100 things that made my year (2025)

Hey y’all,

Here’s my annual list of 100 things that made my year:

1. Walking cookies to friends on New Year’s Day.

2. Accepting the sad fact that my nervous system can only handle one cup of coffee a day. Drinking lots of herbal tea instead. Peppermint. Trader Joe’s Harvest Blend. A cup cap accessory for my Yeti Rambler that turns it into a thermos like workers take to construction sites.

3. Having tweens! One of them now a teen! 6-7!

4. Taking the boys to see the movies they love at the Village Alamo Drafthouse. Sonic The Hedgehog 3. A Minecraft Movie. FNAF 2.

5. Pizza and a movie every Friday night. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Mousehunt. Freaky Friday. The Adventures of Tintin. The Wild Robot. Flow. Harry and The Hendersons. KPop Demon Hunters. Napoleon Dynamite. (The kids still shout, “Make yourself a danged quesadilla!”) Rango. The Gold Rush. Good Burger. Young Frankenstein. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Addams Family Values. Galaxy Quest.

6. Building fires in our fireplace. Chopping kindling. Dipping into The Book of Building Fires and experimenting with the top-down method.

7. Riding bikes with Marty.

8. Making mixtapes to listen to in the studio. Sharing a mixtape, then getting a comment from a young man who said he didn’t understand what a mixtape was or how you make one. Recording an explanatory video for him that made me feel a million years old. Splurging on a brand-new Tascam cassette deck. Rob Sheffield’s memoir Love is a Mix Tape. (“There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one.”)

9. Texting old photos to college pals on a Friday night.

10. Spaghetti every Monday night. Making a “Red Sauce” mix for Meghan to play while she’s making the meatballs. Discovering the Ultra-Lounge series of compilation CDs.

11. Mixing gin martinis with three olives.

12. Getting through winter with soup and heat. Soup lessons. Seeing The Soup Peddler sign with an elegant edit of something I wrote: “Soup teaches us some things get better tomorrow.”

13. Flowers on the kitchen table. The way Meg buys bouquets and deconstructs them into mini-bouquets.

14. Keeping the calendar clear to write. (“Open the document, stay in the document.”)

15. How often the spiritual problems of a piece of writing are connected to its technical problems, and how often a fix to