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.

What a challenging year to really keep any goal. By the end of March, the world had completely come to a stop and it really hasn’t come back alive since. I had set a few goals that were no longer going to be possible like 13 tasting menus or 300 runs. But even with the year working against me I was able to at least accomplish a lot of what I set out to do.

It sort of blows my mind that I’m sitting here in Newport Beach looking out on a 65-degree day as December winds to a close and starting to think about writing my year-in-review. It has been a year not like any other and a December not like any other as well. But even with all of its challenges December and the holidays still happened and although they were different this year we weren’t going to not celebrate them. And so with this let’s get into the last monthly recap of 2020.