I feel a tremendous amount of pressure this year to fully capture what it was like to live through 2020. It’s an understatement to say that it was unlike any other year, because how could it be. And so throughout this recap of my 2020, not only do I want to highlight all of the joy, surprise, and growth but I also want to remember what it felt like when the entire world shut down, and we sat at ground zero of a global pandemic. The uncertainty, fear, pain, and the confusion of what the “new normal” would become. And so this recap will be both familiar and also very different from years past.

It’s hard to even go back to the beginning of 2020, it feels like a different life now, alien to anything that life has become. Jake and Kayla had just left after seeing 2020 rung in from Time Square and Jenn and I had an incredible meal at Portale and seeing Moulin Rogue on Broadway. Everything started pretty much how 2019 had ended. We lived the life that we had always dreamed of. Living in the big city, working incredibly hard, enjoying delicious meals, and going out to cultural events like the theater and museums as often as we could do so.

We had planned a beautiful winter trip to Lake Louise in Canada for the MLK holiday weekend. A four-night jaunt to the Canadian Rockies to enjoy the winter wonderland and a break from the city. Unfortunately, Frasier got incredibly sick a few days before we were set to leave, to the point where we had to rush him to the emergency room to make sure he didn’t ingest anything poisonous. We ended up canceling our trip to Canada. After several trips to the doctor, Frasier did end up fully recovering, but we were glad we stayed home. And because we didn’t go to Canada we were able to welcome in our first niece, Gracelyn Elizabeth Nordbeck who was born on January 16th, 2020, at the exact time we were supposed to be flying to Canada. I can’t imagine how I would have felt to be disconnected from everyone while I knew Amy was in labor. I was grateful to be able to FaceTime and meet our beautiful niece and congratulate the new parents. It’s a moment that I’ll never forget.

Much of the rest of January and early February continued as normal. Jenn and I went to our first opera at The Met, Porgy & Bess. I fell in love with the opera in Vienna when we saw Carmen, and have been dying to get back to one. We got dressed up and absolutely devoured the opera even after a full day of work. It’s a memory that I held onto tightly throughout 2020 and is something I long to get back to.

Jenn and I had planned to come out to California a few weeks after Gracelyn was born. Unfortunately, Jenn had a massive project at work and knew she wasn’t going to be able to make it so we canceled her flight and that left just me coming out. This was just around the time that the word “Coronavirus” or “COVID-19” was starting to make more news in the United States. I’ll never forget texting Amy & Ryan making sure they were still OK with me coming out to meet Gracelyn with this new virus, and they thought I was crazy. At work, we had just started to limit and cancel international travel. So without much other thought, I boarded a plane to LAX (after an 8+ hour flight with a medical emergency landing in Denver) and met my beautiful niece. Jenn stayed back and made a killer presentation at work and spent the weekend with her Dad while I spent it with Jake, Amy, Ryan, Gracelyn, and my parents.

Looking back it’s almost surreal how easily we brushed off COVID then and traveled. A few days after I returned back from my visit to California, Jake came back to NYC to visit Jenn and I. We had an absolutely incredible long weekend with amazing meals at La Salle Dumpling House, Kilo, Rezdora, The Penrose, Momofuku Noodle Bar, The Aviary, and Le Coucou. We had front row tickets to watch The Book of Mormon (Jenn and my second time) which was amazing. It was such a great visit and highlights some of our favorite things to do in the city. I don’t think we ever once in his entire visit mentioned the word COVID-19 or coronavirus.

A week after Jake departed we celebrated Frasier’s 1st birthday with a few long walks, a trip to do the dog park, and new toys. I still cannot believe how quickly Frasier has grown up and become a part of our family. I’ll talk about this more throughout the year but the way in which Frasier has permanently changed and improved our lives was inconceivable to me before we got him. Seeing his smiling face in these pictures of our long walks on his birthday brings me so much joy and peace.

One of my biggest regrets for our first two years in New York City was not taking more weekend trips to nearby cities. We finally started to rectify that at the end of February when Jenn and I took what we thought would be the first of many (we mapped out several for 2020) weekend trips to Philadelphia. Growing up idolizing Rocky Balboa I had dreamed for years to run up the steps in Philadelphia and see the Rocky statue. After dropping off Frasier and driving to Philadelphia in our rental car we did exactly that. We spent two days roaming the city, enjoying great meals, museums, and historical landmarks. We had beautiful weather and it was incredibly refreshing to be somewhere new and to travel again. Little did we know that this would be the one and only trip we’d take in 2020.

