So, I made a decision, on New Year’s morning, to take at least one picture every day in 2025, and then I proceeded to spend the rest of the day not taking any pictures or videos. And it’s not like I didn’t have things to take pictures of either. We drove down to Redondo Beach that day to stay for the rest of the week. It was an absolutely beautiful, perfectly clear, sunny winter day at the beach. I should have taken loads of pictures, but I didn’t take a single one all day long. In fact, I didn’t take any pictures until the sun went down, which may have been exactly the catalyst I needed to make this exercise work.

One of the things I learned over the course of the last year is that if the goal is to take a picture every day and write at least a short blurb about it, something can be found to take a picture of every day. It was easy on days when I was doing something exciting or interesting, but some days, on the other hand, just don’t need to be documented.

There have been days when I haven’t done anything noteworthy, but because of the daily blog, I forced myself to find something to take a picture of. Some of those days, I’m quite proud of what I was able to come up with, but most of them would have been better off forgotten. The hardest days were when I sat at my computer from the time I got up in the morning until I went to bed at night. Sure, I could have posted a selfie at my computer on those days, but had I done that, the majority of this blog would have been selfies of me at my computer, so I had to get inventive. 

Now that this challenge is over, however, I will not be so inventive because this experiment reaffirmed what I already knew: quality is better than quantity. I would rather scroll through my camera roll or this blog and see great pictures with weeks or months gaps between them than see daily slop posts. Plus, posting every day kept me from publishing posts I really wanted to post because I didn’t have time to focus on more than one post per day. Most days, anyway. 

I don’t know exactly what was going through my mind one year ago, but this wasn’t the only daily challenge I gave myself. I think I was trying to cultivate a strict routine or looking for comfort in predictability. In addition to the daily picture and blog post, I also listened to a song every day in 2025 in an attempt to be the #1 listener on Spotify, but I came up short. I ended up being #2,686. Not even close. There were other things, too. I’ve been keeping a daily journal since 2020, I check into my city every morning on Swarm, I record the time the sun sets and rises every day, and I give my mother-in-law her pills at 10 a.m. and 10 p.m., seven days a week. 

I think I went overboard on my daily habits, though. By mid-August, I was starting to feel burned out by it all. When Spotify dropped my Wrapped at the beginning of December, I was so relieved to finally be free of that stupid song. It felt like a weight had been lifted, and I began looking forward to the end of the month, today to be precise, when I could end this stupid daily blog post challenge. A few days before Christmas, I forgot to check into my city on Swarm. I had been using Swarm since 2012, checking in everywhere I go, but when I blew a 196-day streak, I said, “Fuck it,” and I stopped checking in anywhere. I almost never leave the house during the week, and on the weekend, I only ever go to the same three or four stores, so checking in at the same places had become a depressing bore. 

So, beginning tomorrow, I’ll have one less daily task to do, and as a new year begins, I will not be creating any new challenges for myself. Instead, I will focus only on quality projects that I care about, and I will execute them to the best of my ability. If I end up with gaps in my camera roll, so be it. Every day doesn’t need to be remembered, and most are forgettable. That’s what makes the memorable ones so special.

Still, I’m glad I did this. I started a year-long challenge, and saw it through to the very end. It may have been totally pointless, profitless, and a complete waste of time, but I feel like I accomplished something nonetheless.

Happy New Year!

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Then, last week, the wind blew hard enough to knock over all of our very full trash cans, which has never happened before, and then this morning, the wind blew hard enough to toss a cast-aluminum patio table. Granted, it had a collapsed umbrella sticking out of the middle of it, but it always has had a collapsed umbrella sticking out of the middle of it whenever the wind has blown before, and it always stood its ground. The weather sure seems to be getting wild.

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As I’ve grown older and more curmudgeonly, I dislike receiving gifts more and more. It started back when Bonnie and I first met. Her family would get together at least once a month to celebrate whatever birthdays or holidays fell in that month. At Christmas and my birthday, her sister and sisters-in-law would give me some of the most garbage presents you can imagine. They were almost offensive.

I know I sound ungrateful because it’s supposed to be the thought that counts, but no thought was put into these gifts. They were mostly toys, but not even cool toys; they were dollar store toys. I asked Bonnie why they were always giving me toys, so she asked. They said it was because whenever we would go over to their houses, I would play with their kids’ toys. I wouldn’t characterize it as that, exactly.

When I would go to their houses, I would sit down on the sofa, instantly get bored with whatever Bonnie and her sister or sisters-in-law were talking about, and entertain myself by picking up the nearest object, which happened to be toys because they were always lying all over the place. To somehow construe that as being some sort of toy aficionado is tantamount to assuming that someone who owns a lot of cars enjoys spending time at the DMV.

The final straw was when my sister-in-law gave me a jar of pickled onions for my birthday. From that point on, I took the stance that if you’re only giving a gift because you feel obligated to do so, then just don’t give a gift.

We just can’t help ourselves, though, can we? Birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Chanukkah; the gifts never stop coming. They hook us when we’re young. Here you go, little one, the first one’s free. Then we spend the rest of our lives chasing the dragon.

About a month ago, when Bonnie was dragging out the Christmas tree, and I was grumbling as I do every year, she said, “Why do you hate Christmas?” “It’s not that I hate Christmas,” I explained, “It’s just that no Christmas will ever be as good as 1985, so why do we even bother?”

