2024 Life Review

It's time to navel-gaze! My favo(u)rite time! 

2024 Resolution Round-up

My resolutions for this year, and how they went:

  • Health: spend some time on the floor each day.
    Success. It was a minimalist goal, but put a reminder in Omnifocus and it generally happened. I'm going to keep the reminder in, and try to stretch more while down there.
  • Interpersonal: ask more interesting questions when I'm chatting with people I don't know much.
    Minor success? I kind of forgot about this one, but I think I inadvertently did it. I'm getting better at chatting with some people at least. I have found that in some contexts it is very hard to get anything but the smallest of small talk going—there are lots of people for whom that is the comfort zone. We are in the midst of 'small talk' season now...I am coping.
  • One and done: prepare for death
    In progress. I really left this for the last minute, and I have done some of it and have other things on my to-do list for the rest of this week. If it's not done by 1 January, it should at least be done for the restart to work. The main thing left is 're-doing our wills'. 
  • To make me happy: keep up adventure list
    No success. I started the year with leftover Adventures on my to-do list from 2023, and none of those got done as they involved travel. Then I just didn't think of good minor adventures. 
    There was another possible one: find people to have an Infinite Jest reading group with. But that went out the window quickly. I had a hard time getting any reading done once I started studying Mandarin this year. 
    To be honest, I just didn't have a 'make me happy' resolution I wanted to do. Maybe I'm happy enough!
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The rest of life

Eating and exercising: I'm definitely still eating better than I was before doing Zoe last year, but then I went off the wagon while in the US this summer and never quite recovered, putting my blood sugar numbers a bit up again. I know what I need to do. Phil's own goals have made it easier to eat better. No more bread in the house.

My online gym closed, which is a grave disappointment. Now I'm doing two classes on Saturday mornings with one of the teachers from that, but there are never more than two of us in each of the classes, so I don't expect it to last. I re-engaged with my old trainer, doing it as a joint training session with Phil, but I don't know how long I'll be able to justify that cost. We bought each other dumbbells for Christmas, so we need to make some plans about using them.

Making: G and I took a crochet class together, which was fun, but I've not crocheted anything since. I've done various bits of visible mending (mostly embroidery, rather than darning), continued knitting on blanket that will take years (I'm nearly done with the second of six colours of stripe). It's my 'keep myself off email during online meetings' project, and there are a lot fewer online meetings these days. The sewing machine has come out a few times, but I've only completed repair projects.

The main making obsession this year was soup. I haven't quite got through the soup magazine that Phil got me for Christmas last year, but I'm nearly there—just skipping the ones with seafood or the ones based on broccoli and the ones that depend on too many American (often processed food) ingredients. Because of it, I bought a slow cooker and have been loving it, especially for overnight stock.

Travel: I started the year at my dad's, then used the excuse of a work trip to York to book myself in for a couple of nights in a spa up there, on my own. I bask in happy memories of that. 

Our big holiday was a week in Reykjavik on the way to the US. So many things had changed since Phil and I went there for our honeymoon—the food was no more expensive than last time, but so much better. Even the landscape had changed—with the continental plates constantly moving apart. Two regrets: that I had some kind of stomach bug for the first day and a half (thank goodness it was just me), and that we put it as the first part of our journey, rather than having it after our two weeks in my US hometown.

The only* new place I went to this year was Krakow, where I spent three days working for a Polish research agency. The weather was beautiful, so I didn't mind that the hotel was pretty far from the work in the city centre. I didn't get to see a lot of the town, because of the work, but I did climb the tower at the castle and later had possibly the best dumplings of my life. It was also fun to hang out with a number of interesting academics.

*(I'm not going to count my afternoon in a new-to-me village in Oxfordshire.)

Adventure: Despite not fulfilling my 'adventure list' goal, I did some new things. The Polish trip and related work was one, but more exciting (in a somewhat boring way) was being a standby for an American game show filming in London. I got put up in a hotel in West London, fed and taken care of, paid, and just spent a day in a windowless room talking with various Americans. It was strangely fun!

Community/giving: I was not focused on tithing this year. I still gave to my regular charities and every birthday or memorial giving opportunity that came my way, but I didn't keep track of it so religiously. My birthday charity drive did not make its goal for the first time.

In terms of my time, I did some hosting (and speaking) for Sunday Assembly Brighton and participated in the community advent calendar, but I think that was about it! My main charitable act these days is editing a journal for a scholarly society.

Work life

Based on a 5-day week (excluding holidays), I worked 8.45 hours/day in 2024, which was nearly an hour/day less than last year. The difference? I was no longer Head of Department. (There's a reason there's extra pay for doing it.) The excess hour a day beyond 'statutory' university 'full time' is accounted for by the journal editorship. 

What did I get done? Well, I've repaired my c.v. a bit, which suffered a lot in Covid/Head of Department times.
  • Published two issues of Dictionaries. One was a special issue, for which I was production editor. The general issue also had a forum on synonymy that I'd organised (and so an extra introduction by me). And, of course, I've done a lot of the work for the next two...
  • Published an article about emotion and Covid briefings with a former PhD student (and celebrated her graduation in January)
  • Published two book reviews
  • Resubmitted GloWbE please paper and had it accepted. I've done the proofread, so I'm just waiting for it to show up online—the publisher (CUP) was hacked earlier in the year, so everything's delayed.
  • Submitted five (one co-authored) ~3K-word articles for the third edition of Elsevier's Encyclopedia of Linguistics. (Awaiting edits.)
  • Lots of talks 
    • [not work-related]  six Sussex outings for Undertakings, a new-this-year talk about funeral-director inventors, including my brother David
    • four outings for last year's Linguistic Contagion (about Wordle)
    • a new talk on conceptualisation and lexicalisation for the Chartered Institute of Editors and Proofreaders
    • a US/UK English talk for BYU London summer school students
    • my first talk (on 'how English is changing') for the University of the Third Age (an Oxfordshire chapter; perhaps more will follow?)
  • Published an article about children's pronoun development in Emagazine (for A-level students)
  • Interviewed on two podcasts: 
  • Co-taught From Words to Interaction (with Melanie) for the first time and taught some first-time-for-me material in Great Ideas about Language. 
  • Had one PhD student successfully finish and had a great time supervising three first-class BA dissertations.
  • Put together and co-chaired a committee on workload allocation matters and sat on promotion and appeals committees. 
  • Monthly newsletters and 13 Separated by a Common Language blog posts.