Matt Gray A friend of mine, Matt Gray passed away recently. I worked with him for almost 10 years at Clockwork. I have heard many people say that Matt was one of the smartest, kindest, and thoughtful people they knew. I can vouch for all of that. I learned a lot from Matt. We were basically the same age but for whatever reason he was way ahead of me, when it came to a lot of “professional” skills.

This year we’re taking a break from making a Christmas playlist… if ever there was a year to break the norm, amiright?! We fully intend to pick back up this annual tradition in the future but we’ve made 10 playlists with almost 11 hours of Christmas music. So this year, we’ve done our best to put them all together so you can listen all of it (or at least as much as your preferred music streaming service has licensed).

2020 Family Pictures We don’t post much on social media, for a whole lot of reasons, but we do take a lot of pictures. And, well, 2020 sure is a year to remember! Hahaha… sigh. And despite setting aside a lot of plans, ideals, and normals, all the silver linings and graces of this year are not lost on us. We’re grateful for the ways pandemic days, an unplanned 2.5 months without daycare, and all the time we’ve gotten around home/in our neighborhood have deepened our family rhythms.

Do we promise that all these movies are good? Nope. There’s a bunch we haven’t seen yet… plus you need to bear in mind that our three year old is the litmus for whether a movie makes the cut or not. BUT we made this list for ourselves this year, so we figured we’d share in case an extra movie or two makes sense within your December family rhythms, too. And anything we should add to our list?

I managed to read 1 more book in 2019 than I did in 2018 and I didn’t wait until May to write about them. I feel pretty good about that. But one book different is basically the margin of error with book you start in 1 year and end is the second. It’s interesting look at my GoodReads “My Year in Books”. They give a page count (which is a little strange given I usually listen to audio book, but it’s probably roughly accurate).

Here is the 10th Christmas playlist. I made the first one by myself. Erin’s helped me with all the rest. And I’ll share a few photos from the year while I’m at it. This year’s CD felt like a bit more of a struggle. We could not find a lot of good Christmas music that came out this year. So we ended up turning to some older songs. My original goal was to make 10 Christmas playlists.

This post is a lot later than I would have liked, but I’ve held off writing it until I had a chance to finish migrating my blog to a new platform (more on that later). I’m glad I can do it now, on the new setup. 2018 was a slightly lighter year for books, only 19. Goodreads now has a feature where you can see your “Stats”. It’s pretty cool. Looks like my best year (since I started keeping track around about 2011 was 2013 with a whopping 30 books.

The 8th Christmas playlist is also the biggest, clocking in at 77 minutes. Why so much music, you ask? Well, we (mostly Erin) found a lot of good raw material this year. Several of the albums that showed up on this years playlist will probably show up again on future playlists. We realize that CD players are things that most people only have in their cars now a days and we want people to be able to enjoy this music however is convenient.

I finished 25 books in 2017. Not bad. I got the number up from last year but I think it’s mostly because I read lots of “fun” books. Lots of fantasy. Another factor is that now with 2 children I have less time for things like movies and TV shows, audiobooks and podcasts are what I have time and energy for these days. Non-Fiction Politics: The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith it great.