Hello again everyone,

The blog was pretty dramatically redesigned this year in support of my Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast series, and so I’ve decided in the spirt of giving things a new look I’m going to put all of my long-running ‘Top X Tweets/Posts of 20X’ series here in one place rather than linking backwards through more than a dozen old blog posts. I will also standardize the formatting while I’m at it.

A quick recap of what you are about to see?

In 2010 a friend persuaded me to join Twitter back when it was still a pretty cool place, and as an end-of-the-year retrospective somewhere between Christmas and New Year I came up with a ‘Top 10 Twitter Tweets of 2010’ blog post. (For the record, this was also back when blogs were still almost cool…) The same time next year I did a ‘My Top 11 Tweets of 2011’ roundup, because I thought that was fun, and I continued to do an annual round-up with increasing numbers until I left Twitter in 2023. As silly as it sounds, I had resolved to quit Twitter mid-year but hung on just for the sake of having one last full year for ‘My Favourite 23 Tweets of 2023 (The Final List in the Series).’

In August of 2024 I joined Bluesky and did a ‘My Favourite 24 Posts of 2024 (This Series is now about Bluesky)’ post drawn from just four months of content. Today will be ‘My Favourite 25 Bluesky Posts of 2025’ drawn from a full twelve months of posts. When this year’s roundup is done, as promised, I’ll also include all the other years working chronologically backwards below it too. Even if I am in a minority of one, I still quite enjoy looking back at them and will find it handy in the future to have the whole collection together.

Anyway, while putting together a complete list and standardizing the formatting, I sometimes added brief explanatory note in italics about what may have changed from year to year. Many tweets/posts also were written with little comments that I will do in red to make it easy to differentiate from the annual context notes. I did briefly toy with the idea of adjusting those comments to be relevant to this new aggregated posting in 2025, but too many of them are just of their time and place. If they are at all confusing, please remember to read them as if I were writing them in late December of whatever year the list is from.

With all that preamble out of the way, let’s get into it. Ready?

My Favourite 25 Bluesky Posts of 2025

 

January 3, 2025

The TikTok algorithm decided to put me on a stereotypical ‘on the spectrum’ list this morning. I keep getting videos from a 1970s BBC show where old men build model trains, as well as a printer telling me how to organize letterpress type trays.

Yes, I watched them all with interest. Why do you ask?

 

January 11, 2025

This is the first time in my dog’s life where her morning walk has been across virgin snow deep enough to sink into. You don’t think about how much of a dog’s walk is checking in with other dogs’ scents until you watch your pet’s confused and disappointed body language when there’s no nose news.

 

February 10, 2025

Visited my family down in Chatham over the weekend. As I’m loading up the car to come home, my 4-year-old nephew says, “Goodbye, Mommy!”

“I’m not your mother. I’m your Uncle Geoff,” I say.

“Oh, sorry. You look like my Mommy.”

My theory? It must be the beard.

 

April 1, 2025

So I just did an onsite interview for my company’s business podcast with the nicest man, and as I’m walking him out of the studio he asks me, “So when did you discover you’re great at this?”

What a lovely compliment. I’m warm all the way down to my toes.

(I did not know it at the time, but this was among the last interviews I would ever do for my long-running, modestly successful business podcast. I really was proud of it towards the end, and this quiet, unsolicited compliment is how I am going to remember that part of my working life.)

 

April 3, 2025

A month ago I was in Costco. A little girl —maybe 4 or 5 years old— was walking slowly down an aisle of stuff. Every ten steps she would pause and say to her father, “Papa? Papa, it’s my birthday…” Before walking on.

The man told me her birthday was two weeks earlier. I think about this daily.

(For the record, I had to fib this slightly to fit into Bluesky’s character count. The man said it to someone who was shopping with him, not to me directly.)

 

April 16, 2025

While talking about the pyramids of Egypt last night I mentioned I had recently read a great book on the subject. My coworker says, “Of course you have. You probably have a book about doorknobs. Go on, tell me the history of the door knob.”

I felt a sudden pang. I don’t know enough about doorknobs.

 

April 25, 2025

I’ve seen a lot of hockey fights in my life. Sometimes even bench-clearing brawls. I can’t think of the last time a door swung open by mistake and two players and a linesmen went into an empty bench, fighting there while their teams squared off on ice. Quite a game the Habs and Capitals are having!

 

May 11, 2025

Listen, if you don’t break your wife’s trowel while helping her get her garden in, were you really trying? Like, were you giving it all you’ve got?

You’re stronger than a trowel; so am I, so we can all agree nobody did anything wrong here. If we’re guilty of anything, it is of being too helpful.

 

May 20, 2025

I was telling my wife about a guy I met once who tours as part of a modestly successful punk band and struggles to find a day job that lets him be on the road 40-50 days a year.

“You really do just talk to strangers for fun, don’t you?” She asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s my nightmare…” She muttered.

 

June 4, 2025

I’ve reached that age where I am absolutely beginning to silver, but when I step out of the shower, my damp hair is as dark as it was ten years ago.

It’s a strange thing to see your younger self looking back at you from a mirror for a few minutes every day, but only when you’re wet and naked.

 

June 13, 2025

When I buy a bag of apples, it has never occurred to me to open that bag of apples by removing the thing holding the top shut. No. The right way to get at apples is to think like a mouse in the pantry: Tear a hole in the bag, get in there, take what you want, and get out quick! (My wife hates this.)

 

June 17, 2025

An older friend was offering me some welcome advice. “Look, you’re a smart guy. I know it. You know it. But how old are you?”

“42,” I said.

“Okay, so I’ve seen three thousand more suns in the sky than you have, so take it from me…”

What a terrific way to describe life experience.

 

June 24, 2025

I am the waterer of our balcony herb garden. The position is unofficial, unpaid, and thankless, but it has somehow fallen to me.

Anyway, all this is to say I speak with authority when I denounce our dill plant as the biggest drama queen it’s ever been my misfortune to be tasked with keeping alive.

 

July 11, 2025

There’s something just a little subversive about a woman wearing a ‘Plant Mom’ ballcap while spending the day with her two very much alive and not-plant children…

 

July 24, 2025

I’ve never been to Prague, but I worry I’m the sort of person who would start pronouncing it ‘Praha’ if I did so.

Other European cities’ local pronunciations don’t bother me. I’ve been to Barcelona without calling it ‘Barthelonya,’ but something about Prague calls a ruinous siren song to me.

 

August 4, 2025

My father-in-law is named Frank. I’m visiting him this week. The four-year-old living next door saw me out walking my dog this morning and asked me, “Do you know Fwank?”

It was such an adorable mispronunciation, I worry I’m going to start calling him ‘Fwank’ too…

 

August 16, 2025

I did a lot of camping as a kid. Like multiple trips a year, every year.

Now at 42 there is something so bizarre about me being responsible for the stove. What do you mean I’m cooking for seven people? This is an adult’s job. I’m not even supposed to touch that thing. Rules are rules.

 

September 15, 2025

My weekly trivia team won Round 1 tonight. The prize was a pitcher of beer. We also won Round 3, where the prize was some money off our bill. My wife and I enjoyed an evening out with friends for a grand total of 44 cents, thanks to our quick wits. (We tipped as if we’d won nothing, of course.)

(When I did karaoke regularly before marrying a woman who doesn’t care for karaoke, I tweeted regularly about that hobby. I am as passionate about pub trivia as karaoke, but of course you’re not allowed to have your phone out when you play. I think this post is a fair reflection of the fact that we do very, very well. I will let it represent all the other posts I did not highlight or did not get a chance to make about this group activity I did almost every Monday of 2025.)

