20250110

2024 Recap

I’m bad at remembering things so it’s helpful to write stuff down. Thus: a recap post for 2024.

2024 was great, and went weirdly according to plan, I think.

January

• My grandpa passed away right after Christmas, so we went right back to St Louis for the funeral. Lots of feelings there.
• BNB retreat to New Orleans, Erika came along and it was fun. I’d never been. Cold and rainy but warmer than LFK! We saw the first parade of Mardi Gras season (the Joan of Arc) and it was a revelation about what a parade could look like.
• We continued to move the Local Crush Penny Press around Lawrence
• Felix played in the Sousa Honor Band at the Lied Center
• Erika and I started doing weekly ‘family meetings’
• We found F&T on google street view (walking home from school!)

February

• We went to go see some symphony performers in KC at a coffee shop
• We went to see the KC Symphony for the first time (doing Phil Collins songs! Which was fine except they had terrible cruise-ship-level singers doing vocals!)
• We started to really hone in our plans for #europe2024, including the join-up-with friends segment we lovingly called #scandimania and/or #rizzsommar
• Our family profile in Euronews!
• F had a small surgery for his ear, just a tubes thing, but they decided then, that he’d need some bigger work later this year
• F competed in the county Youth Entrepreneurship thing and won 1st place (and some big $)
• Went to Sheyda’s book launch party

March

• E & kids went to visit friends in Des Moines for part of their spring break
• T started on a kids rock-climbing team, although the coach was such a flake half the time it was just unstructured climbing time :upside-down-smiling-face.
• We went to STL for Easter. Sunday service at K&B’s church, where we’d never visited before!
• E & I looked VERY hard at buying an old karate studio to use for big weird art projects.

April

• Total Solar Eclipse! I had this on my calendar since the last one. We drove to southern missouri to stay at a glampground, run by a friend of E’s. Other friends joined us. The eclipse was amazing.
• We found out that our month-long airbnb in Munich was canceled and so we had to scramble to book other accommodation.
• I went straight from STL to DC for a few days of planning with the institute team. Met up with Eric and saw Sir Chloe & Daffo.
• Felix went to the state Youth Entrepreneurship thing at K State, we were very impressed with that operation.
• F & I saw the new STL soccer team against SportingKC
• T & F were both in the spring play at LMCMS
• Felix did the Douglas County pitch event (everybody else was an adult!)
• I got my first physical in years, and a heart scan (uh oh) and one of those bodyfat scans too. We’ll throw some diet and exercise at this and see where we are in a year.
• We built a new ‘rustic’ firepit in the backyard, inspired by the glampground

May

• I saw the chamber music group ‘Chanticleer’
• BNB went to Detroit for RailsConf. We met a lot of rails people!
• We saw the Northern Lights! In Kansas!
• We went to Europe! This was a big thing we’d planned for a long time. Erika documented this extensively. But the big plan was: a month in Munich (with some side trips) and then 2 weeks in Scandinavia. Trudy’s online school and my work continued thru the Germany part, so we did a lot of coworking late in the evening. I had one pretzel and one beer per day, MINIMUM.
• First week was in Munich in the Mildred-Scheel-Bogen neighborhood, which we loved.

June

• Switched locations to more southern edge of Munich.
• Spent a long weekend in Paris!
• Drove down to see Guedelon castle, which was a low-key obsession of mine during the pandemic. Very cool to see it in real life!
• Switched to Kochel am See, south of Munich
• Switched locations to a holiday inn in the city center.
• Saw Erika’s aunt Karin
• Watched some of the Euro soccer games - from a viewing area by one of our hotels and one big Germany game from a fanzone in Olympic Park
• Felix did an online class to knock out his first high school credits.
• Flew to Stockholm to meet friends!
• We were there for Midsommar and it was light til midnight, and then from 3am onwards. Nuts.
• Took a train to Oslo, stayed in a lake-house-type spot on an island in the south harbor.

