1. This was a short work week with the Christmas holiday happening Thursday. I ended up working two days and then getting to enjoy 12 straight days off. That doesn’t mean that there was a lack of interesting stories. The main one came in the form of an unexpected guest in the gym. In the early afternoon, my boss happened to lay eyes on something in the corner of the gym near the exit to the hallway. It was a dead mouse. No idea where it came from or how it got into our gym, but there it was. I was tasked with removing it, so I grabbed a pair of gloves and picked it up by the tail. I apologized to it as I tossed it out the back door into some nearby woods. The interesting part of this story is that where the mouse was found was next to an area I had planned to use with a client that morning. She ended up having to cancel her appointment. If she had been there, she’d have been doing planks on a mat right there, and no doubt would have seen the mouse and rightfully flipped out. So I guess it was a good thing that her schedule changed. Fun fact: In the last year or so, we have had a mouse, a frog, and a squirrel in our gym.
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| An average day at the zoo, I mean, the gym. |
2. A sad realization, or an aha moment? I was at the supermarket one evening this week and was craving pizza. I was trying to get through Christmas before trying (again) to get my health on track. Anyway, I saw an ex of mine there. I didn’t speak to her, just saw her. She didn’t see me. The moment I am talking about comes from the fact that when I knew her as a friend and girlfriend, she was my fitness muse. She made me want to be the best version of myself physically, and I was. I felt that old mindset bubbling up inside of me, but the current version of me stamped it down. Maybe that’s why I didn’t go talk to her? I didn’t want to have that healthy voice speaking to me again. It’s a sad realization that what used to be second nature for me, my health and fitness, seem like foreign concepts. I am planning on using my extended break from work to try to get this under control, but it failed on this night. I still went and got pizza.
3. The town where I live doesn’t allow the sale of individual plastic water bottles in grocery stores. They’re allowed in most towns on Cape Cod, though. One of the items on my list to bring for Christmas was a case of water. Because I waited until the last minute, and because it was snowing more than expected on Christmas Eve, I chose to stick close to home to get the water. Even though I couldn’t get a case of water in plastic bottles, I did find several options for canned water. I don’t know why this amused me so much. Cracking open a nice can of water just made me laugh, so of course I got that. It beats water in boxes. I mean, what is that foolishness anyway? You might as well sell water in bags.
4. Every year since 2009, I have paid a visit to a local beach that my Nana spent lots of time at on Christmas Eve. I did it that first year because she was near the end of her life and couldn’t go and enjoy it. She passed a few days after Christmas in 2009. I make it a point to be there around sunset. Whether it’s sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy, cold, or less cold, I am there. It allows me to purposefully spend a few moments with my Nana front and center in my thoughts. I truly do feel her spirit there. As the years have passed, I have lost several more loved ones. I now use this Christmas Eve tradition to remember them as well. It is somber and bittersweet but also invigorating. I feel all of them in my heart at that time, and it makes me feel lucky I had people that important who still bring those emotions long after they’re gone. But also, it makes me appreciate those who are still here who give me those same emotions. It was cold, windy, and snowy this year, but I was still there and still walked out into the elements to get a photo.
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| The view at my Nana's beach on Christmas Eve. |
5. Christmas was filled with family, food, and fun. The times of family gatherings can be fewer, and further between the older I get, so I always look forward to them. It’s funny how time goes. I can remember my nieces and nephews from the day they were born. Yet here some of them are as teens and young adults, and I can talk and laugh with them in different ways. Sitting and eating my mom’s amazing chicken stir fry while talking about 90s music was a blast. We all were in a food coma by 4:30, but that didn’t stop us from grabbing copious amounts of to-go containers' worth of leftovers. It was a great day overall.
