Year in Review: 2024 Blog Stats and Recap

In 2024, when I wasn’t making the most of my time outdoors, I managed to publish 35 posts, conclude my fourth tour handling international parental child abductions in the Office of Children’s Issues, and begin long-term training for my next assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon, Burma.

I also wrote a series of posts chronicling Foreign Service-related topics, including the centennial anniversary of the Foreign Service, the machinations of retirement and sixth tour bidding planning, and my best tips for success during FSI language study.

Year in Review

It wasn’t a busy year in the sense that we had multiple PCS-related moves or lots of overseas travel. In fact, in 2024 we didn’t even leave the United States. But it was still increasingly a time of change with more changes dawning on the horizon.

In January, I started the new year with eye surgery to restore and stabilize my vision so I would never have to wear glasses or contacts again. The procedure is called Customs Lens Replacement at Brusco Vision in Falls Church (you can read about it on their website at the link).

Essentially, CLR is cataract surgery before cataracts occur, by replacing the eye’s natural interocular lens with a synthetic one. This corrects problems with astigmatism and needing readers as the eye’s natural lens ages and becomes opaque and less flexible. CLR also prevents cataracts from ever forming. The majority of people I know had never heard of the procedure, and although it isn’t covered by insurance (unless you already have cataracts), I highly recommend it. It’s a much more permanent and comprehensive procedure than LASIK, which most people in their 40s are no longer a candidate for anyway; due to hardening of the lens behind the eye, procedures to the front of the eye won’t garner a real vision improvement.

So during January I was waiting for my eyes to heal and trying to get used to my new vision. There was also a small snowstorm that turned northern Virginia white, powdery, and so beautiful.

In February, I noted the blog surpassed 300,000 lifetime views. I returned to my eye surgeon for a LASIK procedure to fine-tune the results of my CLR. V and I had a beautiful Valentine’s Day dinner at Ambar Clarendon, a restaurant where we have celebrated many occasions together and with friends and family.

In March I finally told the hair-raising two-part tale of my social media being hacked in 2023, here and here. We had old friends over for dinner and saw the daffodils starting to pop up in our front yard.

In April, cherry blossoms were in full bloom around the region as the blog marked its 10th birthday. One of V’s groomsmen visited from Montana with his partner for a few days on a cross-country road trip. Some of my A-100 colleagues and I had an after-work happy hour on a weeknight in DC.

Unfortunately, after weeks of blurry vision and depth perception problems, I had to have the synthetic interocular lens in my left eye explanted (a horrifying concept) and replaced. There was nothing wrong with the lens or the way the procedure had been performed; the lens simply wasn’t working for me. My eyes were “fighting” each other.

I was healing from that procedure just as I was experiencing my first return to full-time, in-person work in over two years by attending a weeklong leadership training at the Foreign Service Institute.

In May, the Foreign Service celebrated its centennial. To mark the occasion V and I went to a rooftop party at the Watergate Hotel. We also welcomed an Orthodox Easter visit from my eldest stepdaughter, A. Those in my A-100 currently stateside gathered in northern Virginia to mark a decade since we’d joined this crazy FS life.

June was a huge month, as V and I traveled to South Carolina to celebrate the engagement of his daughter A, I wrapped up my fourth tour, marched in the DC Pride Parade with other volunteers from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and checked out the exhibition on Burma’s Rohingya genocide at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Finally, as the month ended, I flew out to the west coast to see my parents. I flew into Portland to see my dad in Washington state and later drove down to California to see my mom and niece before flying back home out of Sacramento.

It took me a few months to write about it—because I was waiting for my night vision to be completely healed, which took until the fall—but also in June I underwent my fourth and final left eye surgical procedure. After that my vision restoration was a total success. I knew it was all over when I brought a pair of cheaters on my west coast trip, but it never once occurred to me to pull them out. What a miracle.

In July I attended three weeks of consular managerial training, sold the 4Runner we’d had for four years, and ended the month with a purchase of a brand-new red 2024 Volkswagen Tiguan. (Yes, I kept my black 2010 Tiguan that I also bought brand-new. So now I have two Tiguans in the driveway!)

I also lamented the rising cost of family fun in America after a trip V and I took to a local waterslide park.

