Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Goals for 2024 – The Final Report

January 1, 2025 by Beth

Apparently my blog is only a plcae for me to post yearly goals, and then two quarterly check ins on those yearly goals, and then I write half a third quarter check in that I never finish, and then somehow December is over. So here’s how I did on my goals (spoiler alert: I failed to acheive my goal of my quarterly check in!)

1. made 24 new foods/beverages – I exceeded this one (25/24, 102%), which I was really behind on at the half way mark through the year. I credit my friend Linda who invited me over to make things to jump start me after a slow beginning on this goal and my sister for letting me help make stuff she was making while I was visting for Christmas so that I could add them to my list of new things that I made this year!

The things that I made in the second half of 2024 were:

• Bourbon Butterscotch Blondies – made these to bring to a tail gate after one of my summer hockey games. I googled “what to make for a tail gate party” and found this recipe. It didn’t have very much bourbon in it, so I didn’t think it woudl be very bourbon-y, but it was sooo bourbon-y and delicious. It was a big hit!
• Dijon mustand – Made this with Linda. The recipe is from a cookbook she has called Foolproof Preserving (which she also gave me a few years back as a present). The recipes in this book are always great!
• Grainy mustard – Ditto.
• Blueberry Earl Grey jam – Ditto.
• BBQ sauce – Also made this with Linda, but it wasn’t from the same cookbook. We adapted a receipe we’d found online by adding cumin, corainder powder, liquid smoke, and bourbon. It was a bit sweeter than we would have liked, but could easily be adapted to be a bit less sweet.
• Chickpea salad – Made this at Linda’s place on the same day we made the mustards, jam, and BBQ sauce, because I stayed for dinner. Didn’t use a recipe at the time (this is one of Linda’s go-to dishes), but I found a recipe online that was similar, so I could remember how to make it again because it was delicious.
• Beach pie. Linda’s husband Casey mostly made this one, but I asked to help a little bit so that I could say that it was something I made this year!
• Almond cookies. Made this to bring over to my friends Patricia and Mike’s place.
• Peanut butter balls with rice krispies. Made these to bring to Tsawwassen Beer Fest, which is a made up name for a yearly event where a bunch of friends go to one of my friend’s places in Tsawwassen and we all bring different beers to sample.
• Oatmeal protein muffins. Decided I need more protein in my diet, so tried making some protein muffins. I adapted the recipe a bit by adding apples, more protein powder than the receipe called for, and the added olive oil that is suggested if you the muffins to be moister, because I wanted to counter act the dryness that would come from the extra protein. But didn’t quite get the proportions right because the muffins were too dry. I’ll keep experimenting.
• Protein pancakes. On the same protein kick, I added protein powder to my usual pancakes and boom, protein pancakes!
• Vegan zucchini muffins. I made regular zucchini muffins to bring to a work meeting, but one of my colleagues is vegan and I didn’t want him to feel left out, so I made these. They were pretty good!
• Marinated tofu. This was one of my sister’s dishes that I helped with. It was very tasty.
• Amaretto balls. Another one I helped my sister with. She took a rum ball recipe and used amaretto instead of rum.
• Browned butter cardamom cookies. Another one of my sister’s recipes. This was my favourite of the things we baked this year.
• Rocky road “better than fudge”. This was another one of my sister’s recipes and I have to say I disagree with the recipes declaration that it was better than fudge. I mean, it was fine, but it was a mix of chocolate, maraschino cherries, marshmallows, and crushed up digestive cookies (and probably other stuff I’m forgetting). But it mostly just tasted like chocolate covered digestive cookies, so you could have just eaten a chocolate covered digestive cookie.
• Merry Fricking’ Christmas cranberrry cocktail. This was a delightful cranberry cocktail that my brother-in-law made (both boozy and mocktail versions) and he let me help so I could count this on my list of things that I made!
• French onion soup. My mom and I made this together from a fantastic recipe my sister had. It’s possible I’ve made French onion soup before, but this one was vegetarian, so I’m counting it as a new recipe (because that’s different even if I’ve made a non-vegetarian one before!)
• Ice cream. My sister got a kit that allows you to turn your Kitchen-aid mixer into an ice cream maker, so we made some French vanilla brown sugar ice cream! It was delicious and my sister may have bought me this kit for my birthday and it is on its way to me right now!
• Affogato. Since we made ice cream and my sister has an espresso maker, this was a natural next step!

2. read 24 books – Thanks largley to my new habit of borrowing audiobooks from the library (which I listen to on 1.5-2x speed because readers talk too slow for my liking), I blew this goal out of the water. I read 46/24 (192%) . Here are the books that I read in 2004 (I included the ones from my Q1 and Q2 postings, becauase Goodreads gives you a nice spread of all the books and I’m lazy and took screenshots of those.

My book choices continue to be predominantly dictated by which audiobooks are “available now” at library (many of which seemed to be celebrity memoirs!0, although a few are ones that I actually sought out and had to go on the waitlist for and a few I got as ebooks or actual paper books (like the Octavia Butler books and Finding the Mother Tree). Oddly, I read two different books that were about authors who stole a story from another author who unexpectedly died and the ensuing drama that befell them.

