2024

Hello 2024!

Also, hello to the International Year of Camelids... which includes camels, llamas, alpacas, vicuñas and guanacos.

It also led to me discovering the batshit crazy image that graces the top of this post... which, just this morning, I discovered was from an even more batshit crazy commercial for a Norwegian "acupressure" product that... doesn't seem to exist under that name anymore.

Also, there is "no reliable evidence for the effectiveness of acupressure", according to Wikipedia and anybody with any sense. The image is still great though.

So that was my morning. How did you start your 2024?

The thing about traditions... or just a day where you do things because it's that day... is that just traditions... I'm very good with words and thinking and making sense of things this morning... wait, where was I...

Oh, traditions... the thing about them, given that we're talking about ones that only come up once a year, is that they don't tend to change very much from year to year.

My New Years Eve is very that. The only major thing that tends to change is what day it's happening on, which changes some of the minor details.

Yesterday was very much both an average Sunday and also an average New Years Eve.

I did my usual porridge and coffee breakfast, I had pizza for a late lunch/early dinner. I'd already taken down my Christmas decorations (such as they were) on Saturday night, I did some cleaning up, I vacuumed the floors, mostly because they needed it anyway and less specifically because it was New Years.

I changed my bedding from the festive green IKEA swirly quilt cover with the red fitted sheet that I make from a combination of two different regular sets of bedding with the exact same pattern of quilt cover, but in all black and white (which are the other halves of the Christmas sets)... and every year the monochrome version is so very restful to the eyes in a way that I don't think about until it changes over. Also, I think that's the most awkward version of that sentence from any of the New Years posts in recent memory. Like I said... I do words good today.

And then Fluffy came over so we could do what is fast becoming our New Years Eve tradition, which is just the New Years Tradition I was already doing, just with another person. Essentially, watch movies until New Year happens.

I did make little tiny pizza scrolls though, which were successful for the low effort it took to make them.

We also have fallen into a pattern where I show Fluffy a vintage movie he hasn't seen, and then we watch either a movie he's seen and I haven't or something new that neither of us have seen.

This year we started off with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, ticking "Marilyn Monroe" off on his Movie Education Bingo Card... and then we did The Mitchells vs The Machines. Which is... decent. It feels a little too... "I've seen this story 9000 times already" and also "This movie is clearly not aimed at me" and also "LOL, wut, random" or whatever the current generation version of that is. But, to be fair, it's less of that as the movie goes along. I don't think I have enough to say about it to make a whole review though.

We had decided to wander down the road a little to see if we could watch the fireworks down one of the side streets, so we killed the little bit of time before midnight with a frankly terrible episode of the David Suchet Poirot series that was very short and full of very bad acting. And I realised, about halfway through, that the story had also been part of the Anime Poirot and Miss Marple series I watched a bunch of last year.

Was the "watch the fireworks" plan successful? I swear that last year, I saw the fireworks very clearly as I was driving home from having dropped Fluffy home... but, I guess... trees grow in a year. So... we saw what can best be described as both diddly and squat. But we did head people yell "Happy New Year" in literal surround sound as people in the houses around us all yelled it at midnight. So that was novel.

And then I drove him home. I think maybe next year, we just go for three full movies.

This morning, being a Monday, started with my morning walk. And now we're here. So, 2024 definitely has some built in chaos energy already, we'll see how things progress.