Christmas Eve, 2025
If you are feeling blue about anything, it’s always good to compare it with someone else’s unmet expectations - and since anything me or my colleagues are moaning about are typically first-world problems, I’m not talking lack of heat in Ukraine, or food in Africa - I feel that’s an unfair and unhelpful metric to use to keep things in perspective.
Currently, I was looking to lift my spirits up by looking at someone else’s misfortune, I think first in mind would be looking towards those poor souls and families in the western USA skiing locales where there is currently NO SNOW. Like literally NONE. Some spots might have some, but it’s not a lot. Aspen has like ¼ of their slopes open. Many resorts have few to none open. And these vacations start at $10k and go up from there. Mostly non-refundable. As a skier, who goes on family ski vacations, this is actually a pretty depressing big deal. What, sit in your lodge all day instead of shredding the Rocky Mountain peaks. Ugh, not cool. Though, now that I think of it, I'm actually one of those poor souls on January 12 when I'm heading out to take four days of ski lessons in Aspen - 3 weeks is a lot of time for some snow to fall.
Our December has been an eye-opening, 2x4 to the head experience. As I’ve said, a perfect August - early December, and then WHAM, snow storm, single digit weather, more snow, rain storm, single digit weather, more snow, cold… That’s a lot for one month. We have a lot planned for this winter, but if things don’t change I’m scaling back my ambitions a bit. It’s hard on our office staff to continue to pivot every 24 hours, it’s really hard on the guys out there working, and the individual job sites each have their own challenges and since they aren’t right next door in fact spread out over a two hour radius hard to actually know what’s going on with them until someone calls to complain about something, like being stuck or some other emergency.
It also slows our production down, which makes it harder to plan how to keep everyone busy.
Well, enough about our current woes.
Through my annual Christmas party rager and it had a lot of similarities with previous ones including a lack of good photos. Once the party starts, I always forget to get pictures so I have some but nothing that comes close to capturing the essence of the event, which was warm, delicious, fun, crowded, intimate and most importantly, very well-executed.
The menus for non-restrictions, non-meat and then vegans. Not really fair to lump the non-meat eaters in with the lonely vegans.
Regular eaters.
Vegans.
Non-Meat
My abilities as a project manager are so off the charts it’s hard to quantify anymore. I can more of less look at any situation and within a few seconds - like one of those cartoons or illustrations or movie special effects - where you can see the synapses connecting and firing - I have a plan which identifies current status, future goals, real and imagined obstacles, talent and resource landscape to get the job done.
A catered sit-down dinner party with hour+ cocktail hour for 30 is a real event. It’s a lot different than a pot-luck serve yourself event -not better or worse, but just a lot different in terms of expectation. Done well, like all well-done event management, it’s like a symphony of layered parts and efforts, building towards the finale.
We had farmers, actresses, writers, politicians, businesspeople, animal rescuers, teachers and others in attendance, all overlapping in some tangible small ways, but merged and meshed in much larger intangible ways, where conversations yielded many unexpected connections and shared experiences, places and efforts.
As I’ve written about, we got a lot accomplished in the fall of 2025 in terms of putting together deals, locating and buying land, and getting foundations in across 3 counties. But then wham, winter, so now we seek a new path forward that is much more complicated and cherry-picked than before.
It’s a complicated holiday season around my family unit, with the death of my friend and son’s alternate father figure looming large and absent in all plans and observances. The broken traditions, the quiet of the Christmas morning, the reduction of gifts under the tree, the lack of a fire in the wood stove, which was John’s specialty. I’m worried about my son as he quietly and not-so-quietly travels this personal journey of which there are no companions or persons to learn from. It’s a solitary journey, with consequences that are far from predictable or eventually positive as you see in the movies or Hallmark shows. It’s a life and game changer, and what emerges as a person is no foregone conclusion.
My son went out and found a tree for his Mom and their home this Christmas. I don't know how they got it through the door and set up.
I’m off to St Pete’s to the condo I bought in the fall of 2024. The building is a lot whiter than I expected, and definitely older than I expected - almost a 55+ community without any written rules. Maybe that’s St Pete’s in general, not sure. It’s sort of embarrassing to have accidentally bought into The Villages, that famous gigantic FL 55+ community - I’m joking, maybe, but so far, the priorities and dialogue is more like a Sunday morning of Karens than an international cadre of residents with kids and lives. A bunch of retirees is a crowd with a lot of time on their hands. I’m thinking even if it’s not for me - which is not a foregone conclusion - it should be a strong rental option with high rents and serious annual depreciation to help offset some income.
The economy is so weird. I know the impacts of inflation are real, and the media tells us all the time about how people are living paycheck to paycheck, which I have no reason to doubt. But everywhere I’m going things are jammed up - Newark Marriott, sold out. Enterprise Car Rental St Petes, sold out, airplanes at capacity. Can’t explain it one way or another but I’m running into a lot of anecdotal evidence that at least some segment of America is on the move in a big way.
Merry Christmas to all.
We removed the longstanding bunk beds from my Son's room so now it's more grown up for him.
