2025 Year in Review

My story of 2025 doesn’t really begin in 2025, so I don’t think I can begin this year in review without talking about the previous year first.

Last year, in 2024, my wife turned 39, and we decided we wanted to at least try to have another kid, while we still could, before that door was permanently closed for us by the risks and realities of time.

We knew the odds weren’t exactly in our favor. We needed fertility treatment to have our first, and even back then (several years younger), it was a long and often heart-wrenching process. We knew this time around wouldn’t be easier.

And so we spent much of 2024 in all the slow-motion trauma of various fertility treatments. We were in and out of doctors’ offices. My wife was constantly giving herself painful injections of medications that showed up by the boxload, and when she couldn’t administer them herself, I had to. Side effects proliferated. She was rarely not in pain. Sometimes that’s why she was crying; sometimes it wasn’t.

There were tests and lab work followed by more tests and more lab work. Appointments with cheery nurses, followed by meetings with solemn doctors. Weeks of waiting, glimmers of hope, but all for nothing, eventually.

Yet another bad roll of the dice; yet another trip back to square one.

At the very beginning of all of it, we promised each other: we’ll be happy no matter what happens. If we’re able to have another kid, that’s wonderful, and we’ll welcome that baby into our lives with love and gratitude. But if not, we can be happy and grateful with the life and the family we already have.

We can’t lose, we said.

Towards the end of the year, however, we felt as though we had indeed lost—or at least, played a game where there was no winning.

We’d put ourselves through enough. We saw little to no reason to continue; no compelling hope worth torturing ourselves.

So we settled in, and in the final weeks of the year, we made peace with that closed door. We spent the holidays saying a melancholy goodbye to those possibilities, while enjoying our present life together, just the three of us.

We adjusted our vision of the future. And we were, in the end, happy with that, despite all the heartbreaks.

So that was the end of our 2024; giving up on that hope (and a number of others that most of us know and feel, and that we don’t need to get into here).

Then in January of this year, two important things happened.

First: Griff, our beloved dog of 13 years, passed away. I wrote about losing Griff back then. It was a dark time, and we still miss him painfully to this day. But we got through it, the three of us.

Once some time had passed, we adopted a new dog, who we called Milo. But to make a long story short, we weren’t the right home for him. Despite our best efforts, it was painfully obvious he was never remotely comfortable in our home.

It turns out, Milo needed other dogs, and that was a responsibility we just weren’t ready to take on. So we helped to find Milo a new home, with two other dogs, where he’s thriving. Our attempted adoption turned out to be just a three-month foster, but that’s ok.

2025 was definitely not our year, dog-wise. I think a new dog will probably find a home in our house and hearts again in the future. (Maybe even next year? We’ll see.)

In the meantime: at least we’ve got the three of us.

Then the second thing happened.

Miraculously, unexpectedly, unbelievably: we got pregnant all on our own (though we didn’t actually realize it until the world’s most cliché case of morning sickness appeared several weeks later, and I made multiple trips to the nearest CVS to make sure all the pregnancy tests were actually working right).

Suddenly and impossibly, after so many failed attempts to force that immovable boulder up the hill, it just teleported itself up there all on its own.

The idea was an adjustment, to say the least. Bizarrely, after spending the whole previous year trying in every possible way for the thing we were just suddenly and miraculously handed, it was…almost heartbreaking, somehow?

We’d just closed that door. We’d just made peace with never seeing the vision of the future that was now abruptly sitting right in front of us.

Was this actually good? Or just another tragedy waiting to happen?

We didn’t dare hope, at first. There are no guarantees even in the best of circumstances, let alone when you’re pregnant on your 40th birthday.

We live in a red state, where abortion is only legal for the first 22 weeks of pregnancy. We wondered: what happens if something goes wrong? Can my wife actually get the care she needs from doctors who might be afraid of overzealous right-wing lawyers, if the unthinkable happens after that initial 22 weeks?

I had a long, thorough article bookmarked, on how to talk doctors into providing your pregnant partner with care (or passing her off to doctors who will), and how to make sure they don’t let her die if complications arise. People who had been through it—and in many cases lost partners—shared all the things they wish they would’ve known. I read it multiple times. I made sure it was available on my phone. I even saved it as a PDF, in case I was in a hospital or an ambulance or a helicopter, and didn’t have wi-fi.