 

October 1, 2025

Wait, the snack ‘Fiddle Faddle’ is just popcorn with peanuts? Why did I assume it was something to do with eating the garbage parts of animals deep fried until they were unrecognizably edible in a probably delicious but definitely life-shortening way?

 

October 2, 2025

My wife is so good at guessing how much our Costco cart will cost before checkout, it’s not even worth playing the game. She’s always within $10.

The crazy thing, though? She’s not a person who does sums in her head. She’s not doing the math. She just dominates on pure ‘Price is Right’ intuition.

 

October 14, 2025

Our third wedding anniversary is coming up. That’s the ‘glass’ anniversary. My wife collects glassware. I get messages all the time about different things she’s adding to her wish list.

She’s also asking me for gift ideas for myself. Glass? What do I want made out of glass? You can’t read that…

 

October 28, 2025
In all relationships there is the person who thinks food expires immediately, and the person who thinks expiration dates are merely suggestions at best, and legally required falsehoods at worst.

My wife is the former. I’m the later.

We throw away so much food before it poisons me…

 

November 2, 2025

I have said it in jest a couple of times, but I really do mean it. I’m a #Toronto sports fan. Losing doesn’t hurt me that much. We made it to the #WorldSeries. The World Series!

I’m both proud and delighted with the #BlueJays. They put on a great show in and out all season and post-season long.

(My wife and I watched most of the back half of the Blue Jays’ regular season and all of the post-season in 2025. I posted about it a lot, as Bluesky is finally getting to a place where you can do live commentary on sports with other sports fans. That’s where microblogging really shines. Things happen at just about the pace you can comment on them and share with other fans watching the same thing. It’s some of the best social media has to offer, and I had a lot of great little posts about specific plays, funny things that happened, games that ran into extra innings into the wee hours. There was an ongoing series of posts where I documented just how many hits, runs, and grand slams my wife only got to see in replay because she stepped out of the room just before it happened. I had so much fun with this World Series run, but to highlight any of those would require a note like this to give that one context, and in the end, the Blue Jays did not win. As a long-suffering Leafs fan, I was not crushed. The nerves other sports fans feel when it comes to disappointment at the highest level has been burned out of me years ago. It was a great run. I enjoyed it immensely. I look forward to next year. That’s how I feel, and that’s what I said, and let this post be the stand-in for a lot of probably funnier and more energetic posts you just would have had to see in real time to get them. This is for posterity. I think it’s well said.)

 

December 11, 2025

Wrapping my wife’s Xmas presents. Is EVERYTHING I got her so far fragile? Normally I hide the fragile stuff tucked away at the back of the tree.

Right now I can’t put anything up front where it might get bumped.

Well, nothing else for it. I’ve got to go buy her some sturdy books. My hands are tied.

 

December 22, 2025

I went to a friend’s party. He tells me his young daughter complains adult conversations are boring. Quote: “All you do is talk about taxes and Donald Trump.”

30 minutes later, we’d talked about life insurance and how good the return policy is at Costco.

Adult conversations really are boring, huh?

 

Honourable Mention Two-Parters:

(A few years earlier I started including honourable mentions for various reasons. In 2022 I including two-parter honourable mentions, and I’m going to do that here as well to highlight a couple of posts that on their own would not make my Top 25 short list, but go from good to great because of an additional comment I added to the original.)

 

September 22, 2025

I am an excellent typist, a fine writer, and a confident speller… On a keyboard.

More and more of my writing happens on my phone, and I begrudge it. I begrudge the typos that fat thumbs and predictive text and autocorrect put between my actual thoughts and the words I send out into the world.

+

Would you believe I had to delete and repost this because of a typo? Because I would…

 

November 19, 2025

In most things our dog is not a very bright bulb. I say it with love, but her brain is the size and smoothness of a clementine.

She is brilliant at risk management, though.

We’ve gotten her ear drops to deal with some inflammation? Second application, she’s already clocked the bottle is trouble.

+

Fortunately, in a fight, flight, or freeze scenario, one of the fastest dogs I’ve ever seen thinks staying very still on the couch is a better tactic to avoid ear drops than running away faster than I could possibly catch her. As I said, smooth-brain the size of a clementine…

(That’s it for this year’s new content. I’m rather proud to spot my 2025 ‘best of’ included eight direct mentions of my wife, plus two more for our dog and our extended family. I guess I’m doing something right. Anyway, as promised, rather than link back to a bunch of older posts, I’ll put the whole series below in reverse chronological order and with standardized formatting.)

 

—

 

My Favourite 24 Posts of 2024 (The Series is now about Bluesky)

(I joined Bluesky on August 2nd of 2024 after seven months without a microblogging social media outlet. It’s worth saying that means these 24 highlighted posts are only drawing from ~400 posts in total on the new platform. Still, I was glad to be back into microblogging, and if I’m putting together a complete review of my annual lists to date, this partial one is as worthy of inclusion as the 2010 list that was also being drawn from a partial year.)

 

August 2, 2024

I know this place isn’t Twitter, but Twitter isn’t Twitter anymore either. Maybe this thing will one day be even better. Wouldn’t that be shockingly nice?

(As of December 2024, this first post on Bluesky remains my most popular to date. I’m told Bluesky doesn’t have an algorithm, but they must have some kind of ‘new account’ bias, because this little comment of hope for the future got 49 likes, five comments, and a retweet —repost? I’m still picking up the new terminology…)

 

August 14, 2024

We’re going camping this weekend. The forecast is calling for some light rain, and my wife doesn’t want to get wet. She is sending me links to increasingly good tarps. I mean, GOOD tarps. If she murders me and buries me in the woods one day, I hope she wraps me up in something like this…

 

August 16, 2024

I went to buy a tarp last night at Canadian Tire. Think about that for a minute. Do you know how many places the tarps might be in a store like Canadian Tire where half their offerings are tarp-activity adjacent? I finally asked someone, “Where are the tarps?” It turns out they have a tarp aisle.

(Believe it or not, this wasn’t the only tarp talk I did on my Bluesky channel. I couldn’t tell you why this topic so captured my imagination in the first days of my new social media channel. I guess it felt good to write about something so ephemeral and ordinary again? I enjoy these two about an equal amount, so I’m highlighting them both. There were other candidates. You’re welcome for not including them too. I should also say for my non-Canadian audience, Canadian Tire is a department store with automotive, hardware, sports, camping, fishing, leisure, and housewares sectors. Probably half of what they sell, you could argue they could put a tarp in that aisle…)

 

August 25, 2024

My father-in-law is going out to breakfast with a friend. My wife spots his phone is still on the coffee table as he’s getting ready to go. “You’re not going to take your phone?” She asks.

“No. God no. Why would I?” He says, genuinely mystified.

They don’t make’em like that anymore.

(I really do enjoy my in-laws. Sometimes little episodes of pleasant domesticity and family life should make these lists, especially when they speak to a person’s character in a nice way.)

 

September 7, 2024

“There is a medium-weight plaid jacket that every Canadian man gets at some point in the later half of his life that he then wears every autumn until the day he dies,” I muse to myself, observing a pedestrian as I drive. I then look down at my sleeve stretching out towards the steering wheel. “Oh!”