When March arrived so to did COVID-19. The first weekend in March would be our last normal one of 2020. It was during that week/weekend Jenn unknowing at the time jam-packed three broadway shows in three nights, two with me and one with a friend from work. She went to see the opening night of Girl from North County on Thursday and then A Soldier’s Play on Friday and Dear Evan Hansen on Saturday. Although COVID-19 was being talked about now every day nothing had really changed in the city yet. We went and had burgers before A Soldier’s Play and ramen after Dear Evan Hansen.

But then a few days later COIVD-19 hit, and everything changed rapidly. Rather than re-write what I wrote in March let me just paste in what I said in my March recap from this year:

“My last official day in the office was March 11th although much of my team and colleagues began working from home a week prior. I’ll never forget my last day at work. I remember getting a coffee in an almost abandoned coffee shop that a week prior had a line almost to the door. I remember leaving the office and looking back and realizing I had no idea when I’d be back, if at all. Over the coming weeks, the entire city shut down. It started with large gatherings, restaurants at 50% capacity, but by the end of the month, all that remained were grocery stores, banks, pharmacies, and doctor’s offices.

I wish I could paint the second half of March as a beautiful moment in our lives. I wish I could say that Jenn and I found the silver lining every day. But there were good days, some even great, but there were also a lot where we just stared out our window wondering what was coming next. The stock market has crumbled, layoffs seem to be inevitable at most companies, and outside of walking Frasier we really haven’t left our 700 sq ft apartment in almost a month. One of our own personal struggles has been with our apartment complex closing the dog run downstairs. So we now have to brave the elements (in winter/early spring) to let Frasier relieve himself which as of this writing is much better at but was a struggle for the first couple of days and is pretty horrible during a storm.

There are simple things that we both miss. I for one miss going to a restaurant or a broadway show. Jenn misses the freedom to go about her days the way she wants to. When we walk Frasier you can feel the fear and the pain in the air. There isn’t a fifteen-minute stretch that goes by now that an ambulance siren isn’t going off. Every night at 7 PM everyone opens up their windows and claps and cheers for the brave medical workers and it’s both awesome and terrifying. It’s a beautiful show of affection for those putting their lives on the line but it’s also a haunting reminder of how bad this virus really is.”

That didn’t magically change when we went from March to April. If anything April was even tougher than March. We didn’t know it at the time but it was the peak of the first wave in the city. Although it was bad in much of the United States, NYC was the epicenter. Emotionally I had a really tough time dealing with it. Even now I’m not sure what in particular hit me the hardest. I don’t know if it was the loss of freedom, working in a confined space, the constant sirens, or the fear of the unknown but I really struggled in April. When I look back on photos and videos we took during April I can see the stress on my face. Probably more than any other time in the nearly twenty years Jenn and I have been together I relied on Jenn’s strength to help push us through. Regardless of the why, I was battling a minor case of depression having trouble sleeping and feeling motivated.

It didn’t help that in April we also had to make the very tough but real decision to cancel a nearly three-week trip with Jake to South America. We planned and booked an entire trip to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile in May but as the pandemic continued to rage on we knew the chances of that happening were dwindling. As hard as it was to cancel we are very fortunate that we got all of our money back and whenever the pandemic does cease we have a tremendous itinerary ready to book.

When May came around and we weren’t seeing much improvements in COVID-19 or the outlook of returning to any normal so we had big decisions to make. That started with Jenn’s career in which she had received multiple offers for her next career move and had a tremendously difficult decision to make one that as of this writing we both feel she made the right call on. We also had a big decision to make about where we’d be living. In April we started to talk about potentially temporarily moving from the confines of our small New York City apartment back to California. We wouldn’t be alone in leaving with a mass exodus already beginning at the start of the pandemic. We talked about it almost every night for over a month before coming to the tough decision to move back for the rest of 2020. As I write this from California it may seem now like it was an easy decision but for us, it wasn’t. We loved our life in the city and weren’t really keen on moving back. We had built a new life, one we loved very much, but I think we both knew for the good of our family it would help to have more space, be near family and better weather to ride out the pandemic.