In August I hit the 19-year milestone of my federal service and shared my thoughts about (someday) retiring from the Foreign Service. V and I took a road trip to Delaware to swim in the ocean. I hung out with a couple of old friends from my Peace Corps Volunteer days in Macedonia as they visited with family in the DC area. We worked on various yard projects and V began to winterize the yard and house.

We took a second road trip over Labor Day weekend to Boston to see my favorite band Incubus from the front row of TD Garden – something I see I never managed to write about for the blog.

In September, as the long, 10-month (44-week) march of Burmese language class began, we saw James Taylor perform at Wolf Trap – something truly special. Also in September we went to HFStival 2024 in DC and saw Incubus, Girl Talk, the Violent Femmes, Lit, Tonic, Filter, Jimmy Eat World and others.

I continued writing through the end of the year about studying Burmese, recording my thoughts about:

• the foundational study of weeks two and three;
• the hamster wheel of week four;
• retooling my study strategies in weeks five and six;
• connecting the dots in weeks seven and eight;
• my first progress evaluation in week nine;
• passing the 25% course completion mark in weeks 10 and 11;
• a changed class structure in week 12;
• my struggles with speaking in weeks 13 and 14;
• trying to stay positive in week 15;
• and serious frustrations around my second progress evaluation in weeks 16 through 18.

Throughout the autumn, I also brought some new energy into my Trail Quest challenge to visit all 43 of Virginia’s state parks. I brought my total number of parks visited to over one dozen, and wrote about the first seven parks I’d been to with V or by myself here and here.

October brought us SerbFest DC at St. Luke Serbian Orthodox Church in Potomac, MD.

I marched in the annual national Out of the Darkness Walk with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

It also brought my birthday and a celebratory road trip to Kentucky and West Virginia where we visited one of my former FSO neighbors in Tashkent, a trip I see I also never wrote about. We went to the home of the Kentucky Derby and visited the Jim Beam distillery. If I get a chance I’ll still share about this trip, because it was a lot of fun.

Nights out with friends, beautiful fall leaves, and a day trip to local Virginia wineries with some of our best friends with whom we served in Canberra were all highlights in November.

In December, V and I attended our first NFL game to see the Washington Commanders earn a landslide win and attended the Washington Ballet’s talented rendition of The Nutcracker.

My dad came to stay for a second year to celebrate the Christmas holidays. In addition to taking him on hikes at Huntley Meadows and Burke Lake, we also went to our first NBA game (in which the Washington Wizards pulled out a truly thrilling last-second victory), enjoyed local farm-to-table food at the Silver Diner, baked and decorated my traditional Christmas treats, attended a holiday event at Mt. Vernon Estate, and journeyed to DC for my dad’s first visit to the National Christmas Tree followed by dinner at the pop-up winter dome restaurant atop Hi-Lawn at Union Market. We capped off his visit with a trip out to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly; previously my dad had only visited the location on the National Mall.

As we have done many years before, V and I ended 2024 with a New Year’s Eve celebration at Ambar Capitol Hill. Although I was tired from the holidays and feeling a bit stressed about Burmese, it was wonderful to close out the year in a completely different way than we did in 2023. Last New Year’s Eve, we stayed in bed—V exhausted from two hospitalizations for kidney stones and supporting his daughters through the loss of their maternal grandfather, and me emotionally drained after months of caring for my stepmother, who passed away just before Thanksgiving. Her illness and funeral in addition to other personal matters had taken me on seven trips back and forth between the coasts in 2022 and 2023—two by plane and five by car—leaving little time or energy for much else.

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In other 2024 writing, I also marveled at the ease of the transition between a domestic assignment and onward training, with no turning your household upside-down, no packout, and no disorienting long plane ride with a carry-on crammed full of jewelry, medicine, and electronics… after saying goodbye to everyone you’ve just spent the last couple years getting to know.

I shared my top study tips for FSI language learning and wrote about the loss of a friend 30 years prior and reconnecting with his family via the gift of a never-before seen photograph of him.

Overall, it was a balanced year, filled with its share of challenges as well as opportunities to rest and recharge.

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Blogging in 2024

In April 2024, the blog marked its 10th anniversary. I kept my goal of posting at least monthly – a fundamental rule I’ve never broken.