(I remember this is the first time the 300-character limit of Bluesky actually felt confining. It was 20 characters more than the Twitter limit, so for the first month I had the account, it felt like I had ‘extra’ room, but this post I really did go back and forth trying to make the full thing fit. Here’s the slightly longer version I put up on Facebook, to show what I was trying to say:

“There is a certain type of medium-weight plaid jacket that every Canadian man gets at some point in the later half of his life that he then wears every autumn until the day he dies,” I muse to myself, observing a pedestrian as I drive through the grocery store parking lot. I then look down at the sleeve of my plaid jacket stretching out towards the steering wheel. “Oh!”

I normally wouldn’t choose something that stands out at me as ‘not quite right’ for a Top list, but I thought it does make an interesting illustration of the joy and also challenge of making some things fit into the arbitrary limits.)

 

September 9, 2024

My wife has me proofreading something official she has to fill in. She just used the word concomitant correctly and appropriately in a technical context. From this I deduce:

1) I probably don’t actually need to proof this.

2) I married a smart woman.

3) I should up my vocab game…

(It is always worth saying given the opportunity that I am very proud of my wife. I should also explain here that as she is not on Bluesky, I do not refer to her by name. That’s just one of my rules about social media.)

 

September 29, 2024

I handwashed my dishes from 18 to 38. For the last three years –and hopefully for the rest of my life– I have had a dishwasher. I love loading and unloading the dishwasher. This is not a chore. This is an anti-chore. Every time I spend 5 minutes doing this, I know I’ve actually gained time.

 

October 16, 2024

My trivia team went to an alternate, quieter pub trivia night this evening. Attendance was thin, so we split into two teams, still coming in first and third.

I spent most of my 20s and 30s being great at pub karaoke. If my 30s and 40s are eras of dominating pub trivia, I’ll wear it with pride.

 

October 25, 2024

One of my quirks when I write work copy? I highlight what I’m happy with in green, what still needs polishing in yellow, and what needs to be done from scratch in red. My word docs look like fireworks to anyone looking over my shoulder, but that’s okay. I love watching the project go solid green.

(A fun thing about this post? I had a journalist reach out to me, thanking me for saying this. I don’t quite know why it resonated with him so much, but his comment made it worthy of this list.)

 

October 27, 2024

I took a nap. (A rare treat.)

I dreamt I decorated my desk at work for Halloween, including a rather realistic fake spider. Alas, it attracted a number of other spiders, either to fight or mate. I could not tell the difference through their frustration.

It ruined my nap, to be honest with you.

 

October 31, 2024

My wife asked me to buy a baguette today for dinner, ideally in the morning in case they’re sold out by workday’s end. I’ve now walked into the office with a baguette for the first time I think ever, & I have to tell each coworker in turn this is not related to a Halloween costume. It’s just bread.

 

November 7, 2024

My two eldest nephews have started collecting nickels. Next time I visit them, I’m going to take a few dollars worth of nickels out of a bank, and we’re going to play a game with a map of the world where they can win nickels (and learn geography. Gotta start’em young!).

 

November 12, 2024

My wife loves Pizza Pizza’s garlic dipping sauce. We make our own pizzas at home, but we can’t replicate the sauce. Today on my lunch break I bought eight of them. The clerk nodded in a ‘this isn’t normal but I’m super busy and you’re the only one not ordering food on the lunch rush’ kind of way.

 

November 16, 2024

While driving near the Humber a dog crossed the road in front of me, followed by another one. I slowed down to get a good look at what I thought must be someone’s stray pets. Two very healthy looking coyotes looked back at me with a, “What’s your problem?” expression on their faces.

#Toronto

(I included the hashtag to make it clear where this happened. I imagine there are a few Humber rivers in the world. My wife and I now own a home on the banks of the one that flows through the west end of Toronto.)

 

November 22, 2024

It’s been a great few days in San Diego. Last night my coworkers and I went out to celebrate. An Irish coworker decided to call it a night early, and he went around to each of us to offer, ‘An Irish goodbye.’

That was the least Irish goodbye I’ve ever seen.

 

November 22, 2024

I wonder to what extent Jazz musicians look at Christmas the way chefs look at the brunch service?

No matter their skills or artistry, they’re kind of getting railroaded into some very specific, simple things where originality will not be rewarded beyond some strict preset limits.

 

December 1, 2024

I admire standup comedy as an art form, and the writer in me thinks I could probably write a decent, ‘tight five.’

My wife, upon hearing this ambition years ago, said, “I say this with love: You are not damaged enough to do standup comedy.”

She meant it as a compliment. I think about that a lot.

 

December 5, 2024

A dump truck parked outside my condo. Among my dog’s many fears is a true terror of diesel engines. She was awakened by the sound of her living nightmare. She went and hid under the kitchen table until the truck was gone. I get it. Monsters never think to look under the table. That’s just science.

 

December 7, 2024

“Why don’t you cut your toenails?” She asks.

“I do! Twice a year,” I say.

“Do it more often!” She says.

“What if I’m outdoors barefoot & need to climb a rockface?” I ask.

“That never happens!” She protests.

“It only has to happen once, and then the habits of a lifetime will pay off!” I enthuse.

(From time to time my wife has suggested my social media posts paint her in a bad light while casting me in a good one. Of course that is never my intention. I hope this little window into our friendly banter makes it clear, sometimes —perhaps even often— I am the one worthy of derision.)

 

December 13, 2024

We’re trying to empty out our freezer so we can stock it up again for all the cooking we will do when company comes for the holidays. My task today was to eat all of the leftover potato-leek soup I made and froze back in September.

It was too much soup.

I’m more soup than man now.

Pray for me.

(I later replied to this post with an addendum:

My wife tells me I could have eaten the soup across two sittings. I misunderstood the assignment…

Which I think takes this post from good to great in terms of memories I will enjoy reflecting upon in the future. I thought the soup was at risk of being thrown out if I didn’t eat it before she got home. She was very confused why I was walking around, clutching my belly and groaning, and why there wasn’t any leftovers in the fridge…)

 

December 15, 2024

Yesterday at a party we were rolling a 20-sided die to choose drinks (it was quite a party). Someone won a butterscotch schnapps & spiced rum shot. To me that’s a Burt Reynolds. That’s not what the bar called it. Has the shot been renamed because Burt is gone and young people don’t know him anymore?

 

December 19, 2024

I’m told the Murder Hornet has been eradicated in the US?

I think we’ve all seen that horror movie before: As the credits roll, we pan and zoom over to a grave, closer and closer, then bam! A grasping hand emerges from the soil, promising a sequel. (If the first Murder Hornet made enough money).

 

December 19, 2024

I just said, “Brachial tubes.”

“Bronchial tubes,” my wife corrected me, catching me dead to rights in the wrong.

“Beg pardon. Bronchial. It’s like brachiosaurus versus brontosaurus,” I quip.

I feel like coming up with that off the cuff should count as being right the first time.

 

December 23, 2024

I woke up this morning with a cut on one of my knuckles. I’m trying to figure out what happened. So far, my working theory is I’m a sleepwalking bare-knuckled boxer. I enjoy the idea that somnambulant me has edgy, athletic hobbies. Good for him.

 

—

 

 

My Favourite 23 Tweets of 2023 (The Final List in the Series)

(I should say at the top for this year, I thought it was the last one I was ever doing because I was quitting Twitter, so there’s a lot more notes and ‘looking backwards’ commentary than you will see elsewhere. I started off 2023’s list with an honourable mention that served double duty as a public announcement:)

 

December 21, 2023

More and more I get less and less out of Twitter.

