2016 – The Year In Review

The Gilmartin Chronicles – 2016

-A word about the Christmas cards. I did not put a lot of thought into these. Well,…let’s say I did not put a lot of thought into ordering them. I did chase Keagan around for a picture of her in one of her NUTCRACKER roles. That was the bulk of my effort. That’s her on the card, and she has danced just about every major role in that ballet. You see I am flipping through systems all day long at work, -logging into this, and clicking through that,… data data data. -So it was about a 15 minute series of clicks to get the pic off my phone, onto my Mac, and out to the website as a card. -And! I bought at the volume price break because I was busy, and had to get back to other things and wasn’t thinking it through, so I guess what I am trying to say is that I bought way more cards than there are people I know, such was the frenzy of clicks. -So you might get this card again in a few years in some kind of lazy, cheap Christmas card re-gifting sort of thing. I am warning you now, so you know.

I did not write a newsletter last year. I was kind of in a funk, kind of tired, and barely made it through the obligations of the holidays which means I can honestly report to you that since my last newsletter I have bicycled 10,000 miles. Okay! Complete honesty! -9,821 miles at the time I am writing this. There are a few weeks left in the year, so there is still time to make good on that. If you are thinking to yourself how Matt can ride so many miles and still claim to be busy, the answer to that is that I’ve made it possible to squeeze cycling into the smallest periods of downtime. Say you gotta work around the house in the morning, and be at something in the evening, you can squeeze a ride into that donut hole of time. A free hour here or there turns into another 17-20 miles. It actually fits in nicely between other things, and I have made it possible by almost always having one bike up and running and on the back of my Jeep with cycling gear in the back seat. I’ll come back to this, but on to other things first.

Emerson left for school, so we are down one headcount, and Keagan gets top billing these days. If you have watched the movie DEADPOOL and you remember the Nagasonic Teenage Warrior character, then you know what my conversations are like with Keagan. Stoic and taciturn, Keagan likes to zing me with one liners or sometimes even well-timed one worders, often while staring directly ahead and barely acknowledging my presence. Honestly I don’t know how she does it. I could be laying my best material down that would kill anywhere else, and she barely cracks a smile while I talk to the side of her head. She loves to ignore my affections, but it is all good. She just makes me work for it is all.

Affections from Keagan are like distantly related pieces of data that must be joined to get meaning. For example, she was binging her way through the 1990s series FRIENDS which she loves. She said to me in a flat dispassionate tone, “Chandler reminds me of you”. In a conversation weeks later, I asked her which of the friends was her favorite. She responded “Chandler”. This was too good to pass up! I said, “Keagan, if you say I remind you of Chandler, and Chandler is your favorite character, then if a = b and b = c then by the transitive property you must like me!” To which she said, “Shut up. Whatever”, and yes you ARE correctly imagining her tone. I swear to God, if you freeze dried that moment, chopped it up into a fine powder, and made a tea from that powder, and then soaked a rag in that tea, and then wrung the rag out into a shot glass you might have sense of the demonstrated love this girl bathes me in on a daily basis. It’s okay cuz I am thinking it is all going to come out when I walk her down the aisle someday. Keagan still dances 6 days a week. If it were cycling and not dancing, she would have beaten me in miles. She is doing great in school, and will have many college choices next year, and is truly an easy kid to parent.

Emerson was the family cat-person, and the two cats really miss him being gone. Jaxx our 2 year old male cat has taken to following me everywhere. From the moment I get up to the time I go to bed, that cat follows me around like a dog. He sits on the counter while I shave. He gets on my shoulders if I am on the toilet! (I want a picture of this btw to be displayed next to my casket at my funeral.) If I stop anywhere for even just a few minutes, he is right beside me, on me, or draped over my shoulders, and this cat is very physical with the most aggressive affections like love biting my neck for example. -And not just me! What Jaxx does to the 13 year old female cat, Nori, would get me thrown in jail were I to make the same demonstrations with Theresa. Nori is really getting old. Her hips are going, and I don’t know what we’ll do when she can no longer get to places she wants to be. She is a talker though. She can sit there and talk with you for hours. She’ll answer every word. There was family talk of getting a dog, but as the lone hold out, I can’t see why given the pets we have. I can’t sit down and watch a TV show without Jaxx climbing on my back or trying to rub himself into my skin. The funny thing is, I don’t even like him that much. He’s just decided we’re going to be friends and to hell with my opinion on the matter.

Emerson is away at school, and by away I mean he is a 27 mile bike ride from my house. He lives in the dorms and seems to be fitting in better than he ever did in high school, which makes me very happy for him. Emerson did not like his high school very much, and I am only now beginning to appreciate how it affected him. If you measure him by grades he was an unenthusiastic student in high school, but he was one of these anomalies who blew the admissions tests out of the water. The dichotomy used to frustrate me. I see now that he is right where he should be studying mechanical engineering at CU Denver.

About three years ago when Theresa and I were swamped in getting one kid or another to this activity or that, we really had to make a point of blocking off time to do stuff together. No one much tells 20-something newlyweds in any real way that really sinks in how marriage, especially with children, can seem like an endless series of chores. If more people grasped that, I think more people would opt out. At first it was a monthly date-night where we got away, and as time wore on the dates became less planned and less elaborate but more frequent. So if you want to know how I got so many miles cycling, a big part of that is ‘Friday date night’. Usually I leave my Jeep somewhere so I can drive Theresa home in her car (she has a few cocktails and I don’t drink). I then bike back on Saturday to my Jeep, sometimes encircling the city. This year those have been 40-60 mile rides. Last year they were usually 60-90 mile rides, which is why I am probably 300 miles off last year’s pace.

I didn’t get any fishing in this year, which I need to fix next year. Hunting tags were kind of scarce, and I only drew for pronghorn. I took my friend Andrew E. with me to give him a taste of what it was like. I really made it look easy for him. Thirty minutes after sunrise it was pop, drop, and chop at about 150 yards. It doesn’t get any easier than that. Andrew and Emerson have the same sense of humor hunting, so he was a good pick. I’ll have to have him along next year and introduce him to Uli. Andrew got half my haul for coming along. We’re looking up sausage recipes.

Eight hundred miles of my mileage came this year in what was the third annual California coastal ride. This year my friend Andrew W. (not E.) and I began in Oregon and road 800 of the 1100 miles to San Diego. Great ride, warts and all!. The stretch between L.A. and San Diego was a first for us, and if I lived in the southern California area, I would ride that stretch a couple of times a year it is so nice. What a gorgeous stretch of coastline! I think if I were to ride the state length again, I would make a point of camping more along the coast. That was such a great experience. The GoPro was uncooperative for most of the trip, which I really wish I had when on the last day when we passed some other cyclists out for a Sunday ride. Andrew W. is great on these rides. For the last three years it has been a great opportunity to catch up during what always works out to be a spiritual revival of sorts. Andrew got me a really cool hat for the trip. I got him something for Christmas.

Well, that’s the year 2016, or at least as much as I can write about the year. There is much to get back to. Have a wonderful holiday season. Let’s round things out with the quote of the year, on being real.

“‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’”

― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

The Gilmartins