So like that Jenn started a new job during a global pandemic and we started to lay the groundwork for a move back to California. It was at this time that the pandemic started to improve in NYC (and get worse all over the world). In early May we decided to rent a car and take a quick day trip to the Hamptons just to get some space from our apartment and the Upper West Side. We drove out to the beach, found a parking spot, unhooked Frasier, and just walked. We stayed there for at least two hours on a beautiful overcast spring day. It was the first time since the start of lockdown that either of us felt like we had space or time to exhale. I think a lot of our final decision about California came from the clarity of getting out and giving ourselves the permission to feel the weight of everything.

While Jenn ramped up at her new job we began to box up our New York City apartment that we had lived in for the past two years dividing our belongings between storage and what would come with us for our temporary move back to California. We’ve moved so many times over the years that it took us only a weekend to pack up everything and by the end of May our once beautiful apartment had become an apartment waiting to be shipped across the country. We decided to move back to the same complex we had lived at prior to leaving for New York and managed to get Frasier designated as an emotional support animal for our flight back to California. This all seems simple and clear cut now but I assure you during the time the entire world wasn’t sure to make of the pandemic and so each step of the process had its own complexities. We had no idea when we made this decision if the pandemic would be over in the summer or if we were putting ourselves at additional risk by flying across the country and staying in a hotel. We took a leap of faith and now it appears we made a good decision but at the time we had no idea.

The movers came a few days before we flew to California on June 5th. The last five days in New York were on a blow-up bed and using Jenn’s computer monitor as our TV. It was on this week that the Black Lives Matter protests began after the brutal murder of George Floyd. The entire city was under curfew and boarded up and so our last week in the city was one of just trying to survive until our flight out. On the 5th though we woke up early, took Frasier potty, and took an Uber to Newark Airport to take a direct United flight to Los Angeles. We upgraded our seats to business class and after an excruciating wait at the ticket counter, we made our way through a deserted airport to our plane where we boarded and took off for California. I was exhausted. The stress of the moment and the decision weighed on me heavily and as you can see from the pictures I fell asleep with Frasier only 30 minutes after taking off, sleeping almost the entire flight (something I almost never do). Jake picked us up at the airport and after spending a few nights at a hotel in Irvine we moved into our new 2 bedroom apartment that would be our respite for the rest of the year.

While we waited for our things to arrive from New York we started to unload the items that we had purchased to furnish the second bedroom (our new office) and made our one big purchase of the year, a car. You can’t live in California without one and we knew it. As part of the move back to California we had begun to look into buying a used small SUV and landed on a Mercedes. We had driven a few of them as Zipcars in NYC and found them to be incredibly comfortable and beautiful cars. After some false starts (a lot of people were buying cars at this time) we found a beautiful 2018 Mercedes GLC in Foothill Ranch and after an hour Jenn and I walked out of the dealership with a new car.

Our furniture and boxes arrived on the very last day of the estimated “delivery window” and only took them a couple of hours to unload and reassemble. Jenn and I spent the rest of the day unboxing and before the clock had hit midnight we had fully unpacked and disposed of the moving boxes. It was by far the quickest we had ever moved into an apartment before. Before our items arrived Jenn had the walls painted white and once our items arrived we had a handyman come hang the pictures, TV’s, and curtains throughout the apartment. Within a few days of our stuff arriving we had made this temporary home, home.

The shock of being in California during this pandemic was immediate and profound. On one of our first days back Jenn had run into Whole Foods and a lady told her as she was exiting the store that we didn’t need masks anymore and that the pandemic was over. We had another gentleman tell us the same thing on one of our first walks down to the Balboa Island. When we had left New York where everyone was still recovering from the shell shock of the first wave of coronavirus the brazenness of everyone in Orange County was discomforting. As I write this post during a wave as bad as New York’s first here in Southern California its hard to be surprised.

We did our best during those first few months to see our families as often as possible. A few weeks after we arrived we had my siblings down and Jenn finally got to meet Gracie. One of the best parts of being here as been spending more time getting to know Gracie who absolutely loves Jenn, slightly terrified of Frasier, and still deciding on Uncle Joel. In some ways those summer months were like we had never left. We had board game days that were really just wine and food days, we did long walks to Balboa, and Jenn and I would lay by the pool after work or on the weekends. The combination of space in our apartment and freedom with the car were immediate and powerful. We got exactly what we came for and so much more.

