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.

I’m struggling to find the words to capture this year. It started off so promising, I was killing it in my career, Amy had her first child: Gracie, Joel, and I were settling into the city and truly living a dream NYC life. I remember Dad coming to visit during winter (February) and just having a great time with him, watching him freeze at the dog park, and eating La Salle and Il Buco till our hearts were content. I can still see Joel, Jake, and I walking through Central Park, eating at Rezdora, and laughing during the Book of Mormon. I can feel us booking our bucket list trip to South America. I can recall the exact moment I got my new job offer and how thrilled I was for this new adventure in my career.

A few days before the end of the year I’ll send Jenn an e-mail (ironic this year since we work a couple feet from each other) with a template to fill out for our favorite things. I make sure not to read hers before I write mine up so we don’t influence each others list. Being together for nearly two decades its not that surprising that our lists usually sound similar and this year is no exception. And so without further ado here are our favorite things from 2020.

Each year Jenn and I rank the TV that we watch. You’d think that our list in 2020 would be a mile long given that we’ve been home for 9 of the 12 months but in fact we actually watched less TV this year than almost any other year. That’s not to say that we haven’t watched some great television this year. So without further ado here are our rankings of shows for 2020.

It’s really hard to imagine that as I’m writing this post we’ve now lived in New York City for 18-months. On one hand, it feels like we’ve lived here for years on the other I can still feel getting off the plane and walking to my first day of work at Citi. If 2018 was the year of the move, this has been the year of settling in. We’ve both had great years in our careers, we’ve laid a foundation here in New York, and we now have a companion to experience it all with, Frasier our 10-month old Labradoodle.

Where do I even begin? I started last year with so much hope. I was in a new job, and I was starting to finally feel a little bit more settled in our new home – New York City. I tell Joel this all the time, but living here is like living in a dream. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a snow globe, and someone else is watching me live this extraordinary and imaginary life. It makes me so much more cognizant of how precious and fleeting life truly is.