Sun 29 Dec 2024: I started this post on 12/30/2023, worked on it on New Year’s Day 2024 and again on January 10th, and never got back to it. As 2024 is coming to a close, I thought about completing it properly before starting my 2024 Year In Review, but decided I would post it as I last left it (with a few edits for clarity and privacy). This is more of a reminder for Future Diana about what happened in 2023, anyway, and the Brain Dump section at the end pretty much sums up what I had already forgotten.
It’s not that 2023 was a bad year, per se. Nothing super tragic happened to me or anyone in my immediate family. It’s just that my mental health and my physical health did some perverse do-si-do, my hormonal changes were magnified by work-related stress, and all of these things contributed to a feedback loop that I couldn’t shake.
That said, there were plenty of good times in 2023: Hanging out in Ann Arbor, visiting my Mom in NE Ohio, meeting up with friends here and there, and lots of generally pleasant family time.
In August 2017, when Connor was about to start first grade, he and I spent a few days in Dayton to visit my late grandparents and my BFF, Amy.
This past week, he and Aaron and I all spent a few days in Dayton to visit Amy. Of course, I took the opportunity to capture a then-and-now photo at JD’s Custard.
It was late Sunday afternoon when the Mustang pulled into our driveway. At first, I thought it was a contractor for a delivery company, but it turns out it was a young lady whose car had broken down.
Once she realized her car wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, she knocked on our front door and politely let me know. Since the temperature wasn’t much above freezing, I invited her into our home to wait for her tow.
It probably came off cringey instead of empathetic, but I told her about the time the transmission on my first car started acting funny. I was a good half-hour from home, and this was long before cell phones, so I ended up using a nice retired couple’s home phone to call my aunt for advice on what to do.
As I was telling my story, I could tell it wasn’t really having the effect I’d been hoping for, so I stopped rambling, gave her some space by the dining room window where she could watch for the tow truck, and went into the other room to continue folding laundry.
My aunt’s advice to me, once I finally got through to her, had been to accept the quart of transmission fluid the nice couple had offered me, pour it in, then drive home by way of every BP station I could find, using the gas card my stepdad Tom had given me to get another quart of transmission fluid at every stop along the way. I did manage to get to within a mile or so of home before the transmission fluid top-up method stopped working, and I was forced to leave my car at a local (non-BP) gas station and just stick a For Sale sign on the windshield. Eventually, a young man and his dad bought it off of me for $50 with the intention of fixing it up for the demolition derby at the county fair. Since the transmission only ran in reverse at that point, and that’s how they roll at the demo derby, it was a win-win for everyone.
Anyway, I hope that the young lady whose car happened to give up the ghost in our driveway finally got to go smoke with her friends. She certainly deserved some chill time after the weird evening she had, sitting in some Gen-X lady’s dining room waiting for AAA.
I never did get around to writing a Year In Review last year.
I still collected all the data, still had things to say… just never managed to sit down and do it. For various reasons.
As I sat down to recap 2023, I felt (as I’d known I would) that I couldn’t summarize 2023 without at least acknowledging 2022. So, in lieu of a review, here are some screenshots from my 2022 roundup on Exist.io, where I aggregate all the things.
