December comes to us, mild in temperament and temperature this year. Although this season didn't see quite the Grand Social Obligations Tour that previous festive periods have, the household has remained busy (and largely healthy) through December, something to always be celebrated.
The month contained moments of great personal and social delight which, though both real and invaluable, aren't fit to share far and wide on the open internet. Let the record show that I feel both grateful and fulfilled by the people in my life, and my relationships to them.
December 2024 saw my last working day at my (now previous) job as a Senior Software Engineer. In a few weeks I'll be starting a more leadership-focused position in a larger organisation, with a much larger technical footprint. I am excited, and glad to have taken a short (three-week) break between positions. Time off has a funny way of being neither as much time, nor off, as one expects at the outset.
A few months before the end of 2024 I wrote a list of projects I had started, and wanted to finish. These were things I wanted to finish but which had started dragging. I am proud to report that in the last four weeks of 2024, I managed to:
- Finish knitting my first pair of socks
- Finish the second book in John Gwynne's Bloodsword Saga
I continue to make a lot of my own clothes. My relationship to this practice is getting more complicated. I have a lot of thoughts about how inaccessible the knowledge of "proper" tailoring and garment construction is. I wonder if that's a "real" problem, or only a "me" problem. I am infuriated by how often "you just have to know" is the answer to questions, and I wonder how much Cargo Culting or Rain Dancing (i.e. rituals seem to have previously worked, but through unclear mechanisms) happens here.
But I am delighted to report that knitting has little to none of this. My experience has been that people are delighted to provide you with very clear, standardised instructions on how to make a pair of socks. Even better, similar services are available for many other garments! I am also currently batting 100% on "unclear instructions that an LLM can help clarify". It definitely takes longer to make knitted garments - weeks for two socks - and one cannot practically wear only knitted cloths, but it is a skill I am grateful to have, and to improve.
I wanted the pressure to finish the garment precisely for this reason: it is refreshing and I am glad to have done it, but I found it hard to assign time to it.
The book was a similar story: a recently-completed trilogy that I am actively enjoying. But at 600-some pages, and as a physical book (I am 1:2 on books:audiobooks) I found myself picking up, and finishing, books around it. By setting the end-of-year marker, I was able to leave that feeling of drag behind. And it feels fantastic.
See other articles