Another year gone, and this time I wasn’t even awake to wish it good-bye. Yeah, that’s right – Elizabeth and I went to a cooking class in OKC on New Year’s Eve, got home at 10:00, and I was in bed and snugly asleep by 11:00 to be into work on time the next morning. It’s a fitting way to end 2024 – the year I became a full adult.
I don’t mean that to sound so dramatic. It’s not like 2024 was a year of putting on the coat and tie, riding the train to work, going home, and cooking dinner while checking out the investment portfolio. Not entirely, anyway. But I did put more collared shirts than ever before thanks to work. And I did end up cooking, cleaning, and generally taking care of (our!!!) house way more than ever before. To my parents, and to parents in general: I’m so sorry. Being a homeowner is so much work.
I went back and re-read by 2023 Year in Review for some inspiration here and found none. That’s probably a good thing – each year is unique, so each Year in Review should be unique. I thought about doing a top ___ list of my favorite moments of the year, but that seemed reductive and cheesy. So instead, let’s just take some time to appreciate the personal growth experienced as the year comes to a close.
Obviously the biggest story of 2024 was becoming a homeowner. I’m still thrilled that Elizabeth and I were able to afford it. Not only that, we could afford a brand-new home! Even a few years ago, I never would have dreamed that.
Obviously a big part of the story was the process – going to look at houses, figuring out how to deal with overzealous real estate agents, and finally overcoming our own indecision to find the right choice. Then there was the saga with the lender who was giving us one rate until all of a sudden he wasn’t. But something that will likely carry beyond the new-home smell is the difficulty in keeping the house clean. It’s honestly my top source of anxiety most weeks. If I don’t keep up on vacuuming the bedroom, Scipio’s hair is going to start clotting up the brand-new carpet like it did in our rental house. But if I focus there, I might fall behind on dishes or the laundry. And then all of a sudden it’s been 3 weeks since I cleaned our bathroom and the sinks are gross.
It’s fun!
On top of buying a house, things progressed positively for me on the career front in 2024. I finished off my second full year in the National Weather Service and am now on pace to receive my GS-12 promotion (essentially the final major promotion I get to be on the same level as every other general forecaster) in August. That comes with a nice little pay bump, which is nice, but way more important is that it implies a sense that I’m ready to come into my own as a forecaster at NWS Norman.
The opportunities definitely increased within the office this year. Of our 5 lead forecasters at the beginning of 2024, 2 have retired, while another took a job at SPC. That means it’s time for a lot of us to step up. 2024 coincidentally set a statewide record with 152 tornadoes confirmed in Oklahoma. My job for many of those severe events was to provide social media information, answer phone calls, and make informative graphics. These are all important jobs. They’re also jobs I’m good at – arguably among the best in the office. But still, it can feel a bit like you’re out of the action when one side of the office is deciding whether or not to issue a tornado warning, and you’re updating the severe risk graphic for the webpage.
Well, on May 23 of this past year I finally got my chance. It wasn’t an overwhelmingly terrible-looking day, but we expected a few supercells to get into our area with a risk of large hail as well as a low tornado potential. As it turned out, the risk quickly ramped up in the evening in southwest Oklahoma and soon we were staring down the barrel of a big old supercell west of Altus. I got a tornado warning out and we all sat there, transfixed by local news coverage as the tornado of the year occurred.
https://twitter.com/CameronJNixon/status/1795189477989634412
https://twitter.com/Nolan_Meister/status/1793729410283216941
The Eldorado tornado wasn’t my first tornado warning – that was the Marietta-Dickson EF-4 on April 27 of this year – but it was the first event where I was in the driver’s seat the whole way, having to make tough decisions and rely on my gut. It wasn’t perfect – I was too aggressive on warning decisions. But when push came to shove, and we got a tornado to do almost a full semi-circle over the course of an hour, it stayed within the original polygon the whole way. That was pretty cool.
That wasn’t the only cool professional development of the year. I somehow talked my bosses and NWS Fairbanks into letting me go spend a month as a temporary lead forecaster at their office in August and September. You can find my blogs about it here:
https://nolanmeister.com/tag/alaska-diary
The quick summary: it was one of the coolest months of my life, even though I was living out of a dimly-lit Best Western. Fairbanks in the summer is a magical place. Fairbanks in the fall transition is even more magical, if possible. There was gold panning, golf in the rain, Denali, frigid rivers, steaming hot springs, gigantic glaciers, and fields covered in fresh berries. It was amazing and I didn’t want to waste a second.
Professionally, it was awesome too. I was there during a time of transition at the Fairbanks office – two other people had their very first days when I arrived, one of whom was a manager. Nobody in the office had been around for long. Most general forecasters were roughly my age. In a way, that was a boon; it would be weird to show up as a forecaster in charge with a bunch of experienced 40-somethings. But it was also an opportunity – an opportunity to instill a small bit of my own working ethos into the office. I took that responsibility seriously. Between learning a bunch of Alaskan geography, and how to issue about a half a dozen products I’d never heard of before and will never issue again, and the other things that come from being a forecaster, I tried to take an interest in people and demonstrate leadership. Daily discussions with someone who was interested in synoptics? Reviewing someone’s slides they’d been building for DSS briefings? Making NWSChat posts modeled off of how Norman does things? All of those were little ways that I could maybe make a positive difference in my month. It must have paid off, because the Warning Coordination Meteorologist wrote up a recommendation for a “time off award” of 2 days off of work. His words were also extremely kind.