This goes without saying, but: nobody should ever have to do that.

But week after week went by. Bad things kept failing to happen. Milestones kept passing without incident. And soon, impossibility became casual reality: we’re going to have a baby by the end of this year.

Our baby girl, Delainey, arrived in mid October. It turns out I didn’t need that article after all—although my wife did endure several extra days of postpartum torture in a prison cell of a hospital room over preeclampsia concerns. It seemed quite obvious to me this was much more about the hospital covering its own ass legally than it was out of any sincere concern for her wellbeing, but in the fear of the moment, you don’t dare take a chance, no matter how awful things get. (And they did get awful.)

Thankfully, in the end, her blood pressure recovered. She’s healthy, and there were no other major issues with the birth.

And now the three of us is the four of us.

I’m fortunate to have been able to spend the final ten weeks or so of the year on paternity leave, supporting that family and spending time with my daughter in these early days of her life.

The days are long, but somehow never long enough.

Life with a newborn has been both easier than I remembered, and even more excruciating, all at once. I guess knowing what to expect helps, even when the reality somehow turns out to be even worse than you remembered.

The first few months of our son’s life were unquestionably the darkest in mine. I don’t know that my daughter’s newborn days quite compare, but I definitely won’t miss these nights, regardless.

As I write this, we’re about 10 weeks in—but we’re all healthy, which is all anyone can really hope for, I suppose. She’s brought her own challenges even beyond the usual newborn stuff (I’ll spare the details of baby physical therapy and minor oral surgery), but all is well now, and we’re on a good path. I’m sure there are some difficult days ahead, but it all seems manageable. Hopefully, we’ll be leaving the hardest parts of her first year in 2025.

As for my wife and I: we haven’t gotten up to much since that October day. In fact, we pretty much get in bed at 7pm now, which means we’re not watching much TV, and I’m not playing many video games or doing many side projects.

But here’s what I did get up to for the rest of the year, before our lives shut down temporarily.

Travel

It was a great year for traveling, as we tried to get some extra miles in before the baby arrived.

We took the opportunity to visit Tulsa over our son’s spring break, and had a great time exploring the impressive outdoor Gathering Place.

For my wife’s 40th, we decided to book an Airbnb just off Lake Michigan, and spent a wonderful week with some family friends there, on the beach, and exploring the nearby towns.

Over the 4th of July, we made our annual trip to Sewanee, Tennessee to visit family, and enjoyed staying in a gorgeous old home overlooking a scenic bluff in the mountains.

For work, I got to spend a week in Chicago, and one in Rotterdam. Neither trip involved a lot of touristy stuff, but I did get to catch a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, and had the opportunity to sightsee in Amsterdam, and ride bikes around Rotterdam, both of which were absolute delights.

Work life

As mentioned, I got to take two trips this year with Deno. Project-wise, I got to be part of the official rollout of the completely reworked, all-new Deno Deploy. The brand itself was a collaborative effort between myself and John Donmoyer, Deno’s (real) designer, but the logo itself—featuring the new hatching dino “DeeDee” character—is an original work I’m especially proud of.

I also got the chance to work on a partial rebuild of the Deno Docs site, and take on some very fun illustration and animation projects, on top of the normal web and product projects. (Some of them didn’t wrap up before I went on paternity leave, but I’m excited to pick back up where I left off once I return.) sdflkj

Family stuff

Aside from all the above, my son had a busy year, ending kindergarten and beginning first grade. He played basketball, baseball, and soccer. We went to Scouts camp. He got to see his first Royals game. He started riding a bike. He’s reading books on his own, playing games, and solving puzzles at well ahead of his age. (He can even do the easier Clues by Sam puzzles all on his own.) He’s endlessly energetic, and often hilarious.

On top of it all, he’s been an excellent big brother, and commonly a big help to his overwhelmed parents. I know all parents brag about their kids, but I’ve gotten a decent sample size of other kids his age now, and I’m here to tell you I’ve got an objectively exceptional one.

