2025 Notes

Some things I enjoyed this year:

  1. Family trips. My kids are 7 and 3 and bring me so much joy. This year we traveled more with them than previous years: Death Valley, Los Angeles, Helsinki, Toronto, Newfoundland. It was really amazing to see them hit the ground running in new, unfamiliar places. And then to see what parts of the trip really stuck with them and what led to them to be curious and learn more about the places they saw.
  2. Watching the night sky. I grew up in a place where on clear summer nights, the sky was an explosion of stars. Where I live now is about as bad as it gets and so when we do find ourselves in a place where the stars are visible at night, I try to take some time to sit outside and just look up. We bought our kids a book on constellations and had some great star gazing sessions in upstate New York and on our trip to Death Valley. And I managed a visit to the Lowell Observatory while in Flagstaff on a work trip and got to see Jupiter and its moons as well as a close-up of the moon. Seeing a nearly full moon through a telescope, clear enough to see the contours of its craters, was unexpectedly breathtaking.
  3. Work. It’ll be three years for me at Navattic in May and I couldn’t have asked for a better gig. Everyone on the engineering team is amazing. The best sales and CS teams I’ve ever worked with. Great customer logos, steady growth, and tons of interesting problems to tackle. It’s the perfect fit for me right now.
  4. The New York Philharmonic. I saw two shows this year and both were incredible. Dudamel conducting Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé in the spring and the family Christmas show a couple of weeks ago. Dudamel has such an incredible stage presence. Looking forward to hopefully seeing more in 2026.
  5. The Pitt. I don’t watch much TV but Tara and I got hooked on this show. It’s an understatement to say it’s not an easy watch but life-affirming in the same way that Six Feet Under was for me two decades ago.
  6. Marty Supreme: My favorite movie that came out this year. A director swinging for the fences making a movie about going for it. With a great performance by an actor who’s been swinging for the fences for a while now and finally gets a role that embodies that. You can just do cool shit.
  7. About Dry Grasses: my favorite movie that didn’t come out this year. I have a hard time articulating why I liked this movie so much. It is visually beautiful (I did not know that parts of Turkey resemble Newfoundland, especially in the winter). The character is the polar opposite of Marty Hauser though, but I still loved to hear him talk about life.
  8. On The Calculation of Volume I-III: My favorite books of the year. I love how hypnotic the prose is and how descriptive the main character’s diary entries are about the world around her. Knausgaard-esque in the descriptions of the mundanity of life. And that’s before we even get to the interesting philosophical questions that Tara’s predicament presents. Like to what do we owe our loved ones for whom time and circumstances have pulled us apart.
  9. The Blue Jays