I started a year in review post a few days ago, but never got around to finishing it. So I’ll just start a new post for the new year. This is going to be short because I just don’t feel like spending much time on it.

2024 is over. As usual for me, it’s been a pretty good year. THE main accomplishment of the year is my back stairs. They aren’t completely done, but I do have a much better temporary solution than what I had in the past. I took some time off from work around Memorial Day. During that time, I dug six footings, mainly with a post hole digger. That was a lot of manual work. But it was great exercise and I felt pretty good after all that digging. I did do a post with pictures at that time. You can see aht here. Not much else happened with the stairs over the summer. I was pretty busy with work over June and July. And then at the end of August/start of September, I took a proper vacation. I flew to Boston and rented a car to meet some friends in New Brunswick and then drove to Cape Breton. I had always wanted to go there. It was beautiful and just a nice time to relax and see some friends. This just reminded me that I need to take more proper vacations.

I returned from vacation to being busy at work pretty much until Thanksgiving. In my mind, I was going to be get back to work on the stairs over Thanksgiving weekend. Thankfully, I got the posts in a little prior to that, so Thanksgiving was spent doing some welding. It worked ok. Is it a great welding job? No, but it seems to be holding together. After that the stair treads I ordered from Home Depot finally showed up, and they were super easy to install. Since I’m not going to keep these risers there forever, I wanted to make them easy to un-attach. So I just bolted them to the posts. Drilling the holes was easier than I thought it would be. The worst part was that it was ridiculously cold that weekend. Then I just needed to get some 2x6 boards, cut them to length and screw them to the risers. That finished the stairs for now. I’ll take all the wood off in the spring and make the risers out of steel, to match the platform I made. Then I’ll see about maybe making the treads concrete. And then, I’ll put up a railing. So the stairs aren’t fully finished, but I am able to use my back door again, which is great. The only bad thing that happened is that I slipped while welding the platform and definitely did something to my knee. It was really sore for a few weeks, but I’ve been doing strenthening exercises and I feel like it’s getting better.

Going into 2025, one of the things I hope to do is keep up my therapy on my knee. Relatedly, I’d like to bike a lot more as I feel I didn’t do much last year. Getting out of town more…yes, I hope to do that. Doing more welding and woodworking, yes, I also hope to improve my skills there. It’s my usual list.

Happy New Year!