2022: Year in Review
We had a great year! And this post is coming in pretty late (it’s already February 2023 LOL it’s December 2023!). This time around, I’m going to simplify this post as I didn’t create too many goals. I’ll just go through some stats and some projects we did.
So having 3 kids running around has really put a damper on my ability to write this year in review and focus on too many goals. It’s super fun, don’t get me wrong, but I’m pretty overwhelmed and simply don’t have much extra time beyond family and work. So this will be relatively brief and more of a list of highlights.
Family
- Life with 3 kids!
- Vacation & Europe adventure: 8 weeks away from home (6 in NL, 2 in Fire Island). Holy moly this was a huge
- Host 15 family dinners
Financial independence / peace of mind
- No goals
Personal
I had a few projects…
Digitize and organize all videos/tapes
This project aims to digitize all my raw footage on video tapes. It involves playing tapes from a camcorder and wiring that to a device that saves the videos as MP4 files onto an SD card. It has taken me multiple years now! But the end is in sight. I’ve digitized maybe 300+ tapes at this point. This year I digitized probably 150 tapes and have cleared out a few buckets of tapes such as all the raw footage for my Columbia Journalism masters project about wind energy. It has required me to actually buy old miniDV cameras from eBay that are other brands so that they could properly play. My Panasonic miniDV camera doesn’t play tapes recorded on JVC, Canon or Sony cameras that well (audible pops or weird glitches happen). One unexpected bonus from this project is that it has gotten me back onto eBay as a seller. I bought an old Canon miniDV camcorder on ebay, used it to digitize dozens of tapes and then re-listed it and made a $40 profit! I realized it’s not hard to list things and ship them and sold a few things around the apartment.
Get my own damn bike!
In January 2022, I got myself a Benno RemiDemi e-bike from Propel! The idea was to get something that was 95% for me, and 5% accommodating for my kids. So there’s a little cushion in the back but no handles, because most of the time I’m using it as my personal commuting bike. But it can also easily accommodate when situations when Jack (or my friends or coworkers or Maddy) needs to hop on the back as a passenger. It has transformed how I get around & virtually all my trips are done by bike. I added a bluetooth speaker and now when I ride I am very relaxed. No more yelling at drivers… er most of the time. I (sadly) stopped using Citibike and allowed my membership to expire after 7 glorious years. [I recently learned just how expensive an e-citibike ride is if you’re not a member: about $15 for a 30 min ride!] My Benno is an awesome bike that I put 1600 miles on this year.
- Clean out apartment
- Meet some new people in Amsterdam
This year’s activities by the numbers:
- 17 Classpass classes. Pretty sad number…
- 49 Citibike rides: I stopped using citibike when I got my Benno RemiDemi and even allowed my Citibike annual membership expire. 😥
- 41 runs (on Strava)
- 79 Peloton rides
Noteworthy
- The Mars Volta! I went to a TMV show with Drew (huge thanks to my manager Megan and her husband Charley who got me VIP tickets). After that show, I basically listened to TMV nonstop on my bike rides and I have the receipts to prove it. I was in the top 0.5% of TMV listeners on Spotify in 2022 :)
- Reported stats. Reported has been humming along with some pretty impressive 2022 stats
- Internet savings. I learned how to save a bunch of money on my internet bill and I wrote a blog post about it.
Stories about us:
- Streetfilms: Maddy was interviewed for Streetfilms about cargobiking!
- David Epstein included a fun little story about when he helped me edit video in journalism school:
- Kendra Hurley wrote a great story on cargo bikes in NYC for The New York Times! [But don’t read the comments — they are awful :) ]
Ok I kinda failed for this year. I wrote this much, never finished it, it was already Spring 2023, and now I’m writing our 2023 year in review and missed publishing this. So here it is, warts and all.
This didn’t even include much about our amazing trip to Berlin (2 weeks) and Amsterdam (4 weeks).
Here’s to 2023!
