2017

Like last year, I’m doing a year-end wrapup post just becase I enjoy the exercise of looking back so much. I’m a forward-facing person, and it’s easy to forget the cokl things that happened during the year. Also my memory is terrible. I also made a business-related year-end wrapup, which is here.

Side Projects

Erika and I had a fun joint project this year - we built and launched a brand for her oak mite essential oil, Mighty Oak.. I really enjoyed working with E, and I really like the branding we developed, featuring a watercolor she made on the fly.

I joined our church’s Trustee team, which oversees operations & finance.

We joined a new community group with church - but petered out by summer. :( ?

Erika continued her work with the Social Service League, and joined the Board there. She’s a big deal, and helps out a ton organizing the store and its processes. She also spearheaded their annual Dress Givewaway. We worked together on the branding for that as well.

I continued learning a little bit of Chinese, very slowly, helped by my friend Qing.

The biggest one: I started teaching a design class at KU. Officially it was called ‘Design for Social Interaction’, but really it was ‘Everything Matt Wants You to Know Before You Apply at Brand New Box’. It was surprisingly fun, and I was pleasantly surprised by how invested I was in the students. I’m doing it again this semester, although this time they’ve made it a senior-level class and called it ‘Interaction Design.’

House Stuff

I tried not to do anything with the house last year, which did not work at all. We got new gutters and trim, I replaced the plastic panels on the carport, I rebuilt the back balcony, we dug up and destroyed the walkways around the house and rebuilt them with pavers and lava stone. We did a little landscaping. We haven’t had grass for six months and we’re still missing a step to our front porch. :)

Los Niños

My children are still astonishingly wonderful.

• Felix started 2nd grade with same teacher
• Trudy started the 1st grade with new teacher, in the 1-3 class
• They both had swim lessons over the summer, and now they cam both basically swim unattended. Trudy went from dog paddling to doing crazy jumps off the high dive. We can bring books to the pool now!
• They did a sports camp with cousins
• We all built a big complicated cardboard house / fort / sculpture thing in half of the downstairs all summer long. It was complicated!
• Trudy learned to ride a bike, which made family transit way more fun
• Felix played Fall soccer with a team of goons but it was mostly fun anyway because it’s fun to watch Felix play.

Travel

• ICELAND was our extra-big trip - the first international outing that we’ve done with the whole family. We are totally in love with the place.
• We drove to Colorado for almost a week: three days above 10,000 feet on Mount Evans, and then a weekend with our friends Phil and Rel and celebrated Matt and Ashley’s wedding.

We went to St. Louis a ton:

• STL in April for Dad’s 60th
• STL for staycation of sorts - stayed downtown, went to the Zoo, Science Center, City Museum, hung out in Tower Grove neighborhood a bunch.
• STL in November for Mom’s 60th
• STL for Pie Night, then Chicago for fun
• STL for Christmas the week after

And had a few short trips in the midwest:

• ARK for my Aunt Irene’s funeral, which was a bittersweet time but nice to catch up with family.
• NE for Defy Ventures kickoff event at Tecumseh Prison
• Northern Kansas for the ECLIPSE, which was cloudy but very, very cool.