3. read 7,500 pages – Thanks to all those books, I read 16,207 pages, which is 219% of my goal! (And that’s probably an underestimate because I wasn’t very consistent about capturing all the journal articles, student papers, and other reports I read.

4. 26 blog postings – I published an abysmal 9/26 blog postings (17%).

5. 52 journal entries – I only journalled 31/52 times in 2024 (60%).

6. 260 mindfulness meditations (5 per week) – I did 308/260 meditations (119%), but I haven’t always stayed awake for the whole meditation. I intended to also track meditation sessions where I’ve stayed awake the whole time and actually done the whole session, but I didn’t tracking that very well, so I’m not sure sure how many I did.

7. learn 12 things – I’ve learned 12/12 (100%) things in 2024 ¹ In addition to the 8 things I learned in the first half of the year, I learned (9) how to do the moss stitch in crochet, (10) how to crochet a stuffie (a.k.a., amigurumi) – I took at class at my local yarn shop, Baaad Rabbit for this one), (11) what the word “interregnum” means ²We had a provincial election BC and since I work in a government-adjacent organization, in the interregnum (from whent he writ is dropped until the election results are decided), there are limitations on what can be publically communicated so as not to interfere with the election.³, (12) that in most places, avenues run east-west and streets run north-south (but a few places, including Manhattan and Burnaby, they do the opposite).

8. crochet a stuffed animal – When I took the amigurumi class at my local yarn shop, Baaad Rabbit, I made the head of a cat (so I’ll conside this goal 33% complete). The class was 3 hours long, so we didn’t have the time to make anything more than that. We did learn enough to make the rest of the cat, so I just need to put in the time to do that. It’s taken a bit of a backseat as I pivoted to working on some thigns that I’m making as presents, but perhaps I’ll making finishing my cat stuffie one of my 2025 goals!

9. do stretches 260 times (5 days a week) – I only managed to do stretches 180/260 days this year (69%). I’ve gotten really good at doing stretches after my workouts, but I only go to the gym 3 days a week, which is not sufficient. For a couple of months I got quite good at doing the stretches that my physiotherapist recommended to help alleviate my tight quadralateral muscle (which are also helping improve my squat range, neck range of motion, and a host of other good things), but I’ve been a big slacker on that of late. I think part of my problem is that I leave them to the end of the day and then it’s easy to say “I’m too tired” and just go to bed. I think perhaps switching stretches to the morning or when I get home from work my help.

10. practice French 365 days in a row – I’ve screwed this a few times in 2024, by being out late and thus not paying attention to the notifications pining on my phone from Duolingo telling me I’m about to lose my streak, and only realizing it after midnight. *face palm*. Duolingo has a thing called a “streak freeze”, where you can skip a day without losing the streak you are on, and I have earned a few of those, so I cashed them in and Duolingo thinks I was on day 849 in a row of French lessons as of Dec 31, but I know the truth.

11. eat fish or plant-based protein at least once per week – I’ve recorded 53 dinners where I’ve had fish or plant-based protein (though I think there might have been some that I forgot to record). This 53/52 (102%) so chalk this one up as achieved!

12. make a charitable donation every month for a year – I didn’t actully make a charitable donation each month of the year as I intended to (unless you count a recurring monthly donation that I make, but that wasn’t the intention of this goal, which was more about making a deliberate new donation each month. I did exceed the goal of 12 new donations, even if they weren’t actually made one in each month of the year. I also learned yesterday that in Canada charitable donations you make up to Feb 28, 2025 can be claimed on your 2024 taxes (to try to make up for the mail strike). This was definitely not well publicized (I only know this because I live with an accountant).

13. work on at least 1 joke per day (doesn’t have to be a good joke!) – I worked on joke on exactly half of the days of 2024 – 183/366 (50%). This included days where I sat down and worked on writing and days when I jotted down an idea (or ideas) that popped into my head. When I stand back and look at it, I have a lot of ideas that I can work on, so that motivates me to actually schedule some time to work on those ideas to get them into actual full-fledged jokes to take to an open mic for testing and refinement!

14. do 20 comedy performances (including open mics) – I only did 7/20 (35%). Two of them were evaluation-theme sets that I did at evaluation conferences (one in Fredericton in May and one in Vancovuer in Oct). Both of them went over pretty well – and it was tough because there was nowhere I could test out the material since it was way too niche for an open mic audiences). One was an audition showcase and the rest were open mics. I’d like to get out to open mics more regularly in 2025, which means I need to get back into writing more consistently. This is going to require (a) letting go of some of the other things I do, to free up more time in my life and (b) setting out dedicated writing time in my calendar!

15. do a quarterly check-in on my goals – as soon as I click “publish” on this posting (which, if you are reading this meansI have done so), I will have done 3/4 of these (75%).

So for the record, I achieved 7/15 goals (47%), which is not even a passing grade. To be honest, I’m kinda getting bored with doing mostly the same types of yearly goals, so I think maybe I need to shake things up for 2025.

1. In truth, I’ve learned a lot more things than that, as I’m always learning new stuff, but these are the ones I actually tracked.

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