6. One funny thing this Christmas was my surprise that nobody knew this classic Honeycomb cereal commercial from the mid-1980s. We were watching The Princess Bride, and I was mentioning how, at this point, Andre the Giant was probably at his most famous. He was Fezzik in the movie, and around the same time, he was in a Honeycomb commercial. I was shocked, especially that my sister Kate, who has a better memory than me, didn’t remember the commercial from when we were kids. I sang the jingle first, which was embarrassing enough. Honeycomb’s big! Yeah, yeah, yeah! It’s not small! No, no, no! Then I showed everyone the commercial, which they liked but still didn’t remember. I’ll share it here for any fellow GenXers, but maybe my memory is better than I thought.
7. It’s interesting how the week between Christmas and New Year’s is such a dead zone. It’s like I know there are seven days in there, but all I want to do is hurry through them, get past New Year’s, and then speed run my way to spring. I have said numerous times that the period from Labor Day through the end of the year is my favorite time. That being said, my least favorite time is from January 2nd through the first of spring. It’s one long Seasonal Affective Disorder session. It’s made all the more glaring because at my day job, we have the week between Christmas and New Year’s off. This year, we also have an extra week off in January, oh, and there will likely be another week-plus break in March because my boss can afford to shut down for long stretches. He can, the other employees can’t, but that’s why I keep working hard on my content, so I hopefully don’t have to worry about it too much longer.
8. I finished up the continuing education credits to renew my personal trainer certification. I took a course called Business Progressions Level 1. The thing about this course is that the vast majority of it was stuff I already knew. It was a lot about sales and marketing, including social media stuff. That’s literally what I do in my spare time: market and sell my work. So, rather than spend something like 12 hours watching webinars about stuff I already knew, I skipped around, sought out the answers I needed for each quiz, and got my 10 CECs in less than half the time. But shh, don’t tell anyone, I’m sure they’d have preferred that I played by the rules and watched it all.
9. When I was in high school, my sister Kate became friends with a foreign exchange student from Ukraine named Anna. She was this super cute blonde who enjoyed wearing denim overalls. I had such a big crush on her, but I was terrified to say anything. I was even more scared to tell my sister to see if maybe she could put in a good word. Don’t get me wrong, anytime I interacted with Anna, it was good. She was sweet and seemed to find me funny, which was a plus. The universe works in mysterious ways. The time seemed right to grow some guts and make a move. There was going to be a party coming up. She would be there, and I would go. Everything seemed to be falling into place. Then, out of nowhere, Anna was gone. It was like she vanished, but in reality, she had gone back to Ukraine. Now the stories I have heard can’t be verified. I had heard that something had happened to her father, or some member of her family back home, and she was forced to go back and essentially go into hiding. For me, what’s worse is that I learned after the fact that she did indeed like me. She thought I looked like one of the members of the group All-For-One. They did ‘I Swear.’ So not only did I not get the chance to say anything to Anna before she left, but she has been MIA since then. That was 1995. Every now and then, I try to search for her, but I get stuck. I am trying again now since it’s been 30 years. I found a mention of her in a newsletter about exchange students in the state of Massachusetts. The company, MATSOL, still exists. So I went to their website and emailed them to see if there might be any avenues I could go down to try to find Anna. It is highly likely to be a dead end, but you never know. I mean, I failed at finding my great-grandfather’s biological family for years, and then suddenly, new information was available, and it was a success. We’ll see.
10. Being the end of the year, it’s time for New Year’s Resolutions. In the past, I’ve had grandiose declarations of achievements I wanted to accomplish. There’s nothing wrong with setting the bar high. For 2026, I have a big goal, yet also one that is hard to define. I want to rediscover the best version of myself. What does that mean? I’m not totally sure. In all honesty, I haven’t felt like the best version of myself since probably 2019. Even then, I was battling alcohol problems and mourning the death of my hero, my Grampa. Giving such a broad and undefinable resolution might be seen as a cop out, and you might be right. How will I even know if I am the best version of my current self? Maybe it comes down to a feeling? For the most part, in my life currently, I feel unfulfilled and incomplete. I work nonstop on projects like books and podcasts because, in many ways, I am trying to prove my worth to the world. In reality, I think it will come down to the feeling of being happy and satisfied with where I am and, most of all, who I am. Will I achieve it? Who knows, but I’ll spend 2026 trying to find it.
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