2005: not bad, considering. Let’s reflect. Great times with family and friends both new and classic. New responsibilities at my job with my company’s real estate conference division. I traveled to Ireland and California for the first time. I got my own apartment. Joe and Andrea visited, and I went back home for the best Thanksgiving with the whole family. I ate much great new BBQ. I survived terror threats, backpack searches and a transit strike.
Thinking about which entries I like best from 2005, they’re clearly ones in which I attempted to write more creatively instead of relating events in flatter journal style. Among the former are the one about the fire drill and the one about the food pyramid and Katie’s cats and the one about the raccoon.
I am engrossed and amazed by this city’s history, architecture and forgotten places, so any of those entries are favorites, particularly the historical review of my previous apartment on the Upper West Side, a brief history of Penn Station, the Marble Cemeteries and the color-coding of the subway system.
I savored writing my Ireland travelogue (scroll down to August 17-24), which you should check out, again or for the first time, because I just filled it out with an additional 15 photos taken on that trip.
As for my New Year’s resolution from a year ago, by the letter of the law, I failed. The count is 32 meals, which, even if you count the stray reviews I didn’t include when I was adhering to the one-place-per-week rule (such as Cafe Yaffa and the first of what was to be many trips to Celeste), isn’t 52. Someone pointed out to me that the whole point of the 52 Meals Project was to get out to try new foods at new places in places of the city I’d never been, and in that respect, the exercise was a success. And I must admit, by far the greatest number of questions and verbal comments about my blog this year concerned the 52 Meals Project. I’ll give it another try. Bear with me. And good fortune to you in 2006.