So yes, 2024 was a great year professionally. I have a springboard into the future.
Not everything was so easy. While Elizabeth and I had a great first full year as a married family, our extended families had some hard times. This applied in particular to Pam’s side of the family, but it wasn’t an easy year for anyone.
If you’d asked me what I meant by this at the start of 2024, Elizabeth’s Aunt Debbie was the obvious answer. Her health had been failing for several years due to brain cancer. I still remember Elizabeth forcing me to go to Rehoboth in 2022 because we thought it would be the last chance to see her. But here we were in 2024, heading to Rehoboth again to see her and her family. Some people are just resilient like that. And it was so great to see her still getting to experience family events, such as the engagement party for her son Alex and his fiancee Kate.
This time was different. She seemed much worse off – in a wheelchair, unable to turn her head, and generally struggling with conversation. I sat with her a while at the engagement party, and can still remember the chilling clarity with which I thought – this is the last time we’re going to see her. Sure enough, a month later up in Fairbanks, Michael got a couple of calls that he had to step out for. That night, he drank half of a bottle of coffee liqueur and told me bluntly that she had six weeks left to live.
Six weeks later, Elizabeth and I were in DC with her entire extended family. Debbie Harding’s funeral was held at the Cathedral of St Matthew the Apostle, where John F. Kennedy’s body once laid in state. The funeral was beautiful – Victor handled the situation with remarkable aplomb and each of her children gave touching tributes. There was an incredible, Debbie-worthy after-party, and then ANOTHER after-party to the after-party. It was nothing less than I would have expected.
Unfortunately, not two months later, we were in Telluride eating Christmas Eve dinner when Pam passed along the news: Elizabeth’s Uncle John had passed away. John’s passing was much more sudden than Debbie’s – evidently he had fallen and broken his leg a few days prior, and thanks to complications things took a turn from there. It was fairly stunning. Although I didn’t see John as often as Debbie, he’d always been a friendly, welcoming presence among Elizabeth’s extended family. Elizabeth went to the funeral just this past week. You can make one funeral a party, but a second one gets tough to keep that same energy at.
Fortunately, my side of the family didn’t have any more funerals to add to the pile. That didn’t mean there weren’t difficulties, though. My grandma’s health has also begun to deteriorate, especially her memory. It’s not too bad, don’t get me wrong. She mostly passes off as “Generic forgetful old person” at the moment, which could be a lot worse. But still, that’s the kind of thing that once it starts, it may not get worse, but it also isn’t ever going to get better. I know that’s been tough for her, for my grandpa, and for mom. Ding actually came down to visit Elizabeth and me this October; my Aunt Kelly brought her down. Through a trick in the timing, they became the first (and to this point, only) people in my extended family who have seen our new house so far. It was a great visit; the two of them seemed to really enjoy being here. The last time Ding visited Oklahoma was 2017, which would seem to imply that her trip down here in 2024 was her last. I’m so glad we got the chance to do it.
That underscored the main point of this family section in the 2024 Year in Review – Elizabeth and I have both had to learn to overcome a growing sense of detachment from our extended families due to physical distance. In my case, the detachment can feel personal as well as physical – I wasn’t always finding out about family news as fast as others, and often through roundabout sources. That was a real point of contention with my parents in 2024, and one that we’re both working to improve. If this is a Year in Review post, here’s a chance for me to make a resolution – to be a better family member than ever before.
Personal, professional, family: those are the three core tenants of any year. Then there were some of the other things that will make the mental scrapbook of 2024. It was a banner year for travel – Elizabeth and I went to:
- Michigan in January (Wyatt’s birth)
- Virginia in January (Laney’s wedding)
- Sedona in Feburary
- Arkansas in April (eclipse)
- Michigan in May (me alone)
- Colorado in May
- Delaware in July
- Alaska in August/September
- Houston in October (Tigers game)
- Virginia in October (funeral)
- Cabo in October
- Michigan in November (Thanksgiving)
- Colorado in December (Christmas)
That’s not bad!
Elsewhere, I put together what will almost certainly being the greatest sports betting year of my life, racking up an obscene $103,500 in profit. That was more stressful than “taking a bunch of money from DraftKings” should have been; I set 6 figures as a goal and teetered on the brink of being off-pace for most of the year, which made each losing streak that much more excruciating. It sounds silly to say “I don’t want to make 100K again”, but I think for the benefit of myself, Elizabeth, and our quality of life, it’s better to just go for fun this year.
I could write about 100 other things that happened in 2024 – how I became a runner again and completed a 5K on Thanksgiving, how I became a gardener and successfully grew exactly one jalapeno, how Elizabeth made a successful career switch back into meteorology – but this year in review is starting to get long. I’m proud of our growth in 2024 as well as our ability to meet challenges together, and I hope that the two of us can find new areas to improve ourselves in 2025.
2024: it was a bit up-and-down, but we made it through.
