from travel so far.

September was when I started my fall and winter garden in 2024 and I think it’s working because I have leafy greens to harvest, even in December.

Finally, in December, what happened in December?

I passed my CPR class and fulfilled the requirement to be an EMD dispatcher. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m going to quit my job to be a dispatcher. I think I signed up for the EMD class to prove that I’m not as stupid as my mom and others in the family seem to think I am. That kind of talk really got into my head the more they said it.

Christmas was uneventful. I spent Christmas doing a jigsaw puzzle while my mom spent the days lying on the couch watching YouTube videos and drifting in and out of sleep. Her sister did the same thing but in her room.

Well, that’s 2024 in a very long recap. It was a year full of mental health struggles and cabin fever, let’s hope 2025 will have less of those.

Inspired by SundayStills