2024 Behind Me, Thoughts and Gratitude

2024 was a big year of change for me, with many great highlights. I left academia and moved from Chicago to Oakland the year before, and ended up jobless, but in late 2023 I was hired at a space startup. I didn’t quite have the skills they needed when I went to my interview in November, but Shawn the CEO wanted to hire me anyway. I knew him from my grad school years, so I’m guessing he still had a favorable opinion of me.

The job had a lot of ups and downs, some stress periods and fun ones, but it sent me to Scotland and Australia, and helped me develop some new technical writing skills. I also did some coding, which feels good, and contributed to some analyses of technical problems for the company. Best of all, the pay is basically double my academic postdoc salary, even with the classes I was teaching. I’ve been able to save money and invest wisely, and it has been a good year financially. RocketLab, Intuitive Machines, and PLanet Labs turned out to be good investments, and I’m excited about the whole space industry these days, and the future of space exploration. To teenage me, this probably would have seemed like an unattainable dreams. Am I a lucky guy? Yes.

Speaking of lucky, things are still going well with my wife, and we still get along and enjoy spending time with each other. Maybe that seems trite, but I know so many people for whom this is not the case, or people who are still single, or now divorced. I’m grateful we still get along and find it fun to do things together. She has also been open to me wants for the future, and we invested in property in Hawaii together, where we have to move again when we have money to build a small place. We’re going to visit this February!

We’re also trying for a baby. We had some bad luck with our IVF treatments, unfortunately. Things looked promising at first with 13-14 eggs and our general health being good, we got 3 blastocysts of good quality – an ABA and two ABBs, I think, but none of them made it after finishing thawing. Sad, and it cost a lot of money. We’re thinking of trying again, and now trying a bit naturally in the meantime to see what works.

Creatively, I have been active editing my novel, publishing my first fiction anthology under my own press, and working on a few short stories, but haven’t sold any stories this year, I think. Not for lack of trying. Next year, I hope to sell a few, and perhaps finally get an agent for one of my books. I believe in them, and I think other people will too if I put in the marketing time.

Finally, we traveled. We had an absolute blasted a Lakes of Fire with our friends, doing ‘nose beer’ with Michael’s dad David, and hanging out with our ‘couple friends’ Bee and Paul.We also had an incredible year at Burning Man, which we’re taking a year off from next year. I met a pizza demon with our friends out at the trash fence, enjoyed running during the sunny morning in the absolutely perfect weather, ran into Antwon and Benn from Hawaii during the final build days, did some E with Gina while wearing a new skanky outfit that I was shy to try – but proud of myself for wearing – and had a couple of ketamine adventures thanks to our friend Sparrow. It was a wonderful adventure, and great to be amongst so many friends for 10 days and to get away from work.

Gina and I also want to Greece, which was beautiful and had incredible food, where we celebrated a belated honeymoon. We saw lots of stray cats, saw sunset and ate pastries our first day on astronomy hill across from the Acropolis, stayed at a little bed and breakfast on Hydra where there are zero cars, and ate a lot of authentic Greek salad – which has zero romaine lettuce over there, by the way, just lots of cucumbers and tomatoes. I had worked travel to, to New Mexico and Australia and Scotland as I mentioned, but that’s a whole other story.

Grateful for this year, and looking forward to an exciting new one.