Continuing the slowly-growing thread of 'things I did for the first time this year', here's my list for 2025.
1. I stopped trying to studiously write a blog article (or publish one) every month. I discovered halfway through the year that the search engines weren't even finding my articles, and hence I was getting no traffic to them. Instead of just launching new articles out into space each month, I started work on improving the links between the articles (all the Star Trek reviews now contain links to each other; so do the Star Wars; most of the analytics, the maths and so on). I also posted backlinks to my site from other relevant sites, and shared more of my articles on LinkedIn. Has traffic gone up? Not really! It's a slow process, and I haven't been diligent or studious in my approach.
2. I fixed a broken top-down toilet seat. One of those integrated ones where there is zero access to the underneath of the seat. It's all done top-down, and it took a YouTube video to make it happen. And it was a success.
3. After last year's success laying down loft boards for our smaller loft, I increased the coverage of loft boards in our main loft from about 50% to more like 70%. It's not complete, as I am checking if there are any risks in boarding over the recessed lighting we have in our bathroom - I don't want anything to overheat :-) This has given me plenty of room for my slowly expanding model railway, which now has two complete loops and series of sidings - with more planned.
4. I learned to ask for help.
In March, I decided it was time to set up my airband radio with an external aerial. There's zero reception inside the house, especially with the laptops, PCs, tablets, and other electronic toys all producing noise across the radio band. So I set up a small outside aerial - I bought it off ebay and stuck it on our gatepost. It produced a slight improvement in reception, but it was clearly time to get something better. So I asked my dad about an outdoor aerial, and bought the brackets and so on for it. We rigged it up, about three metres off the ground, at a slightly off-vertical angle (not deliberate). My next door neighbour offered to set up something a little more meaningful, and, in exchange for some of his favourite lager, rigged up the same aerial about five metres off the ground. I can now hear some of the radio traffic from aircraft on their way towards Heathrow.
We also revamped some of our garden this year, including getting rid of some old railway sleepers we'd used to landscape a raised flower bed. They were wet, rotten, and sagging. And still very heavy, and very dense. We hired a skip, but it wasn't quite big enough to hold the sleepers, so I set about them with a hand-saw, a small electric saw and a lot of hard work. My other neighbour turned up with his electric chainsaw... even he had some difficulty getting through the dense wood, but he persevered and trimmed the sleepers down to size. I have a small offcut from the most resistant sleeper sitting on my desk, as a reminder to me to ask for help.
5. I planted some conkers. They haven't even taken root - in fact they're more rot than root, but I'm not too concerned. Next autumn, I'll read up on the best way to plant conkers and try again (for example, if a conker floats, it's not going to germinate at all. Who knew?).
6. During the autumn, I went to the cinema on three consecutive nights. Twice, nearly. The local Cineworld showed the Tobey Maguire Spiderman trilogy over a weekend in September, and the Christopher Nolan Batman films on three consecutive nights in October. We didn't see Spiderman 2 - it was Lizzie's idea and she had something else on the Saturday night - but we saw all the other films. I haven't been to the cinema quite as much as this year, and certainly not to see films I'd already seen before!
7. I started using AI to generate music. I like it.
8. I took one of our cats to the out-of-hours emergency vets. Tango suffered a broken leg back in April (we think he was hit by a car), and we had to take him for an immediate check before taking him to our normal vets the following day. We now have pet insurance.
It looks like a short list, but it doesn't include the things I'm doing on a larger scale (my team at work now covers nearly 20 people, which is quite a jump from 10), or the things I've started but not yet finished, but it's been an interesting year, nonetheless.
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