20260106

2025 Recap

I’m bad at remembering things so it’s helpful to write stuff down. Thus: a recap post for 2025. I make these by just paging through my calendar and my photo roll a the same time and writing down what happened.

To be super clear: I don’t expect anybody to read this. It’s just for Matt’s memory.

2024 was a big travel year, with work trips and our big summer in Europe. 2025’s goal was to focus up at home, and put my energy into doing a bunch of house projects. The big failure was redoing the carport; after much deliberation I hired a local architect. That didn’t work out, and we still have the same crumbling carport and much less money in our bank account. Oh well, 2026 it is.

January

• Erika went on a road trip with a friend, kids and I rang in the new year together.
• Launched a new class at KU, teaching Design Systems. This was my first class in the new Interaction Design major, which is (a) awesome and (b) long overdue. Fun to work with design students who KNOW they want to do interactive work.
• Tried to design the carport myself, hated everything
• Took on a new project with an old client that involved daily multi-hour meetings at 7am. Shifted my gym schedule to the evening. And started using the Faculty-Only gym on campus (which was fun actually)
• Plumbing backup in the house threatened a huge 5-figure repair job. Got a second opinion and did some labor myself, managed to get it sorted for just a few hundred bucks.
• Mom and Dad came to visit, saw Felix play with the Sousa band.
• started a project to do a clay portrait sculpture every week; again I’m so bad at this that I couldn’t force myself to go much past march. Just one embarrassing sculpture after another, and no pathway to get better. I need a teacher!
• E & I saw the music minister’s band play at the Replay

February

• Relaunched the homepage of mattkirkland.com, with my new obnoxious windows, and automatic updates on the footer, and secret easter egg of bird sounds.
• Made a plan to buy the house next door
• Reorganized the library/office
• Felix competed in the local Youth Entrepreneurship thing again, got 2nd place this time with a pitch to reuse our penny press for wedding events.
• Felix and I got tickets to a KU basketball game
• Felix threw a broski Superbowl party
• Trudy threw an elaborate Galentine’s party
• went on a fun Friday date w E; played hooky and went shopping, to lunch, and to the nelson.

March

• Prepped a plan to launch Dracula Weekly, my paid tier of Dracula Daily.
• took a wood carving workshop that taught how to make kitschy gnomes. Bought equipment and tried to extend this to other figurative sculpture but it’s very hard to make my brain do 3D, especially reductive. Why????
• Went to suburban Detroit with Nate for a client meeting and party; they rented a movie theater and we went curling!
• Felix got his ear surgery! Put in his prosthetic ear bone, which is kind of cool.
• fixed another problem with one of our sump pumps.
• Trudy was in Little Women at her school; she did amazing. Also designed an ironic but actually great poster for it, featuring four monster trucks. The drama teacher was impressed but not pleased.

April

• Vibecoded a silly horoscope site or parents, that just recommends childhood vaccines
• Cut down a medium-sized tree in my backyard, which was SUPER fun. I monkey-climbed it to the top and took it down branch by branch with a small one-handed chainsaw, and then cut the trunk into sections. Extremely satisfying. And now Carola’s got plenty of firewood for next winter.
• I made myself a homemade Yoshinoya beef bowl, which was delightful to only one person in our house. Me.
• E made a very cool hand-cut paper forest backdrop for easter photos at church.
• I got some further traumatic dental work done
• Trudy and I started coworking afternoons, where we’d go to a coffeeshop while she did school and I did work stuff. Why haven’t we been doing this for her entire online school career?
• saw the music minister’s band again at the replay? I forgot we did this twice

May

• St Louis trip. Happened to coincide with the STL book fair near my parents, so I snuck over for an afternoon. It’s just a big library book sale.
• Stevie & Molly’s wedding; at a St Louis winery on a gorgeous evening. Fun to get dressed up with all the Kirkland side of the family.
• Felix and I got a powerwasher and powerwashed the deck. And then anything else we could think of. Restained the deck.
• Felix did the school mud volleyball tournament with friends, which is a very fun event.
• Actually launched the paid Dracula Weekly plan. Shipped out a bunch of goodies to people that signed up. Started writing weekly Dracula Recap posts, which I suspect I will largely recycle each year.
• TK finished middle school! And also won Thespian of the Year :)
• Marched the kids through a great Final Friday of art gallery openings downtown. It was fun actually.
• Finally installed a handrail on our front porch. I thought for years I would need to custom fabricate it but found I could buy one off the shelf that wasn’t hideous.
• I took over the Coffee team at church; been volunteering there for a few months but now I’m the guy who schedules people and makes sure we don’t run out of coffee.