July

• Took a ferry to Copenhagen, got rental cars, drove to Bilund
• Saw the Jelling stones!
• Went to Lego House
• Drove to Copenhagen
• Flew to Reyjkavik for a 36 hour stopover. Blue Lagoon hotel - a big splurge - including driving across the active volcano spill near Grindavik.
• NY friends came to visit Lawrence!
• Felix had ear surgery
• Saw a Mates of State reunion show at the Record Bar
• Erika started new job at Connect
• SD friends came to Lawrence to visit! Grays, Geitgeys, Clarks! Hung out, did the lake, fireworks, etc. County fair demolition derby!

August

• STL trip. Cardinals game with DNA! City Museum!
• F started HIGH SCHOOL at LHS
• T started 8th at Sora & LMCMS
• F started with the soccer team. Got C team at tryouts but immediately rostered up to JV. Played most of the minutes of every game.

September

• BNB retreat to Lawrence, which means just a few people traveling but we get to do a bunch of stuff locally.
• Saw Abby Holiday show at the bottleneck
• A lot of school activities - choir and soccer and stuff

October

• I volunteered at the Douglas County CORE entrepreneurship / pitch, doing some UX and strategy help for participants.
• F played in the pep band at some football games
• E & I did another round of Growth Group at church on Fridays
• Went to Bob’s book launch party!
• Saw the Northern Lights from Lawrence, again. This time from our front porch.
• A reall strikingly beautiful autumn colors.
• Halloween!

November

• Dad retired, had lowkey celebration in STL
• E & I went to Brooklyn for a big birthday weekend. Saw Kacey Musgraves live, and never went to Manhattan. Highlights for me was a highball at a japanese-style bar followed by Anora at BAM.
• T in the school musical (emma!)
• DNA came to visit
• Saw the Hokusai exhibit at the Nelson
• Pie Night in STL
• Thanksgiving in Chicago, our usual circuit and fun with the crew there

December

• BNB retreat to Austin. Actually Dripping Springs, outside Austin.
• intentionally had a very low-key advent; trying to really dial in the ‘quiet waiting’ part of this season. We used a lot of candles around the house.
• hosted Growth Group party
• STL for Christmas
• Erika went to Rochester MN with a friend over New Year’s

Overall

10/10, would do it again.

20250101

Found 2024

Every year the Kirkland family keeps a jar of ‘found’ coins - and once per year I do the accounting.

This year: Sheesh, really seems like the decline of a cash-based society is rearing its head here. We spent the summer in Germany and Scandinavia, where we walked 20,000 steps a day in major cities. Ten years ago, that would have been a goldmine for found change. But not in northern Europe? In fact, the only cash I saw in Norway at all was rattling around a junk drawer in an airBNB.

On the other hand; maybe we were looking UP at the cities around us.

But - still not a bad haul for the year. Only $8.35 total in USD and €0.65 in EUR, but 160 individual coins (plus this 10,000 peso bill). Not bad. As usual, one day this will be a part of the Erika Kirkland Museum of Found Objects.

20241230

A very wobbly font

This summer, I visited Oslo for the first time - including dropping in at the Oslo Cathedral. There in the choir loft is a series of stained glass windows, with some incredible hand-lettered text.

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It was blobby, wobbly, and perfectly suited for its task - letting in as much light as possible, while still being readable. It had such a unique character - I photographed a bunch of reference images.

Introducing Oslo

In fact - I loved it so much, I made a real working font out of it.

Thus: OSLO is a wild display font, based on the stained-glass windows in Oslo Cathedral. It’s got a wobbly, hand-drawn feel, as suited to its original context. It looks great jammed up together with text, and in high-contrast situations.

The original letterforms were designed and painted by the Norwegian artist Emanuel Vigeland, who created the entire stained glass windows in the cathedral choir area. (His brother Gustav was a prolific sculptor, too!)