My wife and I had a challenging year, for lots of reasons, but that which did not kill us did indeed make us stronger. I feel really good about where we’re headed into 2026.

TV Shows

Again, a much shorter list than in some previous years (even before Delainey arrived, my wife regularly fell asleep immediately once the TV turned on when she was pregnant), but here’s the little bit we managed to squeeze in that wasn’t purely for background noise.

Abbott Elementary

Once our go-to background show, Abbott quickly became a beloved staple. My wife and I binged every episode in 2025. It’s hilarious, but it’s also on a level above traditional network TV sitcom fare in every other category. It makes you care about every character (even the ones you’re sure you hate).

Silo

Season 2 of Silo takes a while to get going, but it builds on the promise of season one and keeps escalating until the mind-blowing finale. One of my absolute favorite sci-fi/drama series of the last several years, and highly recommended for just about anyone.

Bad sisters

A dark comedy (at times very dark) that follows the misadventures of four Irish sisters who are determined to free their fifth sister from her abusive husband by killing him. JP, the husband in question, is quite possibly the most hate-worthy character in TV history, and so you can’t help but root for the sisters’ success. But the twist is: while we know from the beginning of the series that JP does indeed die in the end, we don’t know how, or which of the many plots the sisters spring might succeed.

Laid

Though it was cancelled after only one season, I highly enjoyed this (yet another) dark comedy about Ruby, a self-absorbed woman who carelessly flits between relationships, rarely even remembering the people she was with or realizing she hurt them. But one day, Ruby realizes every guy she’s ever been with is suddenly dying, as if by tragic curse, in the exact order she was with them.

Ruby and her best friend AJ (a true crime enthusiast played by Zosia Mamet) frantically try to figure out what caused this bizarre curse, and how to save the remaining men on Ruby’s list.

The dark humor makes for some hilarious moments, and there are some unexpectedly delightful cameos and twists in Ruby’s journey to become a better person. Too bad it ended too soon.

Severance season 2

Easily my favorite thing I watched in 2025. It’s an absolute masterpiece of a show and I almost don’t even care how things wrap up. It’s perfect, the cast is perfect, the tension is perfect, and more than anything else: the disturbing idea that we might all be better people if we had no idea who we were has haunted me ever since I watched it.

True crime docuseries

Scamanda

I’m a big fan of true crime documentaries where the crime in question is a scam, and few series have such a brazen con (or con artist) at their center as this one. I won’t ruin it by saying any more.

Betrayal

Betrayal focuses on somebody who turned out to be someone disturbingly different than their family believed. Season three, new this year, is one I found unforgettably disturbing.

Stalking Samantha: 13 Years of Terror

The horrifying story of a case of stalking that went on for 13 years and culminated in an unspeakable kidnapping.

Also watched (but didn’t like as much)

• Both seasons of 9 Perfect Strangers were fairly interesting, even if I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. (It’s basically a poor man’s White Lotus.)

• Paradise is kinda meh, honestly—it feels like a basic network drama that desperately wants to be a prestige show—but despite falling into some tropes, it at least takes some interesting swings, and the cast is great.

Games

A whole lot of my year was spent playing games of various kinds; video games (both solo and with my kid), tabletop games (mostly with family), and, of course, daily puzzle games. So I’ve broken this section down into those three main categories.

Video games

Incidentally: my Switch 2 is absolutely my favorite thing I bought this year. It far surpassed my expectations, and it’s so game-changing having upgraded graphics and performance, I probably could’ve contentedly played nothing but upgraded Switch 1 games for the rest of the year. (I usually play in handheld mode, using these grips, and travel with it using the included carry case.)

My favorite games of the year:

Shogun Showdown

In my mind, Shogun Showdown is pretty close to the perfect balance of minimalism and depth.

The game could be described as a turn-based strategy roguelike, with slight deck-building elements. But if that jargon means nothing to you: it’s really just a strategy game about anticipating your enemies’ moves.

Battles take place on a 2-D plane with a limited number of spaces. So you (and your foes) can only move and attack left or right.

