Hey guys, it's my favorite post of the year. The best of, looking back at 365 days and only remembering the good parts. Ha!
2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014
2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014
2019 was really okay. I went into it with some resolutions to take action and read a lot of books, and I think we did that. We also drank a lot of tequila, put some miles on the VW chasing beach sunsets, and basically just stumbled around trying to find our way. It was a good year.
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1 || Home
In our actual home, we refinished our wood floors and stained the house and that was cool, but by "home" I mean northwestern Michigan. Duke and I did a lot of exploring and just hopping in the car to see weird things like the Rubber Ducky Festival in Bellaire, or driving for an hour and a half to see the sun go down while the bridge went up in Charlevoix. We zipped over to an island where you can't dock your boat. We hopped over to Arcadia to try the ice cream and scooted over to Empire to climb the bluffs.
2 || But we loved our home most of all.
3 || Duke B.
I think I say this every year, but Duke grew up a ton. I think this was the year he went from being a baby to a kid and I'm not going to lie. The kid part is a hell of a lot easier.
I've taken this picture on Labor Day every year since 2016, when I was a million months pregnant with my fingers crossed that "labor day" meant something more. It didn't. You can see the others here.
And here's another picture I kept taking this year. I thought it would be an interesting way to see how much Duke grew in a year, and I took that first picture in January. The other one was a few weeks ago. I plan to keep taking it until he has to lift me up.
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4 || On to our next series: Duke Riding on Things, 2019:
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5 || As for me, I drank a lot, read a lot, and snacked a lot. Wash, rinse, repeat.
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6 || Ice Cream Tour
Oh, we also ice cream toured. Which is a fancy way of pretending that you're getting ice cream with a purpose. We bopped all over the place and Arcadia's Banana Pudding ice cream lives in a very special place in my memory forever after.
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Other good stuff. The year was made up of so many small things, like a good hot summer and a pier to jump off of. And pizza with anchovies on it, eating it while watching the sunset at the Elberta overlook. A weekly farmers market and the nice lady that sells monster sized brownies. Family that moved here, friends that visited, and so many cocktails cheers-ed while the sun went down.
The cheese-balliest Christmas card of all time. This might be my favorite.
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Can you believe a decade wraps up today? At the beginning of the decade, we'd only been together for a few years, I was still waiting tables at Applebees and we lived with our two dogs in a 600 sq ft house on a little street called H Drive. And things were pretty cool, but a lot of really neat stuff has happened in 10 years. I graduated from college. Ryan and I got married. We lost a dog, and gained two more. We had a baby, bought a house, cycled through a few jobs, and made it out okay.
We've definitely aged, but I'm chalking that up to the latter half of the decade when we had a baby and pretty much quit sleeping.
Happy New Year, you guys. Let's get rich this year, move to Hawaii to drink pina coladas out of coconuts and confidently wear swim suits every day. If that seems unrealistic, let's just drink more mimosas and sleep in a lot this year.
