Reading

I'm happy with my reading this year. The number of books is not essential other than reading a lot keeps your attention span sharp. I have noticed over the years that with social media and everything on the internet being short, whether it’s videos or articles, my ability to focus on something deeply for long periods is rusty. Learning to slow down and reign in the monkey brain is an ongoing exercise. I find the biggest benefit in meditation, reading books, and limiting social media and the doom scrolling.
Also, my books-to-read list is way longer than I have time for, and the more books I can read, the further I can expose myself to beautiful writing, distant worlds, and deeper human connections.

The goal every year is always around 15-20 books. This year was 33 reads, with several others abandoned. I used to feel bad about giving up on a book and felt like you should finish it if you started it.  No way; there are too many great books out there. Don’t waste your time with something that doesn’t speak to you somehow.

Variety this year was good. That is an important goal every year to not get stuck in a category. There is a vast array of well-written books out there, and I want to expose myself to all I can. A few areas of lacking is Poetry. I've always struggled with it and find it hard to appreciate. Please let me know if you have any good poetry starter books you can recommend. Thank you!

Every year, I waffle back and forth about reading new material or mixing in some favorite books from the past that I would like to re-read. The deciding factor has always been if I can't find enough new material, that's a perfect excuse to pull something from the past. But I've never had a problem finding new material. Alas, the struggle continues.

That brings me to the art of finding new books. I'll discuss more later; I'm working on a blog post about just that.

I was going to pontificate about which books were my favorites and what I learned, etc. But as you can see by my average rating of 4.7 stars, I enjoyed them all, LOL. Maybe I need to expand my rating scale some ; )
Honestly, I abandoned multiple books that I couldn't slog through. So if I finished it, I enjoyed it. 2025 will hopefully bring a mini-book report on each book next year. It will take discipline. When I started using Obsidian, the goal was to write about each book when I finished it. Well, I read 33 books, and I have six book reviews. That shows you what I'm up against.

Note: There are two books below where the covers did not populate.
1) The Reign of Wolf 21: The Saga of Yellowstone's Legendary Druid Pack by Rick McIntyre. It's an excellent book, by the way; I can recommend his whole series.
2) Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts, by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard.

Flying

Flighty says: 

• 205 flights
• 154,355 miles traveled, which equals 18 days and 1 hour spent sitting in an aluminum tube. 
• 6.2x around the Earth
• 0.6x to the Moon (I wouldn't pass up a chance to go to our moon) 
• 0.0007x to Mars (I don't want to go to Mars; I'll let the Billionaires have all that glory)
• 40 airports 
• 1 airline
• Shortest Flight was 174 miles PSP - LAS 
• Longest Flight was 1,767 miles CMH - LAS 

It was a good year flying, instructing, and checking. I learned a lot, and hopefully, contributed to making a few pilots stronger and wiser than they were. Looking forward to another great year of flying and sim work in 2025.  

Technology Thoughts

Apple:
The iPad Pro 13" with keyboard is just perfect. The M4 chip and the Retina XDR display at 1000/1600 nits is just beautiful. I’ve had zero performance issues using FCP or editing pictures.
I’ve never used a keyboard with an iPad before and was pretty skeptical. I forced myself to keep it attached for 30 days, and now I can’t imagine using the iPad without it. It’s a perfect built-in stand, and for reading in bed using the iPad in a vertical position, I can use the keyboard as a light-blocking aid. I find myself using the iPad way more at home for writing than the laptop. But, there have been some awkward moments using the laptop after the iPad and trying to touch the screen…

iPhone 16 Pro is worth it just for the big bump in battery life, especially if you’ll shoot a lot of video.

Apple Inteligence, meh. I’m not using it much. As I’ve talked about before, I’m a terrible writer, and I use Grammarly extensively to fix my horrible punctuation, spelling, and structure. Trying to use Apple Intelligence is just not user-friendly, and it doesn’t show you what it has changed; it just shows the whole paragraph rewritten, not what has changed. The one stand-out is using ChatGPT through Siri. One, it’s free and private if you don’t log into your account, and Two, you can log into your account if you have one, and it will log everything in your ChatGPT account for future reference. One nice trick is using ChatGPT through Siri with your voice after you get the response back, you can ask Siri to make a note out of the response so you can refer back to it, or it will disappear. Hopefully, Apple will kick up its adoption speed a notch or two.

Misc:
1. I stopped using Kagi and Google for search. ChatGPT (free version) works amazingly well.
2. Done with Twitter. Done. I did not delete my account, but I have not posted or read for a long time. I’ve found my home at Mastodon.
3. I started a blog! 

Goals for 2025

1. 20+ books, a wide variety of genres, and if the book is noteworthy, blog about it. I’m considering an outline like Key Points, Personal Impact, and Action Items.
   
2. Stay healthy; eat even better, train more, reduce stress, smile more, and look at the bright side. (in your fifties, your check engine light comes on, and the sins of youth come back to haunt you.)
   
3. Start some sort of music outlet. Pick an instrument and take some lessons.
   
4. Save. Save. Save. Retirement is just around the corner.
   
5. Keep searching for that perfect (adequate, best you can, clumsy, awkward) Work/Life balance.
   
6. Find a new second monitor. I’m using a Studio Display as the main display, and I have a now very old 30" Apple Cinema Display that still surprises me that it still works. It’s around 17 years old. Doing a lot of tutorials and video/photo editing, the second monitor is priceless.
   
7. Read and support more small independent news sources like 404 Media and the numerous independent journalists on Substack. There is a wave of exodus of talent from major news outlets now that they can make a living writing on Substack, Beehiiv, Ghost, etc. That freedom to say what you want when you want has got to be refreshing. We are experiencing significant changes in mainstream media, and I believe 2025 will be a very tumultuous year.

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   Where do you stop with this stuff, I could futz with this post for weeks. It’s gotta end somewhere. This is the end. Here is to an Amazing 2025. (please, please, please, don’t let America self-implode; it’s only December, and they are already off to a rocky start… I need to add: read less politics under 2025 Goals.)
   

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Let’s end with a Carl Sagan Quote for some much-needed perspective.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”  

~ Carl Sagan