1. Maybe this only happens to me, but I feel like I am driving slower on a road if there is a car in front of me. What I mean is that if I am going 40 and there’s a car in front of me, I feel as though I am actually going slower. If I am going 40 with an open road ahead of me, it feels faster. Am I the only one who gets that feeling? Maybe with an open road, I know I could go faster if I wanted to? There has to be some reason for it. Just like how if you drive the same route repeatedly, you can basically black out and still get to where you’re going. It’s like muscle memory.
2. In 2025, when I played Spotify, I typically stuck to one of two playlists. I played my Chill Mix, which consists of a lot of downtempo music, at home. At work, I played a Best of the 1980s playlist since much of my clientele is 50+. It should have come as no surprise to me that when I got my Best of 2025 playlist made by Spotify that it was basically both of those playlists crammed into one. I scrolled through it once and decided that since I heard those songs so much as it is why would I bother playing it? I guess I should try to play more of a variety of music in 2026 just so my best of playlist will be exciting next year.
3. There are tons and tons of great parents out there...and then there are these next people. So I was at the supermarket when I spotted a boy who must have been 4 carrying some food item that he kept dropping, intentional or not, on the floor. The parents kept telling him to stop, but didn’t take the thing he was dropping away. Cut to 5 minutes later, and they come rolling in after me at the little self-checkout section. The mother and daughter, who was probably 10, started checking out and immediately getting mad at the self-checkout register. Behind me, the boy is still dropping that item he had, which I saw was a bag of chips. Then he stepped on it until it popped. Again, the parents tell him to stop but don’t take it away. Oh wait but the best is yet to come. I check out and am leaving. It’s probably 40 feet from the self-checkout to the automatic front doors. Who do I see standing there, not letting the doors close? The 4-year-old boy. No parents around. They had no clue where he was. And it was nearly 8pm. Lucky for them there were no kidnappers around. I can’t be too shocked, though, since the parents looked like if you added them together they’d have the same IQ as a piece of chewed bubblegum.
4. An interesting phenomenon occurs around this time each year. Once the weather starts to get consistently cold, I remember that there is a small hole in the ceiling right above my desk at work. It happened this week. I was sitting doing paperwork and noticed that I had an urge to put my coat on. Out in our lobby, it is consistently 70 degrees, but in our therapy room, where my desk is the temperature slowly drops as you walk across the room. That’s because the warm air is being destroyed by a funnel of ice-cold air above my desk. It comes from the warehouse. In the past, I have taken to shoving a shirt up in the hole, but the air still makes it through. I feel like I’m going to end up with a storm forming in front of my desk where the cold air and warm air meet. I can add it to the list of things we need to have the new owners of the building fix. Sealing the wall in the gym that abuts the warehouse so our heat doesn’t fly right out. Fixing our mini split so we can have quiet heat in the gym, not a 1960s-looking jet engine heater. Putting some adequate lighting in the shady back parking lot. Getting some lines painted in the customer front parking lot. Paving and putting lines in the employee's back parking lot. Any one of those would be great.
5. It’s an interesting window into my life as a child when I look at a piece of pottery I made in school when I was probably in 5th grade. My mom has kept it and now has it as a part of a really cool display with photos and candles, and such. I believe that I have a great imagination and a pretty good creative gene. I mean I do create books, podcasts, YouTube videos, this blog, etc. That being said, pottery was not going to be my chosen path. I made a sort of goblet, and besides the fact that I was 10 or 11, I believe that it shows a bit of possible ADHD. A bunch of different colors, lines, and holes, it’s so busy that it has to be ADHD at least a little. You be the judge.
