2023 Year In Review
This post is going to be a bit simpler in format. I’m going to just go through highlights! (Also, oopsies on posting this 9 months late…but whatever)
Maddy Turned 40 (and got a bike)
This was a big birthday and to commemorate it, I spent about 2 straight months contacting all of her followers on instagram along with all her friends and family for a Tribute video. So many people recorded such lovely videos and the final result had a few hundred people! Tribute
She was also gifted a Riese & Muller Load 60 from the company. It’s good to be an influencer.
Jack got rated above a 600 in chess
Jack has been regularly going to chess tournaments and practicing and loving the game. His efforts have really taken off and we’re so proud that he was able to achieve a rating over 600 which landed him in the “Novice” section. Rating
And, not super related, but since he’s in 5th grade already (omg), we did middle school tours (omg!) for 6th grade and applied to a bunch.
Spring Break Mexico City
We spent 9 days in Mexico City in the Spring and had a lovely time. Our good friends Danna and Enrique even joined us for a few of the days. We ate awesome food, even biked around using the city’s bike share, and overall got to explore and enjoy the beautiful city.
Cargo Bike Momma Highlights
Since Maddy’s Instagram account is now such a big part of our life, let’s celebrate some highlights!
Press
Here’s just a few pieces she (and sometimes I!) was featured in:
- Momentum Magazine, How to keep your kids warm (also Momentum)
- Soulbase Magazine
- Ride This Out (Podcast)
- Riese & Muller Magazine
- Cosmic Playdate
- Bike Portland
- Streetsblog: Meet the E-Bike Using New Yorkers — Normal People Who Want Politicians to Stop Demonizing Them
Renting our bike
One of our big goals this year was to experiment a bit with renting out our cargo bikes. Maddy would get a lot of inbound requests from people asking where to rent and there wasn’t any place to point them. So we whipped up a little survey and decided to offer our own bikes for rent. We rented out our Urban Arrow to 4 different families (from Miami, London, Seattle, Chicago), got to meet them and gave them a pretty awesome and unique opportunity to experience NYC by bike with young kids.
Projects
Maddy’s side hustle has really taken off! She landed a bunch of deals this year including from Prolids, GoFluo,
Our 2023 Travel Adventures
Our summer trip this year was pretty epic and we upped the ante from last year (where we went to Berlin and Amsterdam). We packed a single suitcase for all 5 of us (!), and went to Paris (6 days), Antibes (Cannes, Nice) (2 weeks), Barcelona (2 weeks), Ibiza (Formentera) (2 weeks), Amsterdam (Haarlem, Antwerp, Efteling) (2 weeks). We had way too many moments to even capture here but we got bikes in every city, met amazing and welcoming people everywhere and explored a lot. We took Easy Jet and Ryan Air too.
Before this we also went to Mexico City for Spring Break — call it a trial run to test out the “1 luggage for 5 people” plan. That was an absolute blast. Main takeaway: Mexico City has a ton of bike infrastructure, and appears to be doing way more than NYC in far less time and with far less money.
My bike was stolen
A bit of bad news. My Benno RemiDemi was stolen — lock was clipped in broad daylight on a workday — off the bike rack outside my work. I posted this to Reddit. I filed a police report (they were friendly, there’s a detective on the case), an insurance claim (State Farm to the rescue, paid the replacement value of the bike in a day!), met Phillip via Reddit who said he saw my bike locked normally at 3:15pm, which narrowed down the time frame. I also talked to some of the building supers who helped me get the surveillance footage.
Renting out our Urban Arrow
We know there’s a lot of interest from people in the cargo bike community around the world who really want to be able to visit NYC and cargo bike around the city with their children. Yet there are no places to rent proper cargo bikes. Maddy got some inbound requests here and there, as well as via the Facebook group, and so we decided to try renting out our Urban Arrow. So far we’ve done 4 rentals and with the one exception (due to our bike failing spectacularly — electronics, flat tire, brakes failed) they were all really great.
Digitizing my video tapes
The multi-year project continues to digitize my old 8mm camcorder tapes and other media memories I can’t digitize myself. I sent 30 tapes off to Legacy.com, a cool company that digitizes anything for you. It cost a few hundred dollars, something like $15/tape on average, which does sound like a lot, but it alleviated a lot of stress for me.
Home
Furnishing and Home projects
During the summer, we have some downtime to map out a big list of projects to do at home and this year was no different.
- Completely redo our bedroom. Maddy did most of the work here, re-arranging the bed, getting new side-tables, a new dresser, lamps, art, even replacing the ceiling fan with a clear one (!), the works. It’s a brand new room and really came together!
- Fix up a bunch of stuff around the apartment. We had been putting off a few projects that required our contractor to come back and patch things on the walls and do a bunch of general tasks.
New products #consumerism
Here are some of the things we bought this year:
- Waterpik: Dentists were telling us to get this and we finally did and while I was initially skeptical (seems overkill when floss will do) I was totally wrong. This thing is really fun and easy to use, much quicker to reach for than the floss and very satisfying.
- Samsung “The Frame” TV: After 15 years with our trusty BenQ 720P projector, we finally decided to get a flat TV and put it on the wall. Over the year, a bunch of our home exchanges had this particular TV so we got familiar with it — when it’s off, it can show artwork, so it’s not just a black box. This was a really nice improvement and now we can watch movies and shows without dimming the lights and shades.