June

• A couple of huge tree branches from our front oak tree fell down, crushing that handrail. Thankfully nobody was hurt. Spent evenings and weekends for two weeks just chopping it up into firewood for Carola. Bought a new handrail and installed it.
• Drove to St Louis by myself and stopped at the Daum Museum in Sedalia. An art museum in a small Missouri town, with a great collection. Been sleeping on this one. Saw a Gisela Colon sculpture that I’ve been thinking about ever since.
• Grad party for Asher including a backyard pig roast!
• BNB work retreat in St Louis; we stayed out by SLU. It was AI themed. We went to the City Museum and ate on the Hill. I haven’t been at the City Museum without kids since… I was a kid. Very fun to amble through it at my own pace and see all the little stuff.
• Bought myself an axe and realized that splitting firewood is EXTREMELY fun.
• Built and launched plotted, my ‘all the best books have maps’ aggregator
• Erika and a friend envisioned an incredible product, prototyped it, and did a photoshoot all in one night. I built an online store that night. They’re not ready to launch it but I think it would KILLLLLL if they did.
• Helped neighbor Conrad harvest his cherry tree.
• Saw some old neighbors in town visiting; we hung out at Winter School.
• Felix and I finally ‘launched’ carbon crimes, but we haven’t really spread the word about it. It actually felt kind of scary with the current… atmosphere.
• went to a big showing of Hundreds of Beavers at Liberty Hall

July

• Built and launched TinyTruckTracker.com, a site to monitor which startup will actually deliver a tiny electric truck in the US. Kind of lost interest and it’s getting a bit stale.
• Kids had other plans so Erika and I went to go watch the fireworks in Eudora. Surprisingly great!
• Lewis & Gosa visit! Had fun hanging out. The teens did official campus tours at KU.
• Kids went up to Chicago with the Lewises.
• EK date to KC and a surprisingly good snack/meal at Bikanervala
• I drove to Chicago to pick up kids. Stopped at the Farnsworth House in Illinois on the way, very fun to see. I really loved a sculpture they had there, David Wallace Haskins ‘Image Continuous’. Fun times in Chicago.
• Went to Cincinnati with the Detroit client, a big meeting of the minds. Cincy was fun, we stuck to the Over the Rhine neighborhood. Went to a few great bars, I had three fun runs. Got chili at the airport.
• Felix went to high school camp
• Grays stopped by for a few days; had fun hanging out and took Nate’s boat out to swim
• Erika doula’d for another lady at church (we all feel like this is one of the things she could make a whole career out of)

August

• Kids back to school: T as a Freshman, F a sophomore
• Erika went to Germany and the Netherlands with her mom
• We both marked a funny turning point - we have now been married longer than we were alive before we were married. Like, we have spent >50% of our days on earth married.
• Erika continued first-wednesday-of-the-month Teen Lunches, which now have like 45 kids descending for lunch.
• Felix played in Marching Band all fall. We went to some football games to see him!
• Felix played soccer again, this time fully on the JV team. Played nearly every minute of the season.
• I joined the board at the Lawrence Arts Center, an organization I love and really want to see thrive

September

• Started building a 10x10 shed in the backyard. Watched a whole lot of youtube. Felix helped a bunch, but otherwise it was just me. Also extremely fun. Framed for the first time, roofed for the first time.
• Went to a preview night at Atlas9, the meow-wolf-y thing in Kansas City. It’s an interdimensional movie theater, and great for its size. Definitely feels like something pulled off by designers instead of artists.
• Went to hear Te Deum do Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil
• Went to a truly notable concert with Erika at the white schoolhouse
• I think it was around here that my dr finally pushed me to start taking some blood pressure medication, which has felt low-key miraculous
• Mom and Dad came to visit, saw a soccer game and the Lawrence High football game with the marching band

