Today marks the start of 2024. It will be a leap year. Recalling the past two leap years would suggest that this year wouldn’t be ordinary.

The first few months of 2020 was marked by news of a weird respiratory condition hospitalizing hundreds of people in China. It’s safe to say the rest of that year doesn’t need much of an explanation.

In 2016, pretending to be like the cool kids, I tried to join in on the a-photo-a-day trend on instagram. But to appear much cooler, instead of it being a #project365, it will end up being a #project366 for falling on a leap year!

Not surprisingly, I couldn’t sustain the grind of daily posting. Tragically though, I got much more drama than I could’ve imagined. My mom passed away.

But life is not always doom and gloom. In 2012, we got married. We’ve been blessed with two wonderful boys who keep us hopeful in this crazy world. No honest married person would say that married life is easy, but I’d say that we’re happy. There’s always room for a little more comfort and less worries, but happiness coexists despite uncertainties.

Scrolling through this blog’s archives for 2004 entries would show how much I wrote back then, for both link sharing and actual personal writing. It was then a pre-Facebook era and people genuinely commented on each others’ blog posts, while sharing our personal homepages (and unfiltered email addresses!). I miss those names and the real people behind them, many of which I’ve had the pleasure to get to know IRL. My most consequential open-source code iPAP had its first release that same year, before winning (and giving me some PH internet cred) in the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards, but I digress.

2004 had its own set of drama, too—the kind that people used to read personal blogs for.

And since I’m just allowing myself to ramble and name personal events that fall on leap years, I shouldn’t skip both 1992 and 1996 since they mark important educational milestones, especially in the Pisay context which I associate myself with—sometimes maybe too excessively.

So what’s the point of this post?

In 2024, I’m allowing myself to go on a ride again. There are no guarantees, but I’ll keep it going forward and up the best I can. And I hope to write often as I go about it. Let’s go take a leap!

1st of #100DaysToOffload

(Please pardon how badly this post has turned out. It appears like a very incoherent live draft because it really was. We’ll get better.)