Month: December 2024

With both Christmas and New Year’s Day falling in the middle of the week this year, there is an odd rhythm to the final weeks of 2024. I still have a few transactions scrambling to close before the end of the year and there is a scattering of conversations with prospective clients looking towards early 2025, but we have not had our normal internal meetings and won’t again until the new year. Our assistant has also been out so I’m getting a reminder of just how glad I am to have an assistant. Even sending the newsletter this week and next week will probably prove a challenge the workflow has changed since I last published it myself.

I’ll be traveling back to Durham today. We always celebrate the holiday early and there tends to be less traffic on Christmas Day. Then I’ll have something like a two or three day workweek depending on how I choose to spend my Saturday. I haven’t had one of those in a while, but I’m hopeful that a good work sprint will allow me to make progress not just on my outstanding matters but also on a few strategic planning initiatives that I’ve initiated for next year. Next week’s post will be more of a summary of the year. It has certainly had its ups and downs. This one is just a short missive before I gorge myself on breakfast food. I hope that each of you enjoys this holiday, whether you were awakened way too early this morning by excited children or will be traveling most of the day like me.

I’ve never been one to watch parades on television. Even this year, I left the room on Thanksgiving once the television came on. Saturday morning, after a trip to the grocery store, I walked to get my weekly blueberry muffin. This time, instead of returning back to my apartment I headed to meet friends at a prime viewing spot for Durham’s Christmas parade. Until Friday afternoon I didn’t even know that there was a parade, but it wasn’t as if I had alternate plans.

It was sunny, cold, and windy and there was a helicopter overhead that made quite a lot of noise, but my friends’ little guy wasn’t bothered by any of it. He was in his coat and standing in his wagon. And when he got out of the wagon he ran a few laps around a ramp for the building we stood in front of, hair all askew from being under a winter cap. Some of the other children were less enthused about sitting in the cold, but he had the best time of anyone there. The loud cars, the drums, the people, everything—he was smiling and bouncing in his wagon the whole time. People in the parade were drawn to that happiness and that created a virtuous cycle adding even further to his mirth. Then to top it off, there were fire trucks at the end of the parade. Fire trucks are his favorite and he wasn’t about to let a cold wind interfere with his enjoyment of their lights and sirens. I haven’t experienced that level of joy in months.

I could reflect more on the parade—my thoughts about the marching bands, the different civic organizations, two guys walking with a banner (which is what their banner announced), the Mesoamerican dance troupe, or the people handing out tins of sardines—but it was really just about watching the excitement on the little guy’s face.

I haven’t been for the past month or so, but reading fiction in the evenings has been a part of my evening shutdown routine during my better stretches this year. I’ve read mostly science fiction this year in the evenings, which brought a change from my previous habit of more classic literature. There was a short story collection that sparked a few thoughts, but the highlight of this reading was the Red Rising trilogy. I picked up the first one after hearing about it from a couple of the podcasts I listen to occasionally and ended up plowing through all three (there have been subsequent novels set in the same world too but I haven’t read those yet) in perhaps too short a period of time.

The first book starts on a partially terraformed Mars set at some indeterminate point in the future amidst a community of the lowest caste of a solar system wide society spanning from Mercury to the moons of the gas giants. There is interplanetary travel in the story, but there is nothing like hyperdrive and it can take months to traverse between different planets and moons. The main character, Darrow, is a young Helldiver operating deep in the mines of Mars. Then things proceed as Darrow navigates a world dominated by Golds (with a whole lot of other colors in between).

I won’t give a plot summary since I’m not interested in spoiling anything, but it is a wild ride. The action across the three novels is taut and fast-paced. I know that the mental image I have of some of the characters is wildly different than how they are described in the text, but that has never stopped me from enjoying a book before and there isn’t yet a film or television adaptation. The reader gets more of Darrow’s inner thoughts than those of the other characters, but there is a great deal of turmoil in him as he both shapes and is shaped by the events unfolding around him. This also isn’t a simple story of good universally triumphing over evil, and that makes it much more compelling.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, we celebrated my sister-in-law’s birthday. Some of our cousins were driving through on Saturday and so they stopped to surprise her. The older children were the flower girls in my brother and sister-in-law’s wedding, and they love pleasant surprises. I was part of their greeting party. The two older children were so excited to be part of the surprise, to the point of being giddy with their little hands shaking slightly. The youngest had just woken from a nap during the car ride and was carried into the house, but eventually he warmed up too and played various games with the little balls that were some of the only toys on offer. I hadn’t seen the kids or their parents for several months, and seeing the little ones is always a highlight.

The meal was decidedly kid-focused with tater tots and pulled chicken bbq. I sat with the older children during the late lunch and talked to them about school and new friends that they’ve made in their classes this year. The cake was red velvet so I didn’t partake, but everyone else enjoyed it and most ate seconds.

Then we were treated to a ribbon twirling performance set against a background of Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus songs as the middle child was given her own birthday gift a few days early too (along with a matching one for the eldest to mitigate any envy). The music would not have been my first choice, but no one asked me and that’s okay. After all, it wasn’t my party.