I’m doing this again. A year in review for 2025. If you want to catch last year’s, you can find 2024 here. Pray that brevity finds me, for your sake.

2025 brought new challenges and plenty of adventure.

Challenges

Psychic Damage

The first challenge of 2025 was mental and emotional. Literally everything I read at any point in any news outlet anywhere. Just pick up your phone and you’ll know what I mean. If you don’t have a misery portal in your pocket, a printed newspaper will do the trick.

Surviving the onslaught unscathed, or only a little scathed, was the primary effort of the year. This first challenge could be why I’m sitting here writing a year-end summary and contemplating Volume 6 of my email written and spoken-word newsletter. Subscribe here to assess the toll of this psychic damage, delivered monthly to your inbox!

Bludgeoning? Damage

The second largest challenge of 2025 was physical. At the end of 2024 I pulled something in my back and triggered extreme low-back pain. I tried the battle-tested strategy of my ancestors: ignore it and hope for the best.

Sadly, I was defeated.

One February morning, after coming back from an ill-advised kayaking excursion and plane trip, I found myself lying on the floor, alternating between trying not to make any noise, and crying in anguish. I realized that I was not going to make the upcoming Zoom call.

The story here is long, but the abridged version is that after an MRI, I was diagnosed with a herniated disc. I escalated through stronger and more mood altering drugs, combined with physical therapy.

Several months of mind-numbing pain and limited mobility later, a combination of physical therapy and X-Ray guided epidural steroid injection (yeah, a guided needle through the spine which is less bad than it sounds) got me off all of the substances. As I write this in December 2025, 15 months from the original start of the pain, my back still hurts, but my mobility has mostly returned.

I can hike. I can rock climb. I am thinking about what it would take to snowboard again. More importantly, I can think clearly again without all the pain medication.

Adventures

I could keep listing ailments, but I’d rather talk about the great things that happened in 2025. Here are a few highlights.

Hawaii

Kat and I went on the trip of a lifetime, island hopping around Hawaii in September. As she tells it, this trip was our anniversary, birthday, and holidays all wrapped into one.

We spent two weeks flying between Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island. From Maui, we chartered a catamaran for several days and sailed to Molokai and Lanai.

Chartering a boat was luxurious. Being on the remote side of a popular tourist destination with no one else in sight was spectacular. We had amazing meals, saw sea turtles and sharks, and got to stare up at the Milky Way after gorgeous sunsets.

On the Big Island, our timing worked out perfectly and we saw night-time volcanic pistoning (lol), followed by a majestic day-time eruption. We snagged this great photo.

Bryson City

In the same theme of luxury, we stayed at the Longview Resort in Bryson City for our “runnaversary” in June. It’s been 10 years since I met Kat at the Fullsteam Bull City Run Club.

I would definitely recommend this experience. Great breakfasts and meals. The wood-fired hot tub was fun. It was great to get some time to reconnect. As a bonus, there are so many birds! I had never seen an indigo bunting before this trip.

On top of that, it’s hard to forget (or hard to remember?) the booze train we took. They started pouring hooch at something like 10:15 AM.

Family Outings

Kat’s friends have THREE kids, which I know is a normal thing, but it still seems exceptional to me. Anyway, to get some friend time in, we took to hitting up theme parks with their whole family.

First, we went to the Wet’n Wild Emerald Pointe water park. This was absolutely not something Kat and I would do on our own. Having friends with kids was a great excuse to go down the very scary water slides. My back held up through this, but as I was standing above the chute that opens underneath you into the abyss, I had some reservations. Too late, but it worked out anyway.

Next, we went to King’s Dominion for their Halloween event. Roller coasters at night were awesome! However, if you have low-back problems, I learned not to ride the kids’ coasters.

The Newsletter – Burns After Reading

The last adventure of the year for me, and the biggest positive change, is the newsletter. If you subscribe via email, I’ll send you a monthly newsletter in both written and spoken word format. That’s right, as is my middle-aged-white-dude privilege, I’ve started a podcast.

Why? Because all the news isn’t fit to print.

No, it’s a result of becoming anti-social.

Family and Social Sharing. This is a huge miss in my current system.

• Me, 2023

This year, that changed. I realized sometime in June or July that I could put all my personal stories and opinions into an email and send them to only the people who want them.

The blog could be for technical articles, or bland summaries like this one 😉

I went through my blog, going back to 2002, and realized there was a lot of cringe, and a lot of oversharing. I made a lot of posts private, and I also just took a huge break from publishing anything in general.

I even went so far as to put my photo gallery behind a login. It was being scraped by naughty AI bots that disrespected my robots.txt. If you want to see my vacation photos, you’ll have to subscribe.

Closing Out

It’s been a big year. It feels like all I did was work, but it’s nice to reflect back and realize there has been more to life than exchanging PowerPoint files for paychecks.