OSLO is a single-case display typeface. It has only uppercase letters, numbers, and most (but not all) punctuation and symbols. It’s got a handful of accented characters as well! It’s definitely not your choice for big sections of body text, but it’s a bold choice for fun display situations.

And you can get it, too. I put it up here with more examples, and you can buy yourself a copy (for cheap!) if you ever need a very wobbly, but weirdly modern display font.

20241229

The year, unboxed

This year I made a little minisite celebrating the work we did at Brand New Box this year! Like the new year’s cards and badges, I kept with the composition book theme. I’ll probably write more process stuff on the main BNB blog. But until then: 2024 Unboxed!

20241010

Seven Nation Army should be our national anthem.

Seven Nation Army should be the national anthem for the United States of America.

That’s it. That’s the pitch.

Look. We know we need a new national anthem. The Star-Spangled Banner served its purpose, but we can do better. Let’s talk it through.

On retiring TSSB

First, it’s a bummer of a song. It commemorates getting pummeled by our enemy (the Brits) in a war that nobody remembers (_ of 1812). The song was first a poem (embarrassing) and then set to music by borrowing another tune (from the British).

The song wasn’t even adopted as the National Anthem until 1931, which means it was over a hundred years old before we finally assigned it this role. And it’s been in this role for less than century. For a nation that’s founded on the idea of new beginnings and renewal - that doesn’t sit right.

And we barely know what it means. Of the four stanzas of the poem, we only sing one in the anthem. That’s enough - with its tortuous sentence structure, its archaic terms (ramparts?), and weird hanging questions (does it yet wave?) - nobody wants to sing the second, third, or fourth stanzas.

AND It’s famously hard to sing! At the beginning of every ballgame, there’s a tense pause of awkwardness while we discover if the featured singer can even pull off TSSB. Most of the time, they can’t, or struggle through it, and the crowd winces appreciatively as the singer struggles with the huge tonal range. High parts, low parts, it’s a mess.

We certainly don’t sing along.

Seven Nation Arm does not have these problems.

I'm gonna fight 'em off.
A seven nation army couldn't hold me back.

We LOVE singing along to this one. It’s perfect.

You know the tune. Every high school band in the country knows the tune and they’re just itching to play it: DUM. DUH-DUH DUM DUM DUM. DUM. Drums. Brass. We LOVE this. It’s BIG. It’s BRASH. It’s LOUD. It’s a TAUNT. It’s aggressive, it’s warlike, it’s got SWAGGER. It’s good on any instrument.

It’s EASY to sing. We can’t stop singing it. We shout the tune in groups, in stadiums, at clubs. Plus It’s ABOUT independence and self-reliance. It’s a paean to self-determination. It’s outward-facing, and it dares anyone else to get in our way.

And the message comin' from my eyes
Says, "Leave it alone"

Seven Nation Army is more American than apple pie. Written by people from DETROIT, for crying out loud, in a ROCK song. It’s a shining example of an artform created and perfected by bold, naive, passionate young people - the story of the United States writ large.

And it’s ABOUT Independence - US style. Our Founding Fathers were young men! They boldly declaring their independence! Seven Nation Army captures this exactly: willfully independent, us-against-the-world, and fuck-you if you disagree. Imagine the podium moments at the Olympics if THAT was the song we played!

Everyone knows about it
From the Queen of England to the Hounds of Hell

And if this isn’t the American story, what is? Go west, make a new home, work hard, and do it yourself.

And the feelin' comin' from my bones
Says, "Find a home"

I'm goin' to Wichita
Far from this opera forevermore
I'm gonna work the straw
Make the sweat drip out of every pore
And I'm bleedin', and I'm bleedin', and I'm bleedin'
Right before the Lord
All the words are gonna bleed from me
And I will think no more

Think no more, my fellow Americans. We have the perfect Anthem for us. Maybe you disagree?

And that ain’t what you want to hear
But that’s what I’ll do

DUM. DUH-DUH DUM DUM DUM. DUM.

DUM. DUH-DUH DUM DUM DUM. DUM.