2024 Recap...

You know - I'd really like to start one of these recap blogs saying what a great year it was.  Or what an uneventful year it was.  I remember I have had some of those years.  They do happen.  But wow, not lately I suppose.  2024 was another hella rough year.  As we all know - we're now going to be rolling into a very scary/questionable 4 years.  I don't know what to expect, but as positive as I try to be....let's be real....ooooof.

2024 was full of family drama, lots of health crap, a political nightmare, my now poor dog whose dealing with seizures and sadly just a general overwhelming sense of anxiety and depression that is being felt by everyone.  Like it's everywhere.  My heart goes out to everyone who is struggling right now.  My GAWD.  It's brutal out there.

My year started out with hope, and there was some highlights as you'll see below, but it's been a ride.  But as per usual - that's the bad - let's focus on the good shall we?

I attempted to do the sequel to the Artists Way which was called "Walking in this World".  I didn't get so much out of that one but if you wanted to check out that journey it's HERE.  I think starting 2025 I'll be re-reading my Artists Way Journey I completed in 2023.  I know I got a lot of out of that one and I need to focus on something positive.

In February some of the adventure group folks hit up Luna Luna.  That was friggin awesome!

In April we took a really lovely trip with The McDonald's and The Shouse's.  We'd had so many great trips with Pat's couple friends - I wanted to get mine on a trip and it was just lovely!  You can read about that HERE

In May - I started doing something on this blog I've never done before, and I don't know why because I love it and I'll continue to do it.  I started monthly Photo Dumps.  I'm always taking pictures and trying to captures moments and memories and I love that I do that.  So I started trying to capture that in monthly blogs.  I'm so happy I started doing that, so please go back and see all my photo dump blogs to really see what I've been up to!  I'll of course still be writing about different adventures and journeys, but these monthly "dumps" are such a great way to kind of capture everything in one spot.

In June, Pat and I took a trip to Paso Robles.  It's one of our favorite spots.  We took Poe and stayed in Templeton and it was just lovely!  You can read about that HERE

Another highlight this year is I started bowling again!  I re-joined the league I bowled with back in 2019.  I've missed Anna/Sergio and just doing something competitive.  I'm still not great, but I'm so enjoying it.  The cool thing is Libby and Tim are my teammates!  It's super fun to bowl with Tim, and Jenny is to join us for the next season.  The best part is I'm bowling with my best friend!  We bowled the Winter Season which is June-November.  Then Sweeps is always in Laughlin which you can read about HERE.  Looking forward to starting up our Jan-June season in 2025!

In August Pat & I took a little mini vacay to Ojai/Santa Paula.  My lovely friend from work offered up the amazing place she lives and we spent a beautiful weekend with wonderful people and a lovely area!

In September we had a full month of music, events and fun.  A couple of highlights was of course the The Taste of Europa which is one of my favorite events, and we took a little overnight in LAto see Trombone Shorty at the Hollywood bowl which was rad!

Trombone Shorty with the good wine!

The rest of the year was a bit rougher, holidays were kinda weird but did end up being really lovely despite that fact.  We didn't do nearly as much Halloween fun that I like to do which will need to change in 2025 for sure!  One highlight though was Pat and I are probably going to start a new tradition of heading out to the desert for Thanksgiving, so I really look forward to those new memories.  You can read about our little test run HERE.

New Years Eve was nice.  We headed over to Cori/Tom's again and they were sweet enough to let us bring Poe, although we owe them a new screen door, and had a lovely evening at their house and headed home around 10pm,

Pretty great group of people right here

So here we are - January 1st.  A new year.  Not sad to say goodbye to 2024 and somewhat wary going into 2025.  But I have some new practices and routines I'm planning to put into place and looking forward to see how those work out.  Definitely going into this new year preparing to self care and focus on the good.  

Wishing all of you a wonderful new year!