After 13+ years, I’ve decided Dec 31, 2023 will be my last day as an active user. I’ll keep my account online —maybe I even tweet a couple of times a year— but I’ll be deleting the app off my phone and bookmark off my browser.

(I went on to say I only stayed on Twitter as long as I did because I enjoy having these lists enough to want one last addition to the collection. I wondered if I would ever switch to Mastodon or Threads or Bluesky. I complained about what had happened to Twitter. Then I got into the list.)

 

January 2, 2023

For Christmas I got a lovely warm plaid shirt with elbow patches. When I wear it, I speak of myself in the third person using the nickname “Patch” and prompt my wife to call me that. She is horrified but also slightly amused, and that’s the line I like to walk with her sometimes.

(As I was winnowing down this list, I had quite a number of back-and-forths with my wife that I wanted to highlight. Most did not make the final cut, but I enjoy having this one up at the top setting the tone.)

 

January 3, 2023

Eleven days out of the office. Did I think to get a haircut in any of that time? Absolutely not. I feel like one of those sheep who wanders up into the hills at shearing time and is discovered years later, more wool than beast.

 

January 19, 2023

Today’s Twitter Confession:

Part of me thinks pens belong to the universe.

Another bigger part of me thinks if I have ever used a pen, that’s my pen. Even if it used to be your pen at one point, if I’ve used it, it is forevermore my pen, and I resent you for wanting it back.

(I only did the ‘Today’s Twitter Confession’ bit maybe 20 times in 13 years, but I always enjoyed them. This one was inspired by my admittedly bad habit of having sticky fingers when we go to pub trivia nights. If the host or one of my teammates does not collect their pens in a timely fashion at the end of the evening, then those pens joined the collection of my pens in my backpack, quickly becoming ’my’ pens. How dare anyone ask for them back in the future?)

 

April 15, 2023

A plaque I saw on a street in Fort Worth prompted me to look up Wyatt Earp on Wikipedia. A lot more ‘owned a brothel’ and ‘worked as a pimp’ in his bio than I expected. Like a lot more. Too much, really. I feel like he’s famous for a very specific 5% of his life’s work…

(I encourage everyone to look him up. It’s quite an eye-opening read!)

 

April 29, 2023

The Leafs advance to the Second Round! The Leafs advance to the Second Round! It’s been 19 years. I was a 21-year-old university student the last time this happened!

I don’t know what to do with this energy. I did as a kid, but I don’t now. Do I… Do I make loud noises?

(The sports fan side of myself is something I mostly keep quiet about, and why not? I am a Torontonian who watches hockey and baseball. Justifiable opportunities to express pride have been few and far between in my adult lifetime. The Leafs made the second-round of the post-season for the first time in almost two decades on April 29^th. For me, that was like them winning the Stanley Cup.)

 

May 11, 2023

A few years ago I got my father a ticket to the Hockey Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Bobby Orr was there. My father was too nervous to ask to shake his hand.

“Dad, the guy was literally there to shake people’s hands!”

“He’s Bobby Orr. I didn’t want to bother him.”

(I mentioned this story in a quoted retweet of this post by up-and-coming Canadian historian Craig Baird. Craig has been one of the few remaining highlights of my last year or two on Twitter. I will continue to follow his podcast, his Facebook content, and I believe he is now also on TikTok. I have no doubt someday he will be in the front ranks of our generation of Canadian historians, and I will be able to look back fondly on when he and I used to engage with one another on Twitter.)

 

May 23, 2023

My grandmother turns 98 this August. My aunt got her an Amazon Echo Dot. My grandmother thinks she’s living in the future now. There’s a ‘thing’ in her house that tells her the weather whenever she asks and plays Charley Pride on demand. She’s basically in heaven.

 

May 23, 2023

Godzilla is a burned-out workaholic with no social life, but when his car breaks down in a charming small town —trapping him there for Easter weekend while he waits for a spare part— he finds love and gets his groove back.

Then he destroys the small town. He’s still Godzilla.

(This was in response to a social media account promoting an upcoming Godzilla movie. It asked people in one tweet to pitch the plot of their perfect kaiju —a Japanese giant monster— movie. I immediately wondered if I could fit a ‘Godzilla in a Hallmark Movie’ plot into 280 characters and was delighted when I managed to do so. Unfortunately, the tweet I was replying to was taken down. I am confident enough people said enough negative things to spoil it for everyone else. A social media account trying to have some fun and promote a film found itself a lightning rod presumably for some pretty hateful stuff that is becoming the norm on Twitter, and so the tweet was deleted. Ah, well. I’m still happy with my little Hallmark movie tweet.)

 

May 31, 2023

I’ve just learned the king cobra is not considered a cobra. My first feeling was one of consternation, followed by unshakeable certainty that it’s the other cobras that need to be renamed. The king cobra owns that brand. It’s like Ray Kroc pushing out the McDonald brothers.

 

June 13, 2023

My wife is having some dental work done. I have been driving the ‘You should schedule the appointment for Tooth Hurty (2:30)’ joke into the ground, and I have no regrets. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a load-bearing pun that I will lean on with all my weight with confidence.

 

June 17, 2023

“Will you miss me?” My wife asks.

“Of course,” I say.

“Will you think of me while drinking sangria in the Spanish sun?” She asks.

“No,” I say.

“NO!?” She protests.

“I’ll find some shade,” I explain.

(I went to Barcelona for a work trip, and I persuaded my very understanding wife to allow me to stay for two extra days to explore a city I’d never been to before after the project was done. She wished she could have gone herself, but we had just bought our first home, money was tight, and we wouldn’t have been able to make it a proper vacation even if she was able to join me. Anyway, this was how we said goodbye before I left, and it is something I would like to remember in the future. It’s not quite banter at the August 3, 2021 ‘Should we get a llama?’ level, but I was still pleased to come up with something so teasingly affectionate in the moment.)

 

June 24, 2023

You wouldn’t think at 40 I’d still be getting new mispronunciations of my name –how many ways can you even try Geoff?– but this Uber driver just asked if I was, “Goy-ffffft?” He was so far off, I didn’t immediately understand his question.

(This was the Uber Driver giving me a ride home from the airport after returning from Barcelona. I remain baffled how he got Goy-ffffft from Geoff, but bless him if that doesn’t earn him a spot on this list. I’ll remember him now until the day I die.)

 

July 13, 2023

Back in my university days I knew a guy whose beer of choice was Labatt 50. He once tucked a bottle in each side of his mouth and walked around saying, “I’m a walrus!”

He’s a bank manager now.

(Strictly speaking I believe he holds a senior position responsible for loaning people millions of dollars without actually being a bank manager, but sometimes you need to shorten things to fit in a tweet. Meanwhile, it is a true story with an amusing twist that I am rather fond of and reflects my penchant for fun anecdotes nicely.)

 

July 30, 2023

My eldest nephew is four and a half. He greets me from the door as I am exiting my car. “Hello Uncle Geoff! Have you brought me any presents that are toys?”

First, nice to have a reputation as a gift-giver. Second? Someone gave this kid a non-toy gift, and he never forgave them.

(My sister is embarrassed by this incident. I look forward to my nephew one day being old enough to also have some sense of shame about it. I, meanwhile, think it’s pretty funny.)

 

August 8, 2023

Early morning office banter mentioned the resale value of Taylor Swift concert tickets. An older coworker chimes in, “Young people will pay that much for shitty music? Something wrong with the young generation. The meteor can’t come soon enough…”

A new turn of phrase to me!

