2019 Recap
Every year I write a wrap-up post, not because I think anybody cares, but instead because I have come to cherish the exercise of looking back at what happens in a year. I’ve learned that I either have a terrible memory, or am just very future-focused. I hardly ever look backwards to appreciate all this fun stuff, unless I take some dedicated time to do it.
That said, here’s some stuff that happened in 2019.
TRAVEL
Whew, we are getting awfully used to a lifestyle full of travel. It doesn’t even feel like we traveled a lot this year, but we were out the door almost every month in 2019.
- FEB: Matt to SF and Oakland in february
- MAR: Matt to France in March for work, Germany after that for pleasure. recap here!
- APR: San Diego in April
- JUNE: STL in June, and Mellie was there for some of it!
- JUL: Tulsa in july (it was hot)
- JUL: Erika 20-yr High School Reunion in July
- AUG: kids weekend in STL with my parents in Aug
- SEP: Erika took a long road trip to Seattle and BC
- OCT: San Francisco in Oct for Will wedding / biz meetings / family hangout
- NOV: Thanksgiving in Chicago (we even stopped for lunch in Iowa to see my friend Qing)
- DEC: STL for Christmas
VISITS
And lots of people came to visit last year!
- Lewises visit for NYE (2018)
- Phil & Rel in december!
- Heidi and girls visited in the spring
- Pat visited
- our college friend crew visited in July for a week
- Lillers again in November
- Elkes in Dec/Jan
HOUSE STUFF
The chores of homeownership are generally tedious and frustrating, but this sadly takes up a big amount of brainspace and effort - so I definitely include it in my recap of the year. Plus, it’s nice to look back at the things we learned how to do (or not do).
- The big one last year: Erika finished the house next door for her mom, and Carola moved in! Erika did an incredible job. I barely helped at all, which was great. I built some steps and a porch.
- We had some further roof fixes done
- We got backup sump pumps down in the basement after a minor power outage proved just how short a time it takes to get water in the basement
- We replaced the water heater, ie, a plumber did it for us
- Erika and I actually poured a new crown for our chimney!
- Erika and I reframed out our four skylights, which we discovered were NOT EVEN ATTACHED TO THE HOUSE, just sitting in place on the box.
CREATIVE PURSUITS
- Took an amazing puppet class, made amazing puppets
- Made a big Tolstoy head and other halloween costumes
- Redesigned and relaunched TilmanRiemenschneider.com, my ongoing catalog of the german sculptor.
- Baijiu Review ticked along, got to try some delicious stuff, got some neat bottles contributed, and hosted a couple of tasting nights.
- Erika did a great project halfway thru the year where she visited the same site in a big park every week. But then the flooding cut off that site, so she couldn’t go there any more.
- Printed the last 4 Charles Williams novels! Finishing that project was almost on autopilot, but it was a big achievement and it’s great to have that wrapped up. Now I just need to sell some more books. (available here for sale!)
- Dumb Cuneiform is still going, and I’m still making custom clay cuneiform tablets based on your dumb tweets.
- Made those concrete molded finials
- Made a fun card game w the kids
- Designed a set of tarot cards for sean’s video
KS
Interesting weather this year, which made it really nice to be in Kansas. We got a bunch of snow in the winter, a TON of rain in the spring, summer was hot but in a nice way, and autumn was GORGEOUS.
COMMUNITY
- I continued as a trustee at church, switching to the ‘lead’ trustee for 2020.
- Erika started the year in her board position at SSL. Then over the summer, they convinced her to take a new position as Donations Manager, which she’s doing amazing at. She still put on the big annual dress giveaway in her volunteer capacity, anyway.
- My friend Qing left lawrence :(
- Felix and I worked on a construction project at church, rebuilding the wheelchair ramp
- Matt joined a crossfit gym, which takes up SO MUCH TIME.
FAMILY
Felix and Trudy are just as delightful as ever. Felix started a new classroom at school, with the 4-6 graders. Trudy is now at the boss-level of her 1-3 class. A big change for last year was our new neighbor: Erika’s mom! It’s really nice to have her next door, and I enjoy having her in family activities like our birthday breakfasts, etc.
- Trudy colonized a jewelry class at the art center, and continues to just CHURN out the artwork at an inspiring pace.
- Felix upgraded soccer levels again, and his Premier league has two practices per week plus weekend games in KC. It’s an increase in our time commitment, but the games are FUN.
- They both went to real summer camp this year, and loved it.
WORK
Work at Brand New Box was really fulfilling this year. Challenging, rewarding, and with an eye for building big things in the future. I’m excited. I’ll write a year-end wrap-up over at brandnewbox.com as well, but some highlights:
- josh had a baby!
- mark left!
- major EOS revamp!
- team went to Colorado!
- will got married!
- rosetta was a hit!
- joe joined!
- several new clients signed on!
2020
I have high hopes for 2020. But this recap exercise really convinces me of one thing: I am one lucky bastard.
Animated Eyes
If you know me a little, you know this is Extremely My Jam.
Designer Dinaa Amin made this stop-motion video of plastic eyes, gathered from discarded/salvaged doll heads. As someone who is still a little obsessed with the robots lurking inside children’s toys*, I’m a fan.
