This has been, to say the absolute least, an interesting year for me. The downside has been a lot of unexpected free time, the upside of which has obviously been the ability to read a lot more than usual. In between the myriad home projects I completed, I managed to read a record amount in 2025 while also knocking out perhaps a high point for the book that sat the longest on my TBR pile. I’ll pause for applause while loading up the complete list of this year’s reads:
If there is one thing I can say about my 2020 reading year, it’s that I was significantly better at reading in Spanish. Among my 17 overall reads were two in Spanish, the same as last year. But whereas last year it took me 71 and 60 days to read those two books, this year it was just 55 and 54 days, and the 2020 ones combined were nearly 200 pages longer. Bonus points for me.
Unlike my last read where I jumped into book 2 of a series without reading the first, I came fully prepared to Suzanne Collins’ “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” I started the “Hunger Games” prequel with full knowledge of its existing world having read the original trilogy twice and having seen all of the movies.
We should have known from the first week-ish of the season. On April 3, the Nationals had a 6-4 lead heading into the 8th inning against the Phillies. What happened from there was a microcosm not only of the struggles that would define the early part of Washington’s season, but the ultimate resilient glory that would become the story of the end.
The Phillies scored four runs to take an 8-6 lead. Spirits were low. People got up from their seats and made their way home. The three pitchers charged with those runs would not finish the season as members of the Nationals. In the bottom of the inning, the Nats scored two runs to tie the game, then were the beneficiaries of a bases-loaded walk to end it with a 9-8 victory.There are a lot of Major League Baseball players. They play for a lot of different teams. I have a favorite team, which naturally has a number of my favorite players, but there are others across the league that I really enjoy watching play.
My previous post covered the majority of my trip to Mexico, but now I want to clean up some odds and ends beginning with the 5K race we ran the morning after we arrived.
Hello! Hola! I’m back from 10 wonderful days in Mexico where I simultaneously ate too much but not enough things, experienced the warmth of so many people and had only minor language mishaps.
Working overnights includes the quirk that when you get up from your desk, you’re extremely unlikely to run into another person when you walk to the water cooler, the kitchen, vending machine or bathroom. There just aren’t enough people to make those chance encounters happen.
Now is the time to get on my good side. I’m about to be very, very, very rich.
It’s not often I meet someone who knows me only through the blog, but today I did, and only because I first met a Chinese woman on the Metro.