(For the record, my wife is a fan, and I have now listened to enough of Swift’s music to agree she is clearly a very talented singer-songwriter worthy of being celebrated for a lot of great qualities. Meanwhile, ‘The meteor can’t come soon enough…’ is working its way into my frequently used turns of phrase, so let’s also appreciate my older coworker’s talent for curmudgeonly bon mots.)

 

August 24, 2023

My grandmother is 98 today.

If I live to be 98, my 4-year-old nephew will be 62 when he wishes me a happy birthday. What an incredible thought.

Happy birthday to her, and many more!

 

October 4, 2023

I cut my toe yesterday. While waiting for my wife (aka ‘The Breaker of Wine Glasses’) to help me get the bleeding under control I said aloud, “Direct pressure. Elevate. Rest. RED Backwards.”

I took First Aid courses as a kid. Funny the things you remember by rote decades later.

 

October 5, 2023

I’ve been a TD Bank customer since I was five. My first account book was blue with a puppy on it. From then to now, with all its products for customer convenience, has TD ever used the slogan, “Ta Da!”?

I’ll take my Clio Award & advertising retainer cheque at their convenience.

(Strangely enough, it is occurring to me I’ve mentioned the Clio Awards on my Twitter several times, including one that made my Top 20 of 2020 from December 9^th, although I think this one is better. I wonder what it is about the Clio Awards that gets me to name-drop it so frequently? I’ve never seen the show, nor could I name you a single winner without some educated guesswork…)

 

October 19, 2023

There’s a podcast I want to hear about where Crypto goes from here, but I want to listen to it from a place of schadenfreude, and I worry algorithms will mistake me for and market to me as a Crypto Bro if I download it. I feel like there should be an ‘explain yourself’ option…

(I almost didn’t tweet this for fear of online backlash. If you were making a Venn Diagram of the kinds of people who are making Twitter a less enjoyable place for me, the Crypto Bro circle would have a big catchment area. That said —do I dare say fortunately?— I would never consider paying to use Twitter, so by and large my Tweets are now only visible to my followers, many of whom abandoned the social media channel before me. I don’t believe this tweet came to the attention of the kinds of people who would spend too much of their free time explaining why crypto-currency is great and I’m just not smart enough to follow their example and put my perfectly good money into their unregulated multi-level marketing scheme, or similar twaddle.)

 

November 5, 2023

Me: “I fully support cloning mammoths, but one day –like 20 years from now– I want to eat one.”

My wife: “That is like the darkest thing you’ve ever said.”

Me: “What? Haven’t you ever wondered why they went extinct? I bet they taste delicious! We should farm them like bison.”

(I didn’t have room to include this in the tweet, but I went on to explain the ‘Black Hole’ theory to my wife. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, some witty paleontologist or anthropologist has suggested the world’s Ice Age megafauna disappeared into a black hole… The one between people’s noses and chins. Anyway, I am a fan of the theory, and am happy to share it around.)

 

November 30, 2023

How much has my social media landscape changed in the last year? I first heard Henry Kissinger was dead on TikTok…

…TikTok?!

(My wife got me into TikTok. The more I look at it, the more I think this is where social media has to go. It’s a perfect combination of amateur-generated content for all sorts of audiences and mysterious algorithms driving the right eyeballs to the right products with the right advertising. With a billion pairs of eyeballs already on it, my only quibble is its connection to the Chinese government, but is that so much more concerning than Zuckerberg controlling Facebook or Musk controlling Twitter? Other than Wikipedia, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with an online staple that doesn’t have someone behind the scenes who I wish wasn’t benefiting from my engagement with it on some level…)

 

December 26, 2023

I just saw a YouTube ad for a Mitsubishi SUV that ended with the tagline, “Mitsubishi Motors: Change Your Mind.”

Not since the days of, “Have You Driven a Ford Lately?” Have I so clearly heard a desperate PR team fighting tooth and nail against a brand’s negative reputation.

(I spent about 30 minutes after seeing the ad Googling around looking for the tagline elsewhere. It may be just for that model of SUV, or it may be just for YouTube ads? Whatever the case, I do enjoy thinking about why advertising works the way it does, and sometimes you can just feel the writers room’s frustration breathing out of the end result. Should this be included in my final list ever? Will it age better than some of the stuff from six months ago that I decided shouldn’t make the cut? I can’t say. This always comes up with December posts. Today, I’m enjoying it, and I guess I’m going to remember it for a long time now.)

 

December 27, 2023

One of the first things I did on Twitter 13+ years ago was bemoan that Bernard Cornwell didn’t have an account (he now does); one of the last things I’ll do is tweet at Lawrence Block and get a response. I’ve bookended my time here wanting to connect to the writers on my shelves.

(Since deciding to leave Twitter, I’ve been struggling with what my last tweet at the end of this list might look like. For a while, I thought it was going to be the honourable mention up at the top, so I’m rather happy when the final list came together it included two entries since that Tweet. I am especially happy to end on this note. I really did wish that Bernard Cornwell was on Twitter as one of my very first tweets. It even made my Top 10 of 2010, a list that I have always thought about putting an asterisk to because I joined Twitter with only three months left on the calendar year. Anyway, I spent most of Boxing Day reading Lawrence Block’s A Writer Prepares. He had mentioned it on Twitter, and I told him I’d put it on my Christmas list. I figured, “Why not telling him I’m enjoying it and wish him a Happy New Year?” as one of my final tweets. I did so, and that 80-something lifelong writer responded. That’s the magic of Twitter that you don’t see very often at all anymore. I’m very happy to be wrapping up my time on that social media platform in that way.)

 

—

 

 

My Favourite 22 Tweets of 2022

 

February 2, 2022

In the childhood baseball taunt, “We want a pitcher, not a belly-itcher! We want a catcher, not a belly-scratcher!” What exactly is going on? Is there a rash going around? Is the crowd saying the catcher should help his itchy teammate, or not, or are these two unrelated problems?

(Admittedly an odd entry to start my annual list. When I tweeted it, I didn’t know this would be the first one that I continue to enjoy almost a year later. January had a few tweets short-listed, but they were slice-of-life things that I have done elsewhere better. This is a one-off random thought that tickles me, and isn’t that the whole point of a microblogging site like Twitter? Where else can you write something like this and consider it a worthy contribution to a larger body of work?)

 

February 16, 2022

So the lap pool is open in my building. My fiancée and I booked a 30-minute time slot. I started out at my old pre-COVID pace. Mistake! A humbling, humbling mistake…

Everything hurts now, and I am so very tired…

 

March 23, 2022

This morning I put a typo in the word typo while apologizing for a typo on a workplace group chat.

I’m the company’s copywriter and copy editor, and this was not my finest moment.

This has been today’s Twitter confession.

(For the first month or so of 2022, Ontario entered another severe lockdown such that I worked from home all week. I believe by March we were into a ‘three days at home, two days in the office’ hybrid model. This tweet must have been from a team meeting on a day where we were all working from home.)

 

May 5, 2022

My fiancée is constantly amused I call them blue jeans.

“What else would I call them?” I ask.

“Jeans!” She says.

“But they ARE blue jeans. They’re blue!” I insist.

We’re not even agreeing to disagree. We fundamentally do not understand the other’s position.

(This tweet included a GIF, which is a rarity for me. I decided to illustrate this dialogue exchange with a clip of Neil Diamond singing, “Forever in Blue Jeans, Babe!”)

 

May 17, 2022

My fiancée and I have now attended two @BlueJays games this season, and both times the Jays won. I’m not saying our presence is the deciding factor, but if the team and/or the fanbase want to give us some tickets, we’re prepared to continue our experiment and gather further data.