Every turn, you get one action, and so does each enemy on the field: you can move; queue up an attack from your deck; unleash all the attacks in your queue; turn around; or use your character’s special ability (like swapping places with a nearby foe). The twist is: similarly to Slay the Spire and Into the Breach, you can see what move your enemies are about to make, and your action will always resolve first. So your success will come from using this foresight to dodge, preempt, or even redirect attacks and force your foes into damaging each other.

Between battles, of course, you can power up your deck, buy items, and choose which path to take to the next fight, until your run eventually ends either in defeat or at the final showdown with (who else?) the Shogun.

The core gameplay is extremely simple in the best possible way, but there’s enough depth and strategy involved to keep the game interesting for dozens of runs and beyond. Probably my personal pick for the most underrated game of 2025.

Boomerang Fu

This is a party game that I mostly bought to play with my 6-year-old, and boy did it pay off in that regard. It’s a frenetic but straightforward free-for-all, with highly customizable rules and simple controls that make it easy for anyone to pick up and play, while allowing seasoned gamers to have fun with it as well.

Blue Prince

One of the best puzzle games I’ve ever played, with a crazy premise that somehow works.

In Blue Prince, you assume the role of a boy whose eccentric uncle has bequeathed him a sprawling mansion full of mysteries—but only on the condition that he can find its hidden secret room.

There are 45 rooms in the mansion, aligned in a tight 5×9 grid. The twist is: every day, the rooms are different. Every time you open a door, you get a choice of three possible rooms that could be on the other side, each with their own benefits, costs, and exits further into the mansion.

The ostensible goal of the game is to find the hidden 46th room and gain entry, which may take you dozens of runs and many, many hours all on its own. But as with any good puzzle game, the mysteries are really only just beginning when you finally hit that first rewarding goal, and there’s a world of other secrets to uncover in this house, and to the story you piece together from photos and journal entries.

Mario Kart World

Like many people, I didn’t like Mario Kart World at first, but it grew on me over time. I think it was natural to expect it to be more like its predecessor, Mario Kart 8, but that game nailed the formula so well, I see now there was little point in setting out to make a repeat.

Instead, we get a gorgeous little world where you can still do three-lap races, if that’s what you like, but where the real appeal is Mad Max-style caravans across the widely varied terrain, 24 racers at a time jockeying for position as they race down the road. The Knockout Tour mode is the real star here, although free roam mode is a fun time-killer, too.

Silksong

Although Silksong might have been my most-played game of 2025, if I’m being honest, it’s one of the games I actually enjoyed the least.

The original Hollow Knight is easily one of my all-time favorite games, but Silksong doubled down on all the wrong parts of it, in my opinion. In fact, I came close to omitting this game from my list entirely, because so much of my experience with it was sheer frustration.

I don’t want to dwell too much on this one entry, but: games that don’t offer difficulty controls should be a thing of the past, IMO. I’m a dad. I get, at best, an hour or two for games in the evening, when I’m already tired. I don’t want to spend that entire window failing repeatedly at the same boss, or doing the same runback over and over.

Nonetheless, I grinded Silksong until I got the good ending, but that was much more compulsion than any sense of enjoyment or satisfaction.

I have to imagine I’ll start a new file at some point, and maybe I’ll appreciate Silksong a little more once I know what I’m in for, and bring some experience with me. (In fairness: I hated Hollow Knight at first, too.)

But in any case: I wish the game makers wouldn’t be so stubborn about making their way to enjoy the game the absolute only way, and would let us start where we’re comfortable and then, eventually, graduate to the “normal” difficulty once we’re ready.

(In my field, we refer to this as “accessibility.” The video game industry could use a bit more of it, in my opinion.)

Hades II

Although it stands as a lesson that adding more to a game is not the same as adding more to the experience, Hades 2 is still one of the standouts of the year for me. For both better and for worse, everything in the original is doubled here. This means there’s far more to do, and breathtakingly upgraded visuals, but it also means the game can feel like a grind at times.

Nonetheless, it was an absolute joy to rediscover the characters and settings from the original Hades, and get to know new faces and locations in that world. (Also: Skelly is probably my favorite character in any game this year.)

