A friend of mine used to send out these massive New Year’s newsletters.

I never told her the homemade zucchini bread and pesto she sent with them were dreadful. Then, a few years before she died, she switched to cookies, Oreos dipped in dark or white chocolate and sprinkled with crushed peppermint candy canes.

I’d give a lot to find one of her little bags of joy on my desk today.

But her family update was the point of the gesture, a lesson I learned to appreciate as much as the cookies. So, here is 2024 in review, according to me. I can’t send you all cookies, so you’ll have to make do with numbers.

30: Books I read in 2024. My wife and I share a Kindle account, and I still like to buy hardcovers. My favorite book this year was “The Ministry of Time” by Kaliane Bradley. It’s about time travel in ways you expect and ways that you absolutely do not.

$35: The most I paid for a single book, “The Last Days of the Schooner America” by David Gendell. Co-founder of SpinSheet and PropTalk magazines, Gendell is best when he focuses on the Annapolis Yacht Yard rather than the historic sailboat.

5.8 million: Checkouts at the Anne Arundel County Public Library this year, an all-time high. Top reads were “The Women” by Kristin Hannah in fiction and “Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum” by Antonia Hylton in nonfiction. “Madness” was about the horrors at the old Crownsville State Hospital near Annapolis; the other is a yarn about nurses in Vietnam — ironic because a real-life nurse who served in the war died this year in Annapolis.

21,000: People who get Naptown Scoop, the popular newsletter about Annapolis published by Ryan Sneddon.

31,000: Subscribers to The Read on Annapolis, my newsletter published by The Baltimore Banner. [Sign up today]

50,000: People who receive Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman’s weekly newsletter. Now he’s started a podcast, “Pittman and Friends.”

4: Trips to Louisville, Kentucky, this year to visit our daughter.

1: Trip to dog-sit for my daughter while she was in her fourth wedding of the year.

7.16: Highest flooding level on record at City Dock in Annapolis, measured in feet by the National Weather Service on Sept 19, 2003, during Tropical Storm Isabel.

5.10: Flood tide at City Dock measured in feet on Jan. 10, 2024.

$33 million: Federal funding for City Dock resilience project under review by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

80: Days the project is behind schedule.

1: Lawsuit seeking to block the project.

4: New members of Congress from Maryland to be sworn in Friday.

10: Emails to supporters sent by U.S. Rep.-elect Sarah Elfreth since winning the election.

15: Posts on X by former Gov. Larry Hogan since he lost the U.S. Senate race to Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks.

0: Maryland’s new members of Congress on BlueSky, the new alternative to Elon Musk’s increasingly annoying X.

69,679: Page views recorded on my April 20 column about the symbolism of bridges following the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. It was my most-read column of the year.

477: Miles I drove following retired U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin around Maryland on his farewell tour.

244: Page views on my May 2 roundup of “7 Things to do in Annapolis,” featuring the Annapolis opera competition. It was my least-read piece.

11: Months I worked on a column about fog increasing on the Chesapeake Bay, published in early December.

144: Little sandwiches ordered for the party that my wife and I threw the week before Christmas.

75: Sandwiches left over.

7: Slices that a small fruitcake generated for the party, six months after I bought it from a monastery during a trip to the Michigan Upper Peninsula.

7: Slices I ate by New Year’s Eve to prove people are wrong about fruitcake.

3: Pounds I have gained since June.

5: Round cake pans that my mother used to make tiered wedding cakes and that now sit on a shelf in my pantry.

6: Practice cakes I made to teach myself to bake a wedding cake for my son and his fiancée.

$440: Down payment made in November on a cake for their wedding in June.

4: Family cats and dogs anticipated at my house for the holidays.

3: Actual number. Lucky, adopted two years ago when a friend couldn’t care for him anymore, died right before Thanksgiving.

6: Sections in the new couch that my wife and I bought.

8: Throw pillows that came with the couch.

6: Throw pillows that came with replacement sections after we realized the couch was broken in two places.

1: Replacement coming next month after the delivery team dropped and broke the new sleeper section.

4: Cushions between my wife and me as we stream “Shrinking” on Apple TV.

0: Cushions between us after I realize I’m sitting in the wrong seat.

I hope the numbers added up for you in 2024 as well as they did for me. Happy New Year.