(I believe we ended up attending five games together, and I attended another one as part of my bachelor party. For the season I think we ended up winning just a little more than we lost when we attended a game. We look forward to collecting more data next season.)

 

May 24, 2022

I love overhearing banter in my office:

“You said, ‘Go nuts!’ ”

“I never said, ‘Go nuts!’ ”

“Well you said, ‘Do whatever you usually do,’ and I usually go nuts…”

(A lot of office banter made the long list for this year’s top tweets. This is the only one that made the Top 22, but it is an excellent representation of the others. I work with a lot of people I really enjoy.)

 

June 30, 2022

“On the horns of a dilemma.” What visual does that expression give you? I imagine myself draped across the antlers of an Irish elk, high enough up off the ground that I can’t figure out how to get down safely. I guess for that to make sense, the elk needs to be named Dilemma?

 

July 30, 2022

Family: “There’s not enough stuff on your wedding registry!”

Also family: “Take that off your registry. I have one I never use I’ll give you for free.”

Also family: “Has such and such already been purchased? We don’t know how a registry works.”

We just want money…

(I was a little amazed how few wedding tweets made the Top 22. I thought I might need to set up an honourable mentions section the way I did with COVID-19 in 2020 to keep these tweets from drowning out everything else, but I think it worked out to a reasonable fraction of my year’s best content considering how much of my year revolved around my wedding. This is the first, and talking about this still gets my wife and I fired up. We didn’t get hitched in our early 20s. Both of us had been living alone for more than a decade before we got engaged. We needed new kitchen appliances and household accoutrements like we needed another hole in the head, but people kept asking us to update our registry with stuff we didn’t want. Ah, well. It all worked out.)

 

August 5, 2022

The 2nd Century CE author Lucian wrote a comedic sketch in which the letter Sigma sues the letter Tau in court for encroaching on his syllabic territory as a commentary on the conflict between Common & High Attic Greek.

Nerdy then; among the nerdiest things I’ve ever read now.

(I pride myself on reading some pretty deep cuts of history. This discovery was worthy of repeating to a larger audience.)

 

August 11, 2022

At 1:15 pm today I am picking up my marriage license at Toronto City Hall.

At 12:40 downtown Toronto lost power, and it’s been out long enough some buildings are beginning to evacuate.

I am doing my very best to think this is funny, not the universe trying to tell me something.

 

August 18, 2022

Cheese shopping with the future Mrs.

“Hey!” I say, getting her attention and gesturing to a nearby product. “You know, I hear the Gouda is alright-a.”

I live to make her roll her eyes.

Also? She was expecting me to say ‘good-a,’ but I zigged when she thought I’d zag.

 

September 7, 2022

Driving up to Sault Ste Marie for a wedding. We’re staying overnight at a northern Ontario Comfort Inn that spends its summer months desperately trying to air out all the cigarette smoke from people who can’t be arsed to go outside in a -40C winter to honour the No Smoking rule.

(I’m not going to lie. This made the Top 22 in large part because of how much I managed to squeeze into those 280 characters. Is it the funniest or most insightful thing I ever tweeted? No. Does it paint a picture with all the context necessary to put you in that unpleasant room? Yes. I should also add this was for the fourth of four weddings we went to the summer before out wedding on October 22nd. As a rule I do not tweet at weddings, but I do tweet before and after them in long threads that I cannot put in a ‘best of’ list. All of them were excellent and memorable, each in their own very different way. We did a lot of benchmarking in the run up to our own big day.)

 

September 20, 2022

My fiancée said my suggestion of inviting someone new to the wedding on short notice might be considered by some the heights of impropriety, to which I replied: “Oh, let’s not call it the heights. Perhaps the understandable lowlands of impropriety. Foothills tops.”

(As our RSVPs came back we found out which friends and relatives would and would not be able to attend, which freed us up to reach out to people we hadn’t already invited because of capacity limits. There was a bit of a scramble to make sure everyone we wanted to be there got an invitation, but it all worked out in the end. It was a very happy day full of our favourite people.)

 

October 13, 2022

The next time I buy a microwave, I want to hear the floor model before making my purchase. The designers of my current microwave decided this model need to scream like a ravenous baby eagle who demands to be fed and will not be ignored. Next time I will get a calmer appliance.

(Strictly speaking the microwave came with the apartment we’re renting, but that bit of trivia wasn’t worth squeezing into this tweet. I do stand by this decision, though. For the rest of my life whenever I am buying a noise-making appliance, I am going to want to hear the damned thing before it contributes to the soundscape of my domestic life for years on end. There are some truly unpleasant characters waiting out there for unsuspecting consumers to invite unwittingly into their homes.)

 

October 24, 2022

It’s funny. I’ve had no problem switching over to thinking of my wife as my wife, but someone just called me her husband, and I did not make the connection at all. I asked for clarification.

(We got married on October 22nd. By the 24th we were on our honeymoon in Ireland. Everyone was very, very nice to the newlyweds. When someone called me her husband, though, the remark went right past me, and I did in fact ask who he was talking about.)

 

October 29, 2022

Hello from Sean’s Bar in Athalone, the oldest pub in Ireland and almost certainly the world. (Research for the global title is ongoing.) People have been drinking in this building where I sit for 1100+ years. That is not a typo.

(Did we make a special detour of more than an hour out of our way to visit this bar? Yes. Was it worth it? Absolutely, yes. I have sat in too many pubs in my life not to raise a glass in the Ur Bar ⁠—the great-granddaddy of them all⁠— given half the chance. This place has been serving booze to passersby since Methuselah was in short pants. My wife liked it too!)

 

November 6, 2022

Getting the apartment organized. My wife just tore out all the ‘Wedding To Do List’ pages out of one of my notepads. My God, what a satisfying sound. Those pieces of paper have ruled our waking hours for months on end.

“Did we actually finish it all?” I asked, only half-joking.

(This was upon returning home after our honeymoon.)

 

November 12, 2022

Reading an Aldous Huxley book from 1959 before his reputation was cemented as the “Brave New World” guy. His author bio says he wrote a book called, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan”? Oof. Glad his publisher went with that one over his original suggestion, “Pretentious? Moi?”

(I did not finish the book. This is the third or fourth time I’ve tried Huxley. The only one I have finished was Brave New World, and even that I think is only ranked as highly as it is for being innovative at the time, not on any real strength of plot or prose. He’s just not my cup of tea.)

 

November 20, 2022

The expression, “Snug as a bug in a rug” is entirely built around the rhyme but is otherwise nonsensical, right? No one rolled up a carpet full of insects one day thinking, “Look at them. They are loving that! We should use this as a euphemism for coziness forevermore…”

 

December 7, 2022

Sometimes I read the word ‘fascinate’ and my mind remembers the word of the day while watching the 2011 Royal Wedding was ‘fascinator.’ Every woman wore one, and the commentators said this word I had never heard before over and over again until something broke in my brain…

 

December 14, 2022

I’m delighted to read that Bob Barker is still living and thriving at 99. The real update I want, though? Give us his health update 364 days from now. That’s when he’ll be closest to 100 without going over.

(For non-North American readers, Bob Barker was the host for many decades of a game show called The Price is Right where being closest without going over was a huge part of the program. I appreciate this tweet is almost nonsensical without that context.)

 

December 26, 2022

I am a writer. I have two coffee mugs full of pens at my desk. For Christmas, my wife got me a box of really nice .5mm Muji gel pens as a stocking stuffer. Now I’m going through my mugs, throwing away every pen that doesn’t bring me joy. My God, this is so satisfying.