Ball X Pit

Barely more than a glorified iPhone game, yet one of my most-enjoyed games this year. I don’t know why it’s so fun bouncing a bunch balls off enemies to do damage. Maybe it’s how every ball is different, and they have effects like ice and lightning. Maybe it’s how you can upgrade those balls, and even combine them to get even more devastating bouncy forms. Maybe it’s the roguelike aspect, or the gradual upgrades that make you more powerful over time.

I don’t know. I just know it’s fun as hell and endlessly satisfying to play.

Balatro

I didn’t play anywhere nearly as much Balatro this year as I did last year, but I did manage to get to 100% completion this year (that’s the elusive Completionist++ achievement), and yes, I’m more proud of that than I should be.

Video games I replayed in 2025

• Breath of the Wild - Switch 2 Edition - After buying a Switch 2, I spent dozens and dozens of hours just enjoying how gorgeous Hyrule could be in 4k/60fps. In fact, I eventually did my first-ever 120-shrine run of the game, and I enjoyed virtually every minute of it, even more than my first time through. In fact, this might be my actual most-played game of the year.
• Metroid Dread - Like Super Metroid, Dread is becoming an annual tradition for me.
• Super Metroid and A Link to the Past - not only did I replay both of these all-time classics in their original form this year, but I played the randomizer version of each one, and did some runs on the combined randomizer (where you “warp” between the games, finding items for both, and try to eventually beat both). …Unless you’re from Nintendo legal, in which case: I made all this up as a joke.
• Metroid Prime Remastered - I didn’t know Prime 4 was coming out this year when I replayed Prime, but it worked out well. (Man, I played a lot of Metroid games this year. I didn’t start Prime 4 yet, though, because when I do play it, I want to be able to give it my full focus, and not try to cram it in to random 10–20 minute sessions as a baby allows.)
• Death’s Door - A great, tough little tough Zelda-like. I wish it ran better on Switch, but it was still fun to replay this adventure (and even get the good ending this time).
• Tunic - I probably did at least 3 or 4 runs of Tunic this year, including unlocking all the achievements. It’s a masterpiece in the Metroidbrainia genre.
• Astalon: Tears of the Earth - A highly underrated throwback to the 8-bit era that I enjoyed even more my second time through. You swap between three unique characters in this Metroidvania about scaling a tower of monsters, leveling them up and solving puzzles as you go. A hidden gem, in my mind.
• Super Mario 3D World - I’ve played this game plenty, but I took the time to 100% it this year, which I’d never done before. (Technically I’m not quite there; I still have to get every flagpole with every character, but eff that. I’ve done literally everything else.)

Tabletop games

• Skull - a deceptively minimalistic bidding and bluffing game that works for groups of just about any age. There are very few mechanics to work with here, which keeps the game simple.

  Each player has a hand of three flower cards, along with one skull card. Everyone chooses two of their cards, and places them face-down in front of them in a pile. Then, players can either add cards, or begin bidding on how many flower cards they think they can turn over—from their pile or anyone else’s—before hitting a skull. The twist is: if you win the bidding, you must turn over all your cards first, which means your bid is your bluff.

  It’s almost easier to play than it is to explain, but the cleverly approachable mechanics and strategy make this a fantastic ice breaker of a game with enough depth to keep it interesting for many rounds.

• Patchwork - a clever 2-player game that’s simple and easy enough for kids to play, but with enough depth of strategy and intricacy of mechanics for any age to enjoy. I can just as easily play this with my first-grader, my wife, who isn’t much for games, or my brother, who’s a strategic mastermind.

• Ice Cool 2 - a random game store find by my kid, this is a chaotically fun game about flicking weighted penguin tokens between rooms in a cardboard high school. (High school…Ice Cool…get it?)

  Each player is trying either to capture fish by whisking their penguin through doorways, or trying to catch the other penguins and send them back to class. There are cards that reward trick shots, and the fun of the game is largely in how unpredictably the tokens can move.

• Love Letter - still one of my absolute all-time favorites, with a perfect mix of luck and skill for short, accessible games.

• Forbidden Island - a cooperative game not unlike Pandemic (by the same creator, in fact), but a bit more simplified (and with a less trauma-inducing theme). Players try to collect treasure from a sinking island and escape together in time, using their unique character abilities.