October

• Finished that shed. Moved a bunch of junk out of the house and into the shed.
• Rebuilt StudioKirkland.com, with a better portfolio interface and a Shopify store.
• Drove to Denver/Boulder for a BNB retreat. This was RockyMountainRuby and also the Denver Product Summit (which was way better). I really enjoyed a long solo road trip with a stack of audiobooks.
• Went to the Denver Art Museum and the Kirkland Museum, which has been on my list for a while.
• Took a fall break trip to southern Missouri; saw my folks for a bit, then down to Fredrock Glampground again. We played in Johnson Shut-ins - super fun, and just barely warm enough to be in the water (but still quite cold). Stayed in the big teepee, had a big rainstorm. It was great.
• Fixed something else on a different sump pump.
• Erika did her (now annual?) girls trip to St Louis
• Trudy and I saw Welcome to Night Vale live at Liberty Hall

November

• Northern Lights! Noticeable-with-the-naked-eye from our front porch, even with streetlights and traffic.
• T got her learners permit!
• saw Stile Antico perform medieval / renaissance music
• and then saw The Beths at the Truman with Erika
• Pie Night! In St Louis
• and then our usual Thanksgiving trip to Chicago. Great to spend time with friends, and also did some touristy things: beef sandwiches at the restaurant that inspired The Bear (legitimately so good), black Friday shopping, bowling with the boys, a big snowy day
• back home we decorated the house for advent, which E does an amazing job of and makes the living room especially feel special.

December

• Advent! Erika’s got a countdown of activities and treats she runs for the kids; it’s sweet.
• We try to not jam December full of events except for family stuff; it’s a quiet season.
• One special evening: we got dressed up, went to a fancy dinner at Lydia’s in KC, and then to a Christmas concert of Te Deum, the sacred-music-only chamber choir.
• The actual holiday as usual with our Christmas Eve hosting E’s side of the family, Christmas morning around our tree, then drive to STL to see the Kirkland family for a few days. Emily hosted a Cousin Brunch for all the family of my generation, which was great.

Overall

A weird year but just because I tried to intentionally ‘stay close’. Lots of my creative/extracurricular activity was around the house, working on home projects that I don’t really gravitate towards. And with T starting high school, F being busy, and E working, my theme for 2025 was ‘try to pick up some slack’. A little bit boring, actually, but did feel like I was a support for my wonderful family. At least that was the goal!

As the kids grow more independent, we are finding more and more times where they are just out of the house living their lives, and Erika and I are feeling that out. We’re not empty nesters or anything, but we can see it on the horizon. And the days when we are all together doing things feel even more special. We have a little thing we’ve discussed at the end of a special day: This could be it. That’s shorthand for a longer discussion: When I’m very old, if I could go back and time and relive just one day from my life, I could choose this day. This one could be it. We had a handful of those days in 2025; I think that’s something to be grateful for.

20260101

Found 2025

Every year the Kirkland family keeps a jar of ‘found’ coins - and once per year I do the accounting. Previously: 2024, 2023, (no 2022 post?), 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017. We’ve been doing this since 2004.

Here’s what we found in 2025!

Even fewer coins than last year; I think the approaching cashless world is cutting into this, plus our family now has two very independent teenagers. We’re not taking as many slow ambling walks as we did back when they were in elementary school.

Plus: the abolition of the penny finally happened this year. Who knows how this will affect this!

We did still pick up 147 individual coins, which adds up to $11.82, plus some miscellaneous euro Erika found in Germany and the Netherlands this summer. Tracked in our ongoing spreadsheet, of course.

As always: these coins are stored in the archive for the one-day future Erika Kirkland Museum of Found Objects.

20251015

Call for Entries part 3

We’re back! I still have a background process running in my brain about ‘places I want to commission a fiction writer’.

I’m keeping a running list of alternative fiction delivery methods that I’d like to experience. I’m not a writer, and I fundamentally do not have any interest in me personally inventing a fictional story for others.

BUT.

I love reading fiction. I love printed paper books first and foremost, but also I love digital media and the weird new things it affords for storytelling. And I’ve dipped my toe into publishing, helping make other people’s stories real.

So! Here’s a followup to previous Fiction RFP part one and part two, where I listed out some media formats I’d love to publish. And I’m serious - if you’re a writer and you want to put out a story in one of these ways, I would love to help. Call me.

12

Novella in a Playbill magazine. You know the playbill programs you get at the theater? What if you used all of it to tell a story? This has so much SPACE. Mimic the format of a Playbill program for a stage production (play? musical? opera?), and use it as a not-quite-linear template for telling different parts of the story. You’ve got natural space for the setting, about the work itself, cast bios, composer bios, and ADS. What a world you could build in that space. And the printing is totally foolproof.