6. In one of the most shocking stories in sports this year, the Indianapolis Colts have signed 44-year-old quarterback Philip Rivers to play on their team this year. 44 isn’t old in real life, but in sports it is. It’s doubly old when you have been retired for 5 years and are a legit grandfather. It’s kind of a no-win situation for the NFL. Either Rivers plays and does well, and it makes the current players in the league look bad. Or he comes back, and plays badly or worse, gets hurt, and it gets people asking why the NFL allowed it to happen. It’ll definitely be an interesting weekend of football. I must say, though, that the images floating around the internet of the Philip Rivers render for Madden ‘26 are pretty funny if they’re legit. He looks like some dude cosplaying as a football player. Here’s the image if you want a laugh.
7. My friend Mike and I spend our Monday afternoons in the warmer months doing Monday Runday at a local track. We have a running (no pun intended) joke about a store located across the street in a little strip plaza. It is called the ‘cheap store.’ Mike made it up, and I always figure it’s because it’s a low-end convenience store. I also believe it gets this name because of the stream of weirdos that frequent it. I stopped in to grab a few giant 5-Hour Energy drinks. They are the only place I know locally that has them. I was in there a total of 3 minutes, and in that time, I saw 5 people who could have been posts in the blog on their own. If I had to whittle it down to one, I’d go with the guy in the fur coat wearing shorts (on a 35-degree day) with sandals and socks. He was very interested in all of the specific nips that were behind the register. I got out of there as fast as I could to avoid any unseen shankings from the cheap store crew.
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| Greetings from the 'cheap store.' |
8. The irony of old people going on social media to complain about younger people using social media isn’t lost on me. I see more people in general doing it, and I have to laugh. It’s like if you want to prove a point about social media, how about deleting your accounts and living your life? Or better yet, get a pencil and paper and write a letter to the opinion column of your local newspaper, like you would have done in the 1980s? It’s the need to feel important. I put this thought into practice this week. I realized that I got 5-10x more engagement on my photos on Threads rather than on Instagram with half of the followers. I had crafted a story post on IG announcing that I was going to be posting photos mainly on Threads from now on. Then I realized nobody would care about my announcement. So you know what I did? I just stopped sharing photos on IG without having to make a big production out of it.
9. This week, we finally got the classic unpredictable weather New England is known for. We were expected to get some sort of snow, but it kept going back and forth as far as how much. In the days leading up to the storm, it went from an inch to as much as 6 inches. Having lived in New England basically my entire life, I was hedging my bets about as far as how much snow we’d get. Instead of bringing the snow brush inside and lifting my windshield wipers up the night before, I left everything as it was. Naturally, we ended up on the heavier end of the snow totals. It was a snow shoveling afternoon but some good calorie burn according to my Fitbit. It could be a sign of a snowy winter, or, knowing New England, it’ll be 55 degrees on Christmas Day. We’ll see.
10. It’s amazing how time can go so slowly and quickly at the same time. 8 years ago this week, one of my oldest and very first friends of my life died suddenly. He had a wife and a young daughter and hadn’t even reached his 40th birthday. His name was Matt, and we shaped each other's formative years by being there for each other. We played, we rode bikes, we had adventures, we slept and ate at each other's houses, and we fought like brothers. Later in high school and into adulthood we lost touch; life just happens that way. In our late 30s, we reconnected in real life. We would seemingly always bump into each other at the grocery store. That became our adult hangout where we’d share stories of how life was going. One night in December 2017, I was beat up and tired from work. I just wanted to grab a few things in the store and go home. I spotted Matt, but he didn’t see me. I knew there would be another time to chat so I watched him push his cart around the corner at the end of an aisle and quickly got my shopping done. I can still see him rounding that corner forever in my mind. A few days later, I was getting a text from my sister Kate asking ‘what happened to Matt?’ It was a gut punch that in many ways I’ve never come back from. I had experienced death before but we knew it was coming. My Nana, my Aunt Christine, there was a long road to their final sunset. Not with Matt. I saw him one day and a few days later he was gone. Just remember that you don’t always have the time you think you do. Rest in peace, Matt. Until we meet again. For those interested, here is the podcast that I recorded in his memory.
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