• Sushi Go - it’s already in everyone’s collection for good reason. It’s a blast to draft cards to build the perfect sushi orders—or maybe, thwart the player next to you.

Daily puzzle games

• Clues by Sam - one of the few games I actually play every day, this tantalizingly tricky game of logic challenges you to deduce who’s innocent and who’s a criminal, with clues that trickle in as you successfully narrow down who’s who. It’s easily accessible on Mondays and gets harder throughout the week, so the weekends can feel nearly impossible at first. But figuring out how to combine all the clues to get the piece of info you need never stops being satisfying.
• Inkwell games - I’m particularly a fan of Stars (AKA Star Battle), a Sudoku-like puzzle
• Thinky Dailies - A completely different puzzle every day. Some days it might be like sudoku or picross; some days it might be a rebus or something entirely different. (Note: the puzzle you’re required to complete, as of writing, is much harder than the puzzles inside.)
• Connections - I like to try to get the purple category first. (I’m pretty good at it.)
• The NYT crossword - Though I’ve already moved on, for several months of 2025 I did the daily crossword faithfully, and even got pretty good at it. (I really like Sundays, or other days with tricky meta-puzzles to decode about the arrangement of the answers.)

Books

Reading is mostly an in-bed activity for me, so I don’t tend to get through too many books in a year, but I managed a few more than normal this year.

• The Ministry of Time - a genre mishmash that’s part romance novel, part sci-fi, and part historical fiction. The premise: the British discover time travel, but want to gauge its effects, so they save a bunch of people from various points in history who would’ve otherwise died (but who wouldn’t necessarily be missed if they were to disappear just before that moment), and rescue them by bringing them to the current day. Each rescuee is assigned a sort of live-in case worker called a “bridge” to monitor and guide them in the modern world, and the book mainly follows one particular pair, and the relationship that gradually develops between them.

  The premise is fascinating, even if the story was a little predictable at times, and I never got bored of seeing modern society from the vantage point of people “saved” from their own time in the past.

• This is How You Lose the Time War - another sci-fi/romance mishmash, this one about competing time-bending secret agents who form a bond over their isolated lives spent trying to change history to create the future.

• Just Keep Buying - if you’re not into financial advice books, you can skip this one.

• Cloud Atlas - One of my favorite books I’ve ever read, Cloud Atlas is essentially six stories in one. The gimmick is: you only read the first half of the first story, before that one ends abruptly, and you find yourself dropped without warning into the next—a seemingly unrelated story, not only decades in the future, but written in an entirely different genre.

  This dynamic repeats until you’ve read the first half of each of the six stories in the book (and spanned a few hundred years’ worth of both past and future). Then the sixth story ends, and you go backwards, finishing the fifth, fourth, and so on, until you finally conclude where you started, with a clear view of the thin thread that runs through all six stories.

  It’s not an easy read, as the premise suggests; you’ll be nearly halfway through the book before the format really begins to pay off (and by then you’ll be holding a lot in your head). But for intrepid readers willing to pay the price to make the journey, I found Cloud Atlas to be unforgettably satisfying.

• Signal Fires - a captivating family drama with tragically relatable characters, about two families that live across the street from one another, and the handful of life-changing events that intertwine them.

  I found the ending mildly unsatisfying, but the journey was mesmerizing enough for me to recommend anyway. This is a book that’s stayed with me.

• Children of Time and Children of Ruin - the Children of Time series starts with these two books, which I lovingly refer to as “Michael Crichton in space.”

  Humans in the future develop a turbo-evolution “virus” which they plan to unleash on a planet of apes, so that those apes can evolve into humans and have the planet ready when the original humans from Earth show up centuries into the future. But when disaster strikes and the apes don’t make it to the planet (but the evolution virus does), the humans arrive to find a hyper-evolved species of sophisticated, sentient arachnids instead.

  The narrative bounces between the refugees from Earth hoping to find a habitable planet, and the spiders and their culture, trying to understand the universe they’ve been awakened to, and the creators who made them.

  Both books are captivating, deeply scientific, thrilling, at times horrifying, but almost oddly optimistic in their finales.