Here’s the video:
*Also! I’m reviving this project a bit, because now Erika works at a thrift store and she has been finding some amazing toys to work with.
FOUND 2019
Every year as a family we pick up coins we find on the ground, and add them to a dedicated jar for that year. The rules are simple: ‘found’ money has to be found outside our house/yard, we can’t know who the owner is, and we can never spend it. The jar is documented and saved; here’s our haul from 2019:
The final count was $29.14! Not our largest total amount, but this is already inflated by some big bills we found on the ground as well. But the exciting part is just how many individual pieces we found this year: 286 coins or bills collected. That’s by far our highest, which means we’re getting better at finding.
(Of course I have a spreadsheet.)
I attribute this to our kids: as they grow they’re getting better at noticing things around them, and they’re also just going more places now. When they were little our circuit of locations was smaller, but as they are now in full kid-land, we end up just out in the world more often and at a bigger variety of places.
Notes on Trollope
I’ve been trying to describe the pleasure of reading Anthony Trollope, and one way to compare it is with how I felt about Downton Abbey, back when it was a fresh thing. You don’t really care who gets married or inherits the money, who has their way about organizing the village fair, or if this misunderstanding between the butler and the footman ever gets resolved - but the characters are charming enough, and the acting and writing is so good that it’s simply a pleasure to watch these craftspeople execute their craft so well.
I spent much of this year reading the Barchester series. They’re long - like, eight hundred pages long - and there are six of them. I’ve been chewing on them for a while because the pleasure of reading them is so different from some other kinds of reading.
Trollope’s books are leisurely - they just sprawl out for hundreds of pages, but they’re absolutely NOT a slog. They feel like they are designed to pleasantly pass the time with. That’s not to say Trollope doesn’t have anything else to recommend him as an author: he’s really funny, he’s an amazing observer of behavior, and his authorial insertions are kind of astounding. But they are really equivalent to a beach read: you’ve got time laying around, and here’s a long, long novel full of interesting characters.
I wrote this when I finished The Small House at Arlington, the fifth in the series:
This was such a good one, but one that would only have worked this late in the series. Good characters, interesting plot, and a really intresting subversion of the expected plot elements. Not a cheap 'twist', but a refusal to drive the story forward to a comedic ending (in the sense of ending with a marriage). It feels like more mature, more character-driven writing. Maybe not a modernist rejection of plot itself, but just an honest craftsman who won't bend his material to suit an end.
I always say that reading Trollope, especially the Barsetshire novels, is like Downton Abbey or another multi-season TV drama. This book feels like an entire season, but a later one after everything has been established and the writers are starting to surprise you in new ways.
Anyway, I don’t know if that’s enough to convince anyone else to read these books - it does ring of faint praise. But man: Anthony Trollope! A good author! And he wrote like a real craftsman himself, waking up early to get his pages in, before going out to his job at the Post Office. Heck, he’s responsible for the ubiquitous pillar mailboxes in the UK! What more could you want?
Chicago 2019
Noting this trip down so I can remember it, because I’m bad at remembering, and worse at remembering specific instances of something I’ve done multiple times.
This year for the Thanksgiving weekend we repeated our recent pattern, and really I think each visit we have a better time than the last one. We started the Tuesday before Thanksgiving by prepping our pies for Pie Night, then went to the kids school Feast on Wednesday. They work for a week to prepare the dishes and table settings, and it’s neat to see what they’ve been up to. Then immediately after the Feast we get in the car and high-tail it to the Pie Night mothership, the original gathering of my family in St. Louis. We hang out, eat ham, catch up with the Kirklands, and stuff ourselves with pie. This year we brought a Banana Mallow, Chocolate Mint, my new/old Carrot Pudding recipe - I added a graham cracker crust - and Erika brought a BRISKET pie with a beautiful bacon lattice top.
(Not pictured: a whole ‘nother FIVE pies off-camera!)
The next morning up early to drive to Chicago. They made a turkey and pretty much the whole Thanksgiving dinner! It’s so incredible, and I never feel like we’ve contributed enough. But it’s always so good to see them. I try to have a sort-of-out-of-the-way tourist mission to accomplish when I visit a city, if only to give us a reason to explore a new corner.
This year I dragged us out to the Bohemian National Cemetery. I’ve been following this stonecarver on instagram for a while (he’s got great SEO: stonecarver.com and @IG_sculptor) as he worked on a large double treestump tombstone. Those are apparently a thing: this carver has worked on several, and there were dozens around the cemetery. The one I followed just got installed here a few weeks ago, and so I wanted to see it in real life. It was weird! But interesting to walk around the place a bit and see the work; there’s a lot of interesting sculpture even if (like all tree trunk tombstones) I find them kind of ugly. Actually the whole place was pretty muddy and grim, but what else does suburban Chicago look like in December?
We also at a delicious fancy dinner at Parachute to celebrate our birthdays, and hung out at the Art Institute. Some neat things I’d never noticed before were the really cool asian sculptures in the gallery that crosses the railroad tracks, and the Daumier caricature busts.
I knew Daumier mostly from art history class (twenty years ago!) as a printmaker, but this kind of collection of small studies is like, 110% my jam.