The summer raced by, we immediately fell back into old routines, now with Frasier by our side. Most weekdays I’d wake up at 430AM and start work by 5 AM. Jenn would be up an hour later and take Frasier out for his morning walk. We both typically walked Frasier a little before lunch and I’d make us lunch. We’d work until 2-3 PM and then take Frasier back out to either the dog park at Fashion Island or the small one in our apartment complex. We’d come back, work some more, and I’d make us dinner, typically from Hello Fresh. We’d take Frasier for his nightly walk and we’d finish the night with an episode or two of TV. It’s funny as I look back on the summer and really 2020 as an entirety having Frasier in our lives has been a lifesaver. He will never know or understand how much we needed him this year, probably more than he needs us. Seeing his little smile when he comes to greet me in the morning, or when he comes into the office to tell Jenn it’s time to play has been some of the best moments of the year.

Our birthdays arrived at the same time of year they always do. We had our first “real” meal out since the pandemic at Marche Modernne which was easily the best meal we had post-March. A small beautiful little French restaurant in Crystal Cove, it was the gift we both craved more than anything. One of my fondest memories of the summer was going to the Temecula wineries with Jake, Amy, and Ryan. It was one of the most “normal” experiences we had post-pandemic and was a nice gift to be out with everyone.

In fact we enjoyed going to the wineries so much that we booked a quick trip up to Napa Valley in late August. We thought it would be a safe trip given we could drive ourselves and wineries were only serving outdoors. On August 18th we dropped Frasier off at The Bone Adventure in Costa Mesa and we made our way to Napa. Right as we were going through the Grapevine I received a text from Ally wondering where we were going. When I told her Napa she let me know that her friend had just posted on Facebook that a massive wildfire had just erupted in wine country and we should look. A few google searches later and I had to wake Jenn up from her nap to let her know we’d need to cancel our trip. We pulled off at the first exit through the Grapevine called the hotel to cancel and turned back for home. The third trip in 2020 we had to cancel. We picked Frasier up later that day and had a beautiful relaxing week at home laying by the pool and taking Frasier to the dog beach.

We did everything we could to enjoy the summer here in Newport Beach while still being cognizant of a global pandemic that hadn’t gotten any better. As August turned to September we got word a few days beforehand that Tim, Ally’s boyfriend at the time intended to propose, and sure enough on September 6th he did just that. She accepted and they are currently set to get married in June of 2021. Speaking of weddings, we celebrated our 11 years together at Maestro’s in Crystal Cove. It wasn’t at the same level of Eleven Madison Park last year but it was still really nice to be out and having a few cocktails and a good meal.

And like that summer turned to fall. A lot of both Jenn and my focus turned to the upcoming presidential election. Throughout the summer and then ramping up in the fall I had volunteered to text and call for Joe Biden the Democratic nominee for President. I was actually a fan of Joe Biden when he ran in and eventually became the Vice President in 2008 and couldn’t have been more happy with his choice of Kamala Harris as his running-mate. Both Jenn and I felt a tremendous obligation and desire to do everything in our power to see them in the White House in January of 2021. We have spent the last four years embarrassed and disgusted by the current President and did not want to have any regrets when the election took place in November. Jenn feeling so inspired by the current political season decided to volunteer at our local polling place and ended up working for five straight days at the Newport Beach Civic Center after two full days of training (one in-person and another online). I can’t remember a time that I was more proud of Jenn. After working 12-hour days for the last six months she took her vacation time and gave it to supporting democracy and our local community.

The run-up to the election was intense and stressful. The debates were a disaster, especially the first one which had our current President spouting like a lunatic. The polling both at a state and national level looked strong for Biden but we said the same thing four years ago. We mailed in our ballots in early October and spent the rest of the month volunteering and refreshing the latest polling data as we led up to the big day. I’ll never forget November 3rd, election day. I haven’t been that nervous about an election in my lifetime and every minute leading up to the polls closing was torture. I’ll remember bringing Jenn dinner at around 6 PM on election night and the early results had been quite bad for Biden. And yet leading up to the election we had heard over and over again that they’d count mail-in ballots last and that’s where the majority of Biden’s votes would come from.