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - At a high level, this is a story of two Jewish cousins in New York in the 1930s who set out to create a comic book, which eventually becomes wildly successful. But the story is told in vignettes of their lives, and the author is in no hurry on his path of exploration. The backdrop of the beginning of World War II adds added poignancy to these characters and their desperate motivations to do something to change their worlds.

Other stuff I liked this year

(Note: none of these links are referral links. I just included them for convenience.)

Kitchen stuff

• A good carbon steel pan - I have the OXO 10-inch carbon steel pan, which feels like the right size for an all-purpose pan.

  I started using a carbon steel pan as my go-to skillet this year, and I’ve been a fan. Cooking with carbon steel is similar to using cast iron, but carbon steel is much lighter, and smoother. (Previously, we were using ceramic nonstick, like the OurPlace Always pan, but we didn’t like how quickly they wore out for the price.)

• OXO herb keeper - I refer to this as our cilantro keeper, but whatever kind of herb you like will have its life extended significantly by this handy container that helps keep it both watered and properly aerated (not to mention stored simply and easily anywhere in the fridge).

Home and personal stuff

• Aura Frames - a great way to share photos with family, and to actually look at all those photos you’ve taken on your phone camera. With a frame that cycles through photos, you don’t need to feel like every shot needs to be perfect (as you might with a typical framed photo), and the sharing aspect makes it easy to send and receive photos from loved ones. Pretty much my whole family has these frames, and they were often a source of joy.
• Leesa Sapira hybrid mattress - my wife and I were due to replace our bed anyway when we slept on this mattress on vacation this summer. We absolutely loved how it felt—firm enough for me, soft enough for her, and with barely any bouncy shockwaves to disturb your partner. It’s admittedly spendy, but we’re at the age where good sleep is an investment in body and mind, so it’s worth the price.
• Yogasleep Dohm Nova - white noise machines are nice in any case, but especially when kids or house guests are involved. This little machine, that produces adjustable noise from an actual fan (so it doesn’t sound all digital, or have anys speaker to wear out over time), is delightfully simple and effective.
• Zelus weighted vest - I know it’s kind of a fad right now, but some days I don’t have time for any more exercise than a walk, and it’s nice to be able to use this vest to make that walk just a little bit more of a workout.
• Under-desk walking pad - although I don’t love the one I have (the Kingsmith Z1 foldable), I do love being able to walk during the workday. It’s more of a pain to set up and take down than I’d like, and the fold in the middle is more of a hindrance than a help for me. Still, I’m not sure if there are better options, and regardless: the benefit is worth the hassle.

Food

• Costco rotisserie chicken - Costco is my favorite store anyway, but this deliciously roasted chicken is one of my favorite repeated purchases of the year. I’ve used it to make chicken caesar salads; wraps of all kinds; tacos; chicken salad; curry; soups; sandwiches; greek bowls; and all kinds of other stuff. And again, it’s only $5, which is less than a package of lunch meat (and so if I don’t use it all, I don’t feel too bad about it).

• Aldi Rustic Italian Boule - Ever since we discovered this curiously named bread (it’s actually a five-ingredient sourdough, and I’m not at all sure what’s supposed to be Italian about it), it’s become the only bread we buy. It’s nicely soft and thick for sandwiches, but toasts up perfectly for toast or grilled cheese. Trust me: this is the bread you want.

Miscellaneous

• I didn’t do a lot of writing this year, but I’m particularly proud of this piece on AI from earlier this month.

• My favorite life hack from this year (if you’ll excuse the term): making grilled cheese in the air fryer. Works great for any hot sandwich, and heats the middle much better than a griddle. Just preheat your air fryer to 350°, and put the sandwich(es) in for about 3–5 minutes per side. Perfection.

• I love Bluesky. I’ve become more and more concerned about where its leadership might be taking it over time, but for now at least, it’s my home on the internet.

• The Flesh and Code podcast, which is all about people who have relationships with AI companions. It starts slow (and predictably), but it goes to some wildly unexpected places. It’s an eye-opening, intimate look into many people’s personal lives, and I definitely came away with an entirely new perspective.

Cheers to 2026, friends.