I don’t do this every year, but today I’m inclined to write about what’s gone on this past year, what if anything I’ve “accomplished,” and what if any “progress” I’ve made toward long-term goals.
About books read, settling Larry’s estate, current health and projects in work, music listened to, Y’s trip to China, and our two new cats.
First, a metric I’ve tracked for decades: how many books did I read this year? Only 53, counting the Adair book just finished today. Relatively few. My ambition is always to read 100 books a year, but I’ve only managed that once in the past three decades, in 2016. Reasons about 2024 below. That said, several of the 53 were big science tomes, books I’ve been meaning to read for years that I finally got to. These included Pinker’s HOW THE MIND WORKS and THE BLANK SLATE, EO Wilson’ CONSILIENCE (actually a reread), Joshua Greene’s MORAL TRIBES, and Brian Greene’s UNTIL THE END OF TIME. The first three cemented the foundations of my thinking over all these years, while the fourth actually extended it, and the fifth put everything in a slightly different context than anything I’d seen before.
I also read some short philosophy books, I think all them already posted about on this blog, by Craig, Durant, Russell, and Nagel. I read a group of classic SF novels, not yet written up here, in late September and early October, while my partner was away in China: by RC Wilson, ER Burroughs, Hoyle, Silverberg, Sawyer, Clarke, and Russ. I read a handful of memoirs, inspired by a NYT list of best books of the 21st century, by Didion, Coates, Westover, and Junger. And I read a group of nonfiction books about current social and political issues, by Heather Cox Richardson, Stephen Prothero, Jonathan Haidt, Annalee Newitz, Zack Beauchamp, and Bill Adair, only one I think posted here. (And from among these, I am learning to skim and inspectionally read, to get the gist out of a book without reading every single chapter; I did this with Haidt and Beauchamp. Life is short.) And I read 14 Tintin books in the first week of January, while lying on the sofa sniffling with a cold. Without those 14, I’ve read only 39 books over the entire year!
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Why did I read so little? Well, first of all, 2024 was dominated by my attention to the estate of my late friend Larry Kramer. He died in September 2023, in Texas, but because the only copy of his will was in his house, it took me six months of finding a lawyer to go before judges, sometimes with me on Zoom chats, to gain permission to enter his house and find that will. Once it was found — exactly where Larry told me it would be — I was named executor of his estate, and gained access to his bank accounts. In April. Since then, I’ve been preoccupied by attending to his estate, including two trips to Austin in late April and early June. The process of settling his estate involved taking over his mortgage and utilities and insurance, and dealing with a realtor to put the house up for sale. As of the end of this year, a buyer is due to close escrow on January 10th. There were several significant hurdles in this process:
- As I’ve said, it took six months to gain access to the house, and Larry’s accounts. (If he had left a copy of his will with *anyone*, a lawyer, friend, or me, that six month delay could have been avoided.)
- A car rental agency from our first trip to Austin tried to charge me $5000 for hail damage, on a weekend that it did not hail in Austin;
- The estate sale people were not upfront about their terms, and charged me $1000 for things from Larry’s house that I kept, that they apparently presumed they could sell;
- Larry’s house turned out to need much more maintenance than I’d realized, especially since the foundation had settled causing cracks in the inside walls, so that the sales price of the house kept diminishing, since I stipulated up front that I wanted to sell the house as-is.
On the other hand, perhaps, the fact that the funeral home screwed up, apparently, and did not notify anybody that Larry had died, kept his Bank of America accounts open. Once I contacted a lawyer who gained entry into the house, she sent me his laptop, among other things. His laptop was not locked, and his browser remembered his password to his Bank of America account, and his TD Ameritrade account, so I was able to conclude relatively quickly where his money was and what payments he owed regularly. Fortunately, he’d auto-paid his mortgage, insurance, and utilities, from this checking account. If things had gone differently, the house might have gone into foreclosure before I could intervene and take over mortgage payments. …And so on.
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What else, in 2024? I remain healthy. I’m 3 1/2 years out from my heart (and kidney) transplants. My visits to the cardiologists and down to once every six months. Y and I walk every day, my goal being 5000 steps a day. Y is still working, full-time, from home. He has two grandchildren, with a third (shh! not yet public knowledge) on the way. And I keep working, every day, to support Locus Online, sfadb.com, and the book project. I am marginally optimistic I might finish these projects.
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I’m revisiting a lot of my music CDs, as sometimes reflected in my blog posts. I typically listen to one CD a day, while I’m writing blog posts, so for about an hour at a time. I use a small CD/radio system on my computer desk. Earlier in the year, perhaps prompted by their latest album, I went through my Crowded House and Neil Finn CDs fairly thoroughly. Later, many but not all of Peter Gabriel, U2, Radiohead, and REM. At some point I switched to classical, as I realized I had a huge Herbert von Karajan box with 38 CDs compiling all the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and five other composers. I settled on Bruckner for some time, comparing vK’s version to the individual recordings of his symphonies from Gunter Wand that I collected long ago. And later in the year moved onward to Allan Pettersson, a relatively unknown composer whose symphonies lie in roughly the same musical space as Mahler and Shostakovitch. And after him, I think I’ll explore Alfred Schnittke, with whom I’m relatively less familiar, except for that one piece on an ECM CD called Dolorosa. M/w, works by Philip Glass and certain soundtrack composers like Hans Zimmer are always in the mix.
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This was the year that my partner Y went to China for three full weeks, partly for work and partly to visit family (his brother and sisters there are all older than him). I was left to live by myself for the longest period in the past 25 years. We had a heat wave in early October, the first week he was gone. I read some books, even in the evening when usually we’d be watching TV, and watched some old movies of the sort he wouldn’t care to watch. And rearranged a corner of the living room to tidy up some boxes of family photos that had been sitting there for two years.
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This was the year we acquired, sort of, two additional cats, in addition to the three who live indoors. The two new ones appeared outside on our back patio one day in late August, a half-starved mother and her tiny kitten, so of course I took pity and gave them food and water. They’ve stayed. The only problem is that the indoor cats don’t like, or are jealous of, the new cats, and so if we let the new cats indoors for a while (say, when it’s very hot outside, or raining), the indoor cats sometimes hiss, and sometimes pee in the corners of rooms to mark their territory. So the current situation is to just leave the outdoor cats outdoors, all the time. We got them a little kitty house with a pressure-sensitive heat pad on the bottom, and they seem perfectly happy, sleeping in the house or running around the back patio like two playful kittens.
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Reading today: finished last 50p of text in Bill Adair’s BEYOND THE BIG LIE; the read the first 15p of George Lakoff’s THE POLITICAL MIND.