• I wrote 35 new posts, five less than the year before. I also tightened up my writing a bit, with the lowest average word count per-post since 2016 at around 1,300 words.
• I wrote at least one post per month, with October and November tying for first place at five posts each.
• Blog readership in 2024 was slightly down from the year before. Unique page and post views decreased around six percent, from 44,529 to 41,922.
• However, unique visitors in 2024 rose 18 percent to a new all-time high of 19,446!
• The blog surpassed 336,000 all-time views.
• At no point in 2024 did the blog break its the highest-ever number of daily or monthly views. However, during all 12 months there were at least 2,900 page views per month, with eight months being above 3,200 page views per month, and two months also being above 4,000 page views per month.
• Blog readers in 2024 landed on the site from 162 different countries, up from 152 in 2023. See below for a list of the top 20 countries from which visitors most frequently viewed the blog:

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1. United States
2. Australia
3. United Kingdom
4. Canada
5. India
6. Philippines
7. South Africa
8. Germany
9. Mongolia
10. Mexico
11. Brazil
12. Malaysia
13. Japan
14. France
15. Indonesia
16. Thailand
17. South Korea
18. Singapore
19. New Zealand
20. Sweden

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Below is a list of 2024’s top 20 posts and pages ranked by the number of the views they received and year of publication. I’ve bolded the posts that were also in the top 20 the year prior.

1. Tips for Authenticating Louis Vuitton Multicolore (2020)
2. Foreign Service Housing (2019)
3. Foreign Service Housing, Part III (2023)
4. My Foreign Service Timeline (2014)
5. Foreign Service Promotions: 10 Things I’ve Learned (2022)
6. I Love a Sunburnt Country (Wide Brown Land) (2019)
7. I Left My Heart at the Iberostar Grand Paraíso (2021)
8. About the Author (2014)
9. September is National Suicide Awareness Month: What Everyone Should Know (2022)
10. FAQs (2023)
11. Fifth Tour Bidding: The Early Assignments Cycle (2023)
12. Consular Officers Have the Best Stories, Part I (2023)
13. Becoming an FSO Part II: The QEP (2014)
14. Becoming an FSO Part III: The FSOA (2014)
15. My Top Tips for Long-Distance Solo U.S. Road Trips (2023)
16. Visit to Samarkand, Part I (2015)
17. Low Battery (2023)
18. About the Foreign Service (2014)
19. Our First Foreign Service Pet, Part I (2022)
20. Lucky FSO Numbers: 50 and 20 (2024)

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Conclusions:

• The top-visited posts and pages this year were mostly about Foreign Service-related topics, whether written a decade ago or more recently. There was also a strong element of interest about travel, fashion, and lifestyle.
• The 2020 post about my Louis Vuitton Multicolore purses from the 2003-2015 LV x Murakami collection continues to drive massive traffic to the site. The one post I wrote about my infamous rainbow bags has garnered many thousands more clicks than any other post, second only to the site’s landing page.
• Clicks to my most-visited blog post increased dramatically in the wake of Louis Vuitton’s recent announcement that they would again collaborate with Japanese artist and creative Takashi Murakami to relaunch an edit of the famed collection in January 2025. I was thrilled by the relaunch – although the first drop was limited and I did not make a purchase – and plan to write something about it soon. In the meantime, in the spirit of educating consumers about spotting counterfeits, I’m happy so many people found my post about authenticating these precious items useful.
• The upcoming year promises to be a significant one for us. I will (hopefully!) complete my Burmese language studies, and V and I will be moving this summer to Burma with our cat. This will mark our first time living outside the United States since early 2022, when I finished my third assignment in Mexico. As we transition later this year and I begin sharing stories about our life in little-known Burma, I anticipate this shift—from a domestic assignment and training back to an international post—will bring an exciting change for readers as well!

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Thank you as always to readers for enjoying the Collecting Postcards Blog. I apologize for the emails I haven’t answered yet. Please don’t give up on me! Hope 2025 brings great things to all of you and your loved ones.

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Contact me!

Email: askcollectingpostcards@gmail.com

Facebook: @collectingpostcardsblog

Instagram: @life_in_multicolore (purse-related; just for fun!)

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