2025 Recap

No pretty charts this year. I declared tracking bankruptcy sometime in September, too many things to keep up with, from date nights to meat meals to sleep scores. And work and life and other things needed more of my brain space. I’ll probably reset next year.

Rainbows under grey skies, kinda fitting for 2025.

Successes

• Leela can swim. On our annual family vacation to a warm place, Leela swam by herself in the pool. Was it pretty? No. Is she alive and undrowned? Yes.
• Leela reads for fun. She still hates reading with me. Pro tip: don’t try to force your daughter to learn to read early just because that’s what her brother did and you don’t think she’s any less capable but you might think she’s a little lazy and doesn’t like challenges and then you realize you’re being a pretty bad parent but it’s too late and now she’s traumatized by reading with you. Don’t do that. That said, I’ve seen her pick up books and read them on her own. I just have to stay away.
• Leela learns to ride a bike. I took her out every week. She was fussy for the first few sessions, but once it clicked, she wanted to go every day. This worked way better than the reading experiment. We now go on regular bike rides around the lake with Pravin.
• Buy a house or get remodel plans for where we live. Why not both? We got the house across the street for my mom to move into and started plans on remodeling our place.
• Clear out the storage unit. Done. Between Cat’s office and some flex storage at mom’s house, we finally have room to breathe.
• 18 solo dates. This is vibes-based since I stopped tracking, but Cat and I have been on a ton of dates. We found a sushi place we like and an activity we both enjoy (comedy). Having something regular helps a ton.
• Pravin finds a sport he enjoys. He’s now in a level two gymnastics class. I really wanted him to be into team sports like soccer, for all the stereotypical reasons. But I guess we can’t control what our children are into.
• Lose two inches off my waist. tried hard to do it on my own, but work got stressful and stress eating is difficult for me to manage. Eventually Cat found a way to get some Zepbound through the internet. Super effective. Fitting into clothes is really underrated.
• Two friend trips and two family trips. We did way more. The whole family went to Disney, the Oregon Coast, and Palm Springs. Cat and I did a solo trip to New York. There was a big family reunion in Seattle. Pravin and I went to Europe together. For a lot of these trips we saw both friends and family, including family I hadn’t seen in 20 years in London.
• Read 26 books, at least 4 with Pravin. Ended up at 37 books. Pravin and I read five Amulet graphic novels together and listened to the first four Harry Potter audiobooks while traveling to Europe.

Partial Successes

• Limit eating out to 3x/week while in Seattle. Tracking bankruptcy strikes again. I don’t have firm data, but I think we still eat out too much. That said, we’ve gotten better at having meals at home. Some combination of GLP-1s, regular Costco runs, and getting a second freezer.
• Decorate upstairs. We cleaned the space, but it needs to be more functional. We should get beanbags, toy areas for the kids, better organization in the upstairs bedroom. But since we are remodeling, none of that will happen.
• 12 dance classes/open dances. I went to 4–5 dances early in the year, then stopped. It just got to be too much to keep up with.

Failures

• Track expenses for 3 months. Yeah, this went poorly. I think our burn has increased significantly, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that’s the slack our family needs given two stressful jobs and growing kids.
• No buying sweets for ourselves. We ate fewer sweets for a while, but recently I’ve been pretty bad about this. Sometimes you need some Skittles.
• Pravin can type. I’m sure this will happen this year, but there wasn’t real motivation last year. I think an iPad with a keyboard would be clutch.
• Run another marathon without injury. I’ve had a lot more fatigue this year, whether from work stress, fewer calories from GLP-1s, or just life. I ran a half marathon but for the first time had nothing left in the tank at the end. I’ll have to train seriously for a full.
• Learn to cook 3 Gujarati dishes. Made zero from the cookbook. I did make delicious Dishoom daal many times, but no Gujarati dishes.
• 12 drop-in art classes. Not in the cards. I’m learning that creative tasks fall to the back burner when I’m working or stressed. My creativity goes into my job and there isn’t much left afterward.
• Update my website and blog. Should be easy with LLM coding tools, but the hard part is design. I should break it into two goals: get content up with the current scheme, then update the scheme. I didn’t didn’t prioritize this.
• Secret project. Didn’t do it. Looking back, I don’t know where the time would have come from.