happy new year everyone!!!! I hope everyone had a good night, be it sleeping or enjoying explosions

personally I headed out to the beach at midnight to watch the the city's firework display with a bunch of other rowdy drunk people and it was a delight. I love new year so much there is just something special about everyone gathering to celebrate another arbitrary lap around the sun and collectively deciding to mark it as a fresh new start together. joy and whimsy. also I love pyrotechnics

I did a lot in 2024 without really even realising it. I saw concerts and got into the local live music scene, I went to local theatre productions, I met my two best online friends a handful of times and we all met in person together for the first time in 8 years! I had a major promotion at work, which wasn't always a good thing, but really did test my skills in both nursing and management skills. I threw myself fully into some cases and got really involved, there's some Im really glad I followed through to the end. I went to Japan with my best friends! That really challenged my ability to adapt and learn, and I came out of it with a better knowledge of the language which was awesome.

I have a lot of faraway plans going into the new year both in personal life and in terms of creative projects (+ my site!). I think last year I really grew into myself as a person and I spent a lot of it working fervently on bettering myself. I'm a little short of the goals I wanted to achieve but I'm close enough that I dont want to go into 2025 with that rise n grind mindset, yknow? This year is about taking it slow and appreciating the moments, spending more time creatively and appreciating the little things.

site-wise i think I want to further my technical and coding skills and really work on making this place clean and streamlined and learn WHY we code the way we do rather than just pasting in something from stackoverflow because it works. i originally started this site because i wanted somewhere to talk about my life and interests, but i'm really, really bad at maintaining physical journals. i'd seen a friend blogging about stuff on wordpress or something, and i thought that was such a neat idea if i could think of a way to compile things into their own sections. and so this site was born! it has truly been such a valuable outlet for me to ramble about whatever i want on here without having to bother everyone in my life about it. it's original purpose was to talk about my taxidermy and yap about my day to day life, and it has become so much more than that in the few short months i've been maintaining it. I'll have to accept that I'll never be happy with the layout because I simply can't settle! but that's the joy in a personal web page I suppose, it'll only grow and change with me. I also really want to work on my side project site that I haven't really told anyone about and that's why it's so slow going, I think. I need that pressure of being perceived to really work on anything!

good things ahead, I believe!! 🩷