1985 was the gold standard of Christmases as far as I’m concerned, and the crazy thing is, it wasn’t even about the presents. In fact, I can’t tell you what I got for Christmas that year. I just remember it was the best Christmas party we ever had, I got to hang out with my friends and family, the vibes were on point, and I probably got a lot of cool shit the next morning.

The point is, Christmas 1985 felt so good that I spent the next several decades trying to recapture the way I felt that year, but it’s gone, and it’s never coming back. Then, I had kids and thought maybe, if I did everything that we used to do at Christmas time, I might get that feeling back, but it seemed like the more I tried, the further it slipped away.

So, this Christmas, I didn’t try. Bonnie and I agreed not to get each other anything, and she handled the gifts for our kids, so all I did on Christmas morning was show up. While I sat there, watching them open their presents, I had a thought that had never occurred to me before. Even if I could never feel as good as I did at Christmas when I was seven years old, I’ve still felt good at Christmas in the years since, and it’s always been for the same reason: Anticipation.

The years when I’ve gotten Bonnie or the kids something really special, something I know they’re really going to love, the anticipation and excitement of buying the gift, hiding it, wrapping it, putting it under the tree, and then watching them open it, is the same feeling as the build-up to Christmas morning when I was a kid. I missed that this year.

My cynical take is that hooking kids on Christmas when they’re babies is just a grand capitalist conspiracy to keep the engines of finance thoroughly lubricated. But maybe it’s not so sinister. Maybe, like everything else about parenting, it’s about the reversal of roles; the give-and-take. We give our children presents because we remember how much fun it was to open presents on Christmas morning, but then we discover that it feels even better to see the look of joy on their precious little faces. And so the cycle continues.

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So, while watching Christmas Vacation – or rather National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation as it is officially titled so I have to scroll all the way down to the “Ns” to watch it every year – Bonnie said, “And that’s where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came from,” as the sewer glowed green from Eddie’s chemical toilet.

I thought back to 1989 when the movie was released and wondered if I was aware of the turtles at that time, but I don’t think they were on my radar until the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie came out the following year.

A few minutes later, she commented with a tinge of disgust in her voice that Clark had made plans to install a pool without involving his wife in any way. I pointed out that just 15 years before the movie was made, women couldn’t open a bank account without a man co-signing for her. 15 years! Our kids have been alive for longer than the time between the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Christmas Vacation.

Who, in 1974 could have imagined how different the world would be in 1989, let alone 2025. It got me thinking, though, about what else I’ve seen and experienced since then that I had no idea was coming down the pike. I couldn’t have imagined, in 1989, that anyone would make a funnier Christmas movie than Christmas Vacation, but they have since.

While we were watching Home Alone, Bonnie incredulously commented on the likelihood of the family making their flight, and I reminded her that it was pre-9/11 and air travel was unimaginably easier back then. When I saw Home Alone for the first time, I never could have imagined how much the world would change in the following decade.

What “before time” are we living in right now? What’s going to happen in my lifetime that I will look back, nostalgically at 2025 and think, that was before _______________ happened. 2019 was pre_COVID, 2007 was pre-recesssion, and 2000, 1994, and 1986 all mark the years prior to major life or world changing events, but no one knew it at the time. Well, maybe some people did, but I’m not getting into conspiracy theories here.

Even though I personally feel like I’m currently in the nadir of my life, I suppose I should enjoy and appreciate this time of relative peace and calm before it becomes the next “before time” because as history has shown me time and time again, the before time can shift into the next crisis overnight and without warning. Merry Christmas!

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Our annual Christmas party gave way to the split-Christmas. One with my mom and one with my dad. Eventually, I would find my biological family, get married, and end up going to six different Christmases. I put an end to all that after my son was born. Fuck all y’all! You want to see me for Christmas? You come to me.

As Bonnie and I started our life together and began cultivating traditions with our own family, Christmas shifted from the 24th to the 25th. Yeah, I know Christmas is on the 25th. What I mean is that we would do all of the Christmas stuff on Christmas Day instead of Christmas Eve. It always felt weird to me.

Christmas Eve is filled with the same anticipation that Halloween, a birthday, or a trip to Disneyland is. It’s like setting off firecrackers: the fun is in the buildup to lighting it. Celebrating a birthday the day after isn’t the same as doing it on the big day.

So, this year, I decided we should eat Christmas Dinner tonight instead of tomorrow, in part because I want to get back to celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve, and in part because I didn’t want Bonnie to spend the whole day cooking as she has every year for as long as I can remember.

I smoked a tri-tip and made potatoes au gratin. I meant to make green beans too, but I forgot about them. It wasn’t anything close to Christmas when I was a kid, but it was nice, and now we can all just chill tomorrow. Merry Christmas!

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So, a week after he came back and installed the cover, it popped off the wall with such force that I heard it from the next room. I can be sure, but I think what happened was that because there was so much moisture in the wall, and it was 85º outside that day, and the sun shone on the stucco all afternoon, the water vapor built up too much pressure inside the wall, and blew the seal around the cover.

I took the cover off, and for the past few days, we’ve let a space heater run in the bathroom with the door closed and the fart fan on. About 2/3 to 3/4 of the bathroom is tile, so it slowly soaks up the heat. By the time the sun goes down, it feels like we left a window to hell open in there. I must say, though, it’s kind of nice to have a shit and a sphitz. Brushing my teeth with hot toothpaste, on the other hand, is extremely unpleasant.

In the plus column, however, when we shut off the space heater at night, it radiates the heat back into the air, keeping the bathroom nice and warm for us when we wake up in the morning. I might just keep it in there all winter long.

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