(My note from 2022 says, “I wrote this yesterday, so who knows if this really is going to stand the test of time? I do think it’s a nice idea to remember and highlight a little scene of domestic bliss as my wife and I enjoyed our first Christmas together as a married couple.”)

 

Honourable Mentions

(As discussed earlier, here are a few ‘linked’ tweets that I enjoyed enough to add to my long list and short list, but in the end decided to disqualify from inclusion in the Top 22 because of their length. If I allow multiple-tweet threads to compete with standalone tweets, pretty soon I’ll be comparing metaphorical apples to metaphorical apple pies, and the only person who will actually worry about it is me, but I’ll worry about it too much. Better to have an honourable mentions category and enjoy them separately. I have used the + sign to mark the division between the first and second tweets. No idea if I’ll do this again next year, or if that will even be necessary…)

 

January 2, 2022

My parents both had live alligators/caimans as school pets: Mom had a grade school teacher with one in a terrarium that he fed in front of the kids; Dad’s high school had a mascot that would eat frogs and stuff.

What the hell was going on in Ontario schools in the 50s and 60s?

+

Someone on Facebook replied, “Funding.”

I added, “This just screams, ‘No one has ruined this for the rest of us yet, so there are at present no rules about having carnivorous reptiles around children on school grounds. Enjoy those toothy smiles while they last, kids!’

 

May 11, 2022

Years ago I had a boss with an identical twin brother. They even had similar mustaches & glasses. My boss wore a suit & tie to work every day. Sometimes his twin would pick him up for lunch wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt. I still smile remembering him walking through the office.

+

Another fun thing about that boss, as long as I’m reminiscing? Whenever anyone mentioned Boston in any context he would interrupt to say, “—The greatest Rock band of all time! Continue…”

 

May 26, 2022

Listening to a podcast this morning and came across this gem of a thought: The Shang Dynasty Oracle Bones are like having access to the nightly prayers —and only the nightly prayers— of America’s 20th Century presidents. How would you reconstruct history through that window?

+

The archaeologist being interviewed played out the idea further. “Wait, is there a war happening? Is it the same war as that earlier prayer? Is this one about his dog being sick? Wait, is Wichita a person or a place?” That’s analogous to our window into Bronze Age China.

 

August 11, 2022

A random memory: At a school assembly I watched someone put enough current through a pickle to make it glow like a dim lightbulb. He ended his presentation saying with enough current you could make a brick do it too. What did he think 5th graders were going to do with that info?

+

Even if it was about inspiring a future generation of electricians and electrical engineers, isn’t it more likely to have young people playing with wiring trying to make things glow that shouldn’t glow, leading to fires and electrocutions?

 

—

 

My Favourite 21 Tweets of 2021

 

January 6, 2021

So I stopped checking the US news after about 11 am. Did I miss anything?

(This is 100% true. I missed almost all the live coverage of the storming of the US Capitol building. I was working from home on a big project without anyone to tell me to turn on the news. By the time I realized what had happened, the world didn’t need one more person chiming in with a hot take on Twitter. I decided to mark the occasion based on my first thought, “But I just checked the news this morning..?”)

 

March 19, 2021

My grandmother’s friend saw a deer killed by wolves on her property. She watched them eat the deer, and then watched the ravens pick the carcass clean.

“Did she take any pictures?” I asked.

“No. Why would she?” My grandmother replied.

People are baffling sometimes.

 

May 2, 2021

“It’s like an obstacle course in here, with all these boxes,” she said.

“Yeah, some wicked old witch made me pack up my apartment a month too early,” I said.

“It’s not a month too early!”

“I like that you didn’t object to the wicked old witch part.”

(My fiancée and I moved into a new place together in mid-May. She had me 90% packed up and ready to go by mid-April. She deserved all the chirping I gave her. Yes, I said it!

Also, upon reading this list several times during formatting and editing it occurs to me I should explain I always refer to her as my fiancée on Twitter, as I try not to use people’s names on social media platforms of which they are not members. On Facebook I use her name.)

 

May 17, 2021

My sister tells me my two-year-old nephew has taken to calling me, “Apple Geoff.” (He doesn’t know the word ‘Uncle’ yet). Apparently she just heard him over the baby monitor wake up and then count himself back to sleep, “One Apple Geoff. Two Apple Geoff. Three Apple Geoff…”

 

May 20, 2021

My grandmother phoned to tell me a story, & halfway through she said, “Anyway, you know how I walk like an old woman when I first wake up?”

“You are an old woman,” I said.

“What do you mean?” She asked.

“You turn 96 in August,” I reminded her.

“Oh, right…” She acknowledged.

 

May 21, 2021

Well, it’s Moving Day. I’ve been in this apartment 10.5 years, my late 20s through to my late 30s. If I live to 100, it will still make up the setting for an impressive chunk of my fondest memories.

Ah, well. Onto bigger, better things with someone special.

 

May 22, 2021

I awake before 7 am. The muscles of my shoulders and back feel like sacks of hammers clanging and jostling against one another. In six-plus hours of unpacking yesterday, did I get as far as the ability to make coffee? Of course not. This morning is going to hurt, I reckon…

 

June 11, 2021

Snoop Dogg has a wine brand. His red is very tasty, and we’ve ordered some of his rosé for pickup at our local LCBO. As my fiancée gets ready to go pick it up I had a light bulb moment, “We should call it Snoop Winey Wine!”

This. This is why she keeps me around.

For my wit.

(For the record, while the red is quite nice, the rosé was far too sweet for our liking. Also for non-Ontarians, the LCBO is the government-owned monopoly that sells liquor in this province.)

 

June 16, 2021

Earlier today I came across a little girl nervously blocking the top of an escalator. Her mother took her by the hand and said, “Stand over here with me. This man wants past us.”

The girl looked up at me with eyes big as saucers. “I haven’t been on an escalator in a year.”

(This was as one of Ontario’s COVID lockdowns was easing. I believe the little girl was telling the truth that she probably hadn’t been on an escalator since the previous summer. I wonder how living through this global pandemic is shaping our young people?)

 

June 17, 2021

As a kid I heard a TV commercial that included the line, “Portobello mushrooms, picked by the moonlight!” I took that to mean Portobello mushrooms MUST be picked in the dark, and probably by specialists? When I learned that wasn’t true, the world became a little less magical.

 

June 26, 2021

I’ve suggested I roast a chicken this week with parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme from our balcony herb garden. My fiancée was curious why those herbs in particular. She did not make the connection to Simon & Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair.

I’m marrying a Philistine.

(I have a fun follow-up story based on this tweet. I cross-posted it to Facebook, and a dear family friend who is something of a character chimed in, “I was alphabetizing my daughter’s spice rack the other day, and it killed me to do it, but I put these herbs out of order to make this joke.” Her daughter then replied, “What’s crazier is I don’t cook with sage. My mother went out and bought sage to make this joke.” My fiancée has only heard of this friend through anecdotes, so to see these exchange happen in real-time was magical for her and hilarious for me.)

 

July 14, 2021

Her: “You should have a banana for breakfast. I’m doing my part!”

Me: “Your part? You make it sound like there’s a war on.”

Her: “There is. It’s us versus the bananas.”

 

August 3, 2021

Today is my first full day back at the office sitting at my old desk doing my normal job since March 13, 2020. I’m going to be honest. It feels weird. Good, but weird.

