As far as my various passion projects were concerned, 2024 was a year of historical research. Things were pretty strong out of the gate with the "Ghosts of DFW music history" blog series - five posts went up by the end of April and substantial research on several others was done in the background... for the first third of the year. After that point, the time off taken for my road trip to Alaska and an overall burnout stemming from the Deep Ellum Live entry led work on the series to grind to a halt for a couple of months. Having lost momentum on "Ghosts" upon my return from Alaska, I instead set to work sorting through and editing the two weeks' worth of trip photos. This evolved into editing work involving several other years' worth of as yet unpublished road trip photos, and subsequently into various other Dallas history-related projects. I stumbled upon my first collection of cabinet cards in a Dallas antique mall, a discovery which triggered the "Early photography studios in Dallas" walking tour idea. My interest in vintage and antique photos and other DFW ephemera led to posts about the history of a downtown Dallas parking garage, the old Valhalla motel (now the Yotel Inn), and the old Plano city dam. And some other happenstance finds in antique stores and online spurred me to put together posts including the "View down Elm Street" and one on the old Capri Theatre, which saw publication as the first post of 2025. Add to all this my ongoing efforts to create themed galleries of vintage photos, and it's not hard to see why I lost focus on what was supposed to have been my primary project for the year. Going into 2024, my intent with the "Ghosts" series was to have it finished before the end of December, potentially by the end of fall. Obviously, I didn't even come close to realizing that goal.
Despite having lost focus in 2024, I did manage to get quite a bit done behind the scenes. One major success was the long overdue integration of a real search engine into the site. The heavy lifting for many of the planned "Ghosts of DFW music history" posts was completed, not only through hours spent scouring print media but also via live interviews and sourcing other reference materials and memorabilia. Photos of the present-day sites for all remaining one-time music venues were taken and additional personal contacts were made. As far as vintage photo galleries, multiple collections are assembled and ready to go, and these are simply awaiting publication at a later time. Some of my less ambitious research-based blog posts are also close to being finished or only in need of editing, and these should see publication very soon. In October, I made a new contact via the DFW Archives Bazaar at Heritage Village, and she provided me with information that has proven to be invaluable in solving mysteries that had plagued two different research projects of mine. And in addition to finally getting four of my earlier road trip travelogs online, I dedicated a substantial amount of effort toward many of the others, efforts that should bear fruit later this year. Ditto with the long-delayed revamp of the galleries highlighting my time as a local concert photographer.
The groundwork has been laid for a lot of forthcoming material on the website, but it remains the case that a lot of my goals for 2024 simply didn't get addressed, or were barely touched upon. As previously stated, "Ghosts" was supposed to have been wrapped up by now. Again, I'd wanted to have all the road trip material up before the end of the year, but I only managed to get four of the fifteen planned travelogs completed and posted. Absolutely none of the concert photography made it to the site. My VERY long-delayed pizza sauce recipe post never materialized, despite me having collected illustrative photos for literally years. A plan to have the old Lost Art Open Mic promotional CD cut onto vinyl didn't come together. I've had too many things on my plate to properly focus on any one of the still-unrealized projects long enough to fully complete it. To be honest, the difficulties I've had in sourcing illustrative material for some of my projects (particularly the "Ghosts" series) has really put me off working on them on more than one occasion. It's frustrating how many people can't be bothered to respond to me when I reach out; it's even worse when I can see that they've read my messages but (evidently) didn't see me as important enough to even acknowledge.
Lastly, there were situations that came up during the year that cost me a lot of time and/or motivation. One of the worst of these occurred right after publication of my thirty year car history, when my car suffered a major equipment failure in the form of a broken shifter cable. This rendered it completely undriveable and required $1500 and two weeks to get fixed, during which time I had no regular transportation. A very painful upgrade of my Linux installation also cost a lot of productivity time (I'm really getting tired of experiencing major software and/or hardware issues stemming from internal changes to Ubuntu between LTS versions). I took a fairly substantial break from all project work in October and November to work on a political campaign, something I will not go into further detail about. My car was broken into right at the end of December. And, for full disclosure, I've simply fallen victim to several prolonged periods of laziness. All I have to say about this is that life often pulls in many directions at once, and not all of them involve wanting to sit in front of a computer screen during my free time when I already do it all day at work. Having a social life is still important, and it nearly always takes priority over personal projects.
So what are the goals for 2025? First and foremost, I plan to complete the "Ghosts" series and work toward an eventual print version. I plan to get the concert photography back up in a more polished and curated form compared to what was online pre-2021. The road trip galleries should be finished and posted, hopefully before any potential 2025 trip takes place. I also want to get back to covering other, non-historical topics once in a while on the blog, and to featuring more food and recipe-related posts and possibly reviews. The overall goal is to settle into a routine of one blog post per week moving forward. I have a number of research-heavy and labor-intensive blog posts queued up for this year, and I will fill out the time between those with lower effort content. Much of this content has already been completed and will be posted as needs and the schedule dictate. I'm also looking to build new connections and further existing ones that I've made for both research and personal purposes, and to work toward several personal improvement goals which are outside the purview of this website. My social network took a huge hit in 2020 with the pandemic and never really recovered, so expanding that is a top priority. Thus, as the new year really gets underway, the principal term which should define my overall approach to 2025 is "discipline." Discipline in the sense of being better committed, exercising better judgment in planning and execution, and maintaining focus while working toward goals of all kinds. This is the main takeaway for me as I recount the successes and failures of 2024 and look ahead to the rest of 2025.
