2023 Year End Update

Posted on December 31, 2023 by Scott French

In October I lost the thread on my guitar projects. In September school really starts getting going for my kids. In early October we have my son's birthday, then my wife's birthday. Then a family camping trip, then Halloween, Thanksgiving, colder weather, and a big, slow, frustrating project at work. Then weeks of holiday prep, family Christmas, and finally the New Year. I lost the thread! It's happened around late fall many times in past years, but it was a especially frustrating this time because in 2023 I had been making very stead progress.

So now I am slowly getting my head back into things and making plans for 2024. I have a lot of goals and projects outside of guitar building that will likely slow things down for the next few months, but I will be transitioning my brain back over to guitar stuff eventually. I've spent a lot of time in 2023 working toward understanding my core values and trying to more align my daily life with those values. That's all positive stuff, but it does mean that at times even things I really care about like making progress on my guitar projects still don't make the cut when allocating time. I fear may it be March before I make much progress there, but hopefully it will align with some nice weather anyway.

Looking back at 2023, I really did make some good progress up until fall so I am happy about that. Hopefully I can wring some good progress out of 2024 as well, and maybe even finish my first instrument in years. I'm looking forward to that and many other projects this year. I hope you had a great 2023 and wish you a happy and productive 2024!

One last thing for the year... I've found myself mostly away from social media for the last few months and not really missing it. So although it will be slow coming, I do intend on keeping the website up to date every month as possible. Social media not so much, so I wouldn't expect to see much on Instagram going forward. Until I actually finish a guitar I then all bets are off!

2023 Favorites

It feels like about two weeks ago I was looking at my playlists and picking out the most played songs of 2022, but alas it was twelve months ago. Here are some top picks from 2023.

• "Street Fighter Mas" by Kamasi Washington from the album Heaven and Earth
• "Animal Behavior" by Praxis from the album Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis)
• "The Bird" by Anderson .Paak from the album Malibu
• "Stay in My Corner" by The Arcs from the album Yours, Dreamily,
• "Hot Shit" by Tom Cardy from the album H.S - Single
• "I Come In Peace" by Buckethead from the album Giant Robot
• "fool around" by strongboi from the album strongboi
• "Really Love" by D’Angelo and The Vanguard from the album Black Messiah
• "No More Lies" by Thundercat & Tame Impala from the album No More Lies - Single

Thanks for reading this journal entry! Feel free to reach out via email or join the discussion on Instagram.