13

Quarterback playbook wristband. Here’s the opposite. It’s sports instead of drama, it’s short instead of long. I want to commission a fiction piece that only gets published as an insert for these wristbands that football players wear. You’ve got about 3 or 6 pages. When we distribute the story, you get an actual wristband with it.

Airline pilots have a similar thing called a kneeboard too; it straps to your thigh.

14

Trade Magazine. I am a longtime subscriber to niche trade magazines like Pizza Today, Parking Today, National Nut Grower. These are pretty thinly edited, and one at least has a long-running fiction story that gets published each month. But it would be fun to make a spurious trade magazine and use the whole thing - articles, advertisements, letters to the editor, etc - to tell one story.

Easy expansion of this idea to a product catalog - seems like that has to have been done before, right?

15

In This House We Believe. Libraries and Parks Departments do these ‘story walks,’ where they make outdoor signage and place them along a pathway in a park. Sometimes they’re just printing out spreads from a picture book! I’d like to take this idea and tell a story in the form of those rainbow ‘In This House We Believe…’ signs. You can make them custom, and print one-offs! I envision a story that works by walking down a suburban block where each house has one of these. Perhaps the neighbors are in conversation with each other, or telling some Rashomon-esque take on some neighborhood disturbance. H/T to Trudy on this one.

Call me already

I love the format here, but I stall out on these because I’m not a writer. I don’t have a story to tell, and without that, what’s the point?

I’m not kidding. I have some modest budget prepared for these projects, and I’m really just cruising for a writer to work with that thinks these sound fun. If you are a writer, consider this your invitation to query me!

20250822

All my favorite books have maps

All the best books have a map at the front, right? At least, all of my favorites. I love two genres: fantasy/scifi in an invented world (Narnia, Earthsea, etc) or a travelogue in an exotic place. Either way, I’m always flipping back to the front of the book to peek at the map.

But! I also often want to annotate those maps - or in some cases, I want to supply my own. So: I made plotted.io. It’s a simple little web app that lets you add maps from books and annotate them.

You can upload an image of a map - like the drawing on those first pages - of the fantasy world. Or if the story you’re interested in happens in the ‘real world’ (even in fiction), you can choose a ‘real world’ map to annotate.

I have a personal reading journal site, but that’s only for me. I’m the only one who can post there. But Plotted is for everyone! Anybody can grab an account and add a map.

A great example of this is Dracula. The core of the story happens in two places: Transylvania and England. it’s fun to explore a map of where those places really ARE. And there are a couple of plot-relevant journeys in the book (the voyage of the Demeter, and the final race back to Transylvania) where actually knowing the geography really adds to the story. When Dracula causes a storm and fog, the ship Demeter wanders right through the English channel, without a chance to stop for help. Stoker’s original audience would understand this intuitively, but I sure didn’t as an American. Seeing this on a map really drives the story home!

But I think it’s also just as fun when you annotate a fictional place. Like: when you read The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, didn’t you want to visualize all the crossing paths of Aiden Bishop? I know I did. So I made a map!

This is a little half-baked for now, but it absolutely scratches my itch. I can:

• upload a map
• associate it with a book
• draw lines on the map
• add pins on the map
• and label things
• and share that map with others

Is this going to satisfy the real obsessives? Probably not. For fiction worlds where there is a deep bench of expertise - Middle-Earth, Westeros, etc - there’s already going to be some other mapping project. But for the rest of us, we can use this.

20250816

Sprout Sign

Here’s a silly project that came out of an actual client conversation!

Sprout Sign is a baby horoscope tool. Enter in your child’s birthdate, and the STARS will tell you about your child’s future!

We’re working on a state-funded project now at Brand New Box about getting early childhood resources to people, and one of my left-field ideas was: what about the kind of folks who trust woo-woo Instagram more than like, their pediatricians? Is there a way we can speak that language?

I jokingly suggested: what if there’s an online Tarot reading, but the cards just tell you to get your kids vaccinated?

I loved this idea, goofy as it is. And we spitballed into other new-age spiritual models: astrology! I couldn’t resist just making it, even though (of course?) it’s not something that we’ll really publish with actual tax dollars, but it’s something that I can absolutely make for fun!

So: here’s a astrology tool for the crystal crowd, where every horoscope result just tells you what childhood vaccinations to get next, from the official CDC vaccination schedule*.

( * I used the CDC immunization schedule from June 2025. Will we have recommended vaccinations in the future? Or maybe we’ll all just get measles, who knows)