November 3rd came to a close without a victor although it still looked strong for our current President. As the next few days went by we stayed glued to CNN as we slowly watched each vote come in. We learned more about the counties in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada than I ever thought we would. And finally, on Saturday, November 7th the networks called the race for Biden, and he would become the 46th President of the United States. Jenn was just getting home from a night out in San Diego with her Dad and we celebrated the victory with the Mumm’s champagne we had saved from the 2016 election. It was a night I’ll never forget.

To help celebrate the incoming administration November brought with it two new video game consoles, the Playstation 5 which I received a couple of weeks early for review from Sony, and the Xbox Series X. This only happens every five to seven years so getting two new consoles in a matter of weeks was quite a special moment. Staring at them now in our entertainment center I can say they might not be the best-looking console designs ever but I have enjoyed playing on them quite a bit.

In mid-November, we decided that we’d host our first-ever Friendsgiving. Jenn has wanted to host an event like this for a decade and we now had both space and resources to be able to do it. Jenn rented a beautiful dining table and purchased stunning flowers for the table. She even made beautiful menus for the table as well. It was quite the event with a great charcuterie board, fun times playing both Jackbox and Werewolves & Villagers. I made Coq Au Vin with pasta for dinner and we had apple pie from PopPie in Costa Mesa for dessert. I’m so glad we were able to host this and Jenn did an absolutely phenomenal job.

Neither Jenn or I had taken much vacation in 2020 so we both took a week or so off towards the end of November leading into Thanksgiving. We decorated our apartment for Christmas with the decor that we brought back with us and a new artificial Christmas tree from CB2. As always Jenn does a great job of transforming our home from a beautiful model home to a beautiful model home set for the holidays. There’s nothing quite like coming back from walking Frasier at night and coming in to see the side table and tree lights on and our stockings hanging waiting for Santa to fill them.

Thanksgiving this year reminded me of how it was earlier in our marriage. We went to Riverside in the early part of the day and then to Oceanside to visit Jenn’s Dad and Joan for the evening. It was a little over 200 miles of driving in a day but since we are here in California this year it was worth it to see everyone in our scaled-back Thanksgiving celebrations. We had two great meals, some great wine, and a good time for all.

As December rolled in the pandemic began to roar back and lockdowns began to take effect again. We canceled most of our plans to see anyone in December and instead stayed more secluded than any other time since we had been back in California. We watched two renditions of A Christmas Carol streaming online and finished our 12 movies of Christmas tradition easier than any other prior year. As we got closer and closer to Christmas we realized that we might have to alter our plans and really wrestled with the decision.

We ended up celebrating Christmas with Jenn’s Dad and Joan on Christmas Eve and still went down to Riverside on Christmas although were quite concerned about it. We had two phenomenal celebrations and came back to our apartment with Frasier to celebrate our own Christmas that afternoon. It’s the first time ever that Jenn and I have really been able to celebrate our own Christmas. We picked up a four-course dinner from Playa Provisions which head chef is Brooke who won Top Chef several years ago. I prepped the dinner and we had one of the best meals of our year in the comfort of our home with a digital fire roaring on our TV.

We came to the end of the year with tremendous hope for the future and worry for the present. Just as the year came to a close not one but two vaccines have now been approved by the FDA with a potential third on the way. There’s a very real chance by the time I’m writing this post next year that a lot of this will be behind us. And yet without looking ahead I want to one more time looking back on 2020. It was a year of tremendous challenge, stress, and downright fear. There were moments in early 2020 as the pandemic began to ravage NYC that you couldn’t go a few minutes without hearing a siren or realize that the once noisy bustling city had come to a complete stop. And yet through it all, I was supported, loved, and comforted by Jenn. If there was ever a year that would test our resolve it was 2020. And yet when I look back on 2020 I get emotional not because of what we lost but because of how it shined a giant spotlight on how much I have. Jenn and I got to spend more time together, take more walks, eat more lunches together, and rely on each other in ways that we haven’t before. It was a year that highlighted just how lucky and fortunate I am to have a wife who loves me, a dog who brings constant joy, and my health which I will never take for granted. So goodbye 2020 you’ve taught me a lot, and hello 2021 I’ll take that vaccine whenever you’re ready.

One more thing for posterity’s sake. Here’s me in May after 3 months of not shaving or getting a haircut. Jenn eventually cut my hair and I finally trimmed the beard.