This has become one of my favorite things to compile and write each year.
My annual birthday list of the 45 things that I learned, was grateful for, or brought me joy in the last year. (last year’s list)
- Paris. At night. The Eiffel tower. Versailles on a bike. The best vacation ever.
- Thursday bar trivia nights. We may not win them all but we always confidently go down swinging.
- Weekday walks in the woods with Dash.
- Selling my first audiobook and seeing a strangely high royalty amount for India and thinking it was a mistake but no, turns out people in India dig Max.
- The birds returning to their birdhouse outside the kitchen window.
- The thoughtful holiday gifts from Bröel. Who says we are in a friendship recession?
- Making pizza for friends and family then eating it outside around the fire pit.
- Watching Ally dance in the kitchen.
- The first cup of coffee on the couch each morning with Chelle when the house is still quiet.
- The old Ukrainian woman who offered a Russian soldier sunflower seeds to put in his pockets so flowers would grow when they put him in the ground. Gets me every time.
- Food! Trying to order burritos in Spanish at Achillto’s. The appetizers at the Fireworks Feast. Crepes at a sidewalk cafe. Debating who has the better ramem: Dorogan or Little Big Diner. Pizza at Picco. Poutine and cinnamon rolls at Dysart’s.
- The Marco Polo app. Who knew I’d like talking on camera so much?
- Watching Cece crack up watching Will Ferrel as Little Debbie.
- Discovering Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club album.
- Saturday morning runs especially the cold and dark ones where I knew I had friends waiting if I could only get out the door. Plus, any run that went through the Tickle Zone.
- Discovering KUTX’s holiday mix. Christmas music we all don’t mind.
- Naps. All of them.
- Finding pockets of the unexpected in a town or city where I’ve lived for over 25 years now. Like finally visiting Paul Revere’s house and seeing a paper marbling demonstration. Or, like a sake brewery in my hometown.
- Driving everyone back to the hotel after my nephew’s bar mitzvah in a rental car with a dozen boxes of pizza.
- Seeing how confident Cece is on stage with her instrument. Even if she won’t wave to her parents in the audience.
- Finding energy in the gap between who I am and who I want to be.
- The Basin Head Jump club t-shirts and finally getting to go back to “our” house in Prince Edward Island.
- The burpee exercise was invented by Royal Huddleston Burpee Sr.
- Warmlines are telephone/chat hotlines for people who aren’t in crisis but just need to vent or talk to someone. Pretty sure that describes 90% of social media posts, too.
- In the 90s, Meat Loaf coached a JV girls softball team in a small Connecticut town. “To the scrappy group of girls he was trying to mold into softball players, he was Coach Meat.” RIP, Meat.
- Fees from music playing on Peloton are a top 10 account for pretty much all major record labels right now.
- Watching my friend and neighbor Dave and his band rock out at a proper music club and not the cul-de-sac.
- 37% of the world’s population, 2.9 billion people, have never used the Internet.
- There’s a warehouse in Israel full of claw machines you can play remotely. They send the prize if you win.
- A deep learning model trained on 85,000 eyes can tell male from female eyeballs with 87% accuracy but no one knows why. AI is going to be a fascinating story in the next twenty years but also a little spooky.
- Learning to use conversational doorknobs.
- If you want a question answered on the Internet, post a wrong answer first.
- Young friends turning 40 and celebrating with spa days and cooking classes.
- The International OCD Foundation has a helpful 9-step photographic rating of household clutter as a way to diagnose hoarding disorder. Level 3 is “standard household clutter”, while level 7 “poses significant safeguarding issues.” I wonder what our basement rates?
- The power of 10-year dreams. 5-minute actions. Where do I want to be in 10 years? What can I do in the next 5 minutes to contribute to that outcome?
- Getting to see to Hadestown a second time on Broadway before Andre Deshields left.
- Garbage time with the girls on the couch or in the car driving to dance or music lessons.
- Cape weekends with seafood boils, cheese balls on the beach, Cobie’s fried clam plates, chocolate soft serve, and friends that will order the entire appetizer menu.
- Ragnar weekend, even if it gets weird. And it always gets weird. And I always have issues. Still love it.
- Wawa pretzel deliveries and revisiting Boston College’s campus with the girls.
- More Puppy therapy.
- Making Rob go see Barbarian in the theater and his utter confusion to this day.
- Surviving the kitchen renovation.
- Taking the girls to Fenway for the first time.
- Getting somewhere I didn’t know I was going.
MIKE'S WINDOW