(For the record, I am still not back in the office full-time. I work two days in the office and three days at home each week. I expect this hybrid work model will continue well into 2022, and I begin to suspect I will never work a regular five-day workweek in the office again. Time will tell the tale.)

 

August 3, 2021

“Should we get a llama?” She asks playfully.

“I insist upon it,” I say. “And you know what else? It should be of good breeding stock from the Bahamas.”

“What? Why?”

“So we can have a Bahama Mama Llama,” I say matter-of-factly.

She stares for a moment, then leaves the room.

(I was VERY proud of this off-the-cuff word play. I regret to say because of Twitter’s character limits I had to distort the story just slightly. She was actually standing in another room, and after staring at me for a moment she closed the door between us without saying another word. Anyway, I cross-posted this to Facebook where several of my friends had fun with it. My favourite exchange was someone saying, “Hopefully it would be of even temperament so you wouldn’t have any Bahama Mama Llama drama.” To which I replied, “If that did happen, I would recreate the scene in cardboard set inside a shoebox. I’d call it my Bahama Mama Llama drama diorama.”)

 

August 21, 2021

Listening to a podcast on the life of Julius Caesar that is someone reading a book in the public domain. I wondered when the book was written. An hour in, the author bemoans America’s postal system will never use Caesar’s horse relay system now that the railroads are taking over!

 

September 6, 2021

We have a ‘make your own hot sauce’ kit. We’re missing 2 ingredients, and the grocery stores are closed for Labour Day.

“The Chinese greengrocer will be open,” I say.

“You’d go that far for me?” My fiancée gasped.

It’s 3 blocks away. You’d think I’d gotten her another ring.

 

October 8, 2021

A few weeks ago an elevator door opened and a stranger heard me say to my fiancée out of context, “The Muffin Man!”

We are now playing a game of saying that whenever an elevator door opens. Well, my fiancée claims we’re not playing, but I think that’s because I’m winning.

 

October 21, 2021

Ah, going to work in the dark and then returning home in the dark. I won’t say I’ve missed you —that implies a fondness— but I noted your absence, and now I note your return. I’d say good day to you, but I don’t think you know the meaning of the term.

 

October 22, 2021

A year from today will be my wedding day, which makes this my Negative One Year Anniversary. My fiancée and I will be going out to dinner somewhere to celebrate. Gauging how nice a place you go to for a negative one year anniversary was not a challenge I expected to face…

 

December 2, 2021

My fiancée just asked, “How many ounces is four ounces?”

To which I replied, “Four.”

She looked at me like I was the crazy one. No, no, no. If you want me to convert something, you give me the units of measurement. Otherwise one to one is one to one all day long.

 

December 23, 2021

Today I’m driving from Sudbury to Sault Ste Marie. When Americans talk about Canadian winters? That’s what I’m driving through right now. Beautiful and terrible and glorious and cruel.

And cold. Definitely cold.

(I spent Christmas with my fiancée and her family in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario.)

 

—

 

My Favourite 20 Tweets of 2020 (With some COVID-19 Honourable Mentions)

(I made the decision in December of 2020 that while I would include a couple of COVID tweets in my annual ‘best of’ roundup, I would set aside the bulk of the ones that made my longlist for their own honourable mentions category at the end.)

 

January 1, 2020

I received a scented candle for Xmas that smells like a campfire. Now my ‘I’m not a scented candle guy’ street cred is firmly established, but I’m not going to lie: This thing smells like a campfire, and —unless and until my landlady calls the fire department on me– I dig it.

 

January 10, 2020

Today is the sort of day where you don’t trust the weather forecast. I’m still going to wear my winter coat. Oh, I could bust out a spring jacket in January –be a hero– but the risk? The risk is too great. I mused this to someone. She said, “This is your next tweet, isn’t it?”

 

January 25, 2020

There’s something about carpeting in an airport that just FEELS like Florida, you know? Someone really lobbied for this. “No. No easily mopped floors. We’ll vacuum. I want this airport to look like as much like the set of The Golden Girls as possible!”

 

March 4, 2020

“He’s a cowboy. On a steel horse he rides. Why a steel horse?” My coworker wonders.

“Because it’s a motorcycle,” I say.

“Oh!” My coworker says, genuinely gobsmacked.

Another coworker also thought it was literally a metal horse.

…I feel like I’m taking crazy pills some days.

(Worth saying these first four tweets all happened in what I now call ‘The Before Time’ or ‘The Long Long Ago’ before COVID-19 changed so much about how the world worked. These are tweets about holiday gifts, the weather, travel, workplace banter about Bon Jovi lyrics. As long and weird and scary as 2020 has felt, I kind of marvel at how normal my first few months of tweets read back to me now.)

 

March 15, 2020

I’ve just spent the last hour doing a text-message rendition of ‘Drunk History’ talking about the history of Albania (of all things) with my girlfriend, and I’m taking the fact that she’s still texting me with relevant questions rather than breaking up with me as a good sign.

(A note I am inserting from 2025? This is the girlfriend who is now my wife.)

 

April 15, 2020

I have a friend whose son is named River.

I have a friend whose daughter is named River.

I have a friend whose dog is named River.

Checking my Facebook newsfeed before I’ve had my morning coffee can sometimes require more concerted effort than I am prepared to muster.

 

April 20, 2020

I fell asleep on the couch and moved to the bed at some time in the middle of the night. This morning I woke up with too many options for where my glasses might be, but they definitely weren’t on my face: Blind Man’s Bluff meets a Scavenger Hunt pre-coffee. The struggle is real.

 

April 20, 2020

My girlfriend just made a declarative statement: “If you somehow become a dictator, I’m not dying alongside you.”

…I don’t know how to feel right now.

 

April 24, 2020

My sister got me an Amazon Echo Dot for Christmas, and by and large I dig it. Sometimes, though, things like this happen:

“Alexa? Tell me everything is going to be alright.”

“Sorry, I don’t know that.”

Honest? Yes. Reassuring? No.

(This is a COVID-19 post that escapes the honourable mentions. I talked to Alexa a lot during my Working-From-Home-Self-Isolation-Oh-God-It’s-Too-Quiet. This was a gem of a conversation.)

 

May 4, 2020

It’s been 4 weeks since my #COVID19 haircut. It’s not quite like watching the grass grow. People don’t really complain when you mow the lawn too short. Also, there’s less interest/opportunity to speculate how much of the grass will come up silver this time around. #COVID19Ontario

(This is the first time in ten years I’ve ever had a photo make my Top Tweets list. What you’re seeing here is one of a series I did every week for a couple of months after I shaved my head to get out from under what is universally acknowledged to be a thick crop of hair. My mother and girlfriend were horrified, so I made an art project out of it: Every Sunday I took a photo in the same pose to show my hair growing back. Week 4 had the best tweet to go along with the photo. One of the earlier weeks actually was picked up and reposted without permission by a few news blogs covering people giving themselves COVID-19 haircuts. I’m honoured to have been considered such a prime example.)

 

May 11, 2020

Last night I dreamt my girlfriend and I were on the couch watching YouTube; Eddie Vedder was also there, standing off to one side. After each clip he asked us to check out one of his music videos with the awkward earnestness of a small child trying to make friends at summer camp.

 

June 1, 2020

Playing online Risk has taught me so much about convincing others to do all my dirty work for me, all the while patiently waiting for the decisive moment to betray everyone and march over their corpses to victory. I cannot wait to apply these lessons to real life.

(I played A LOT of online Risk during the first few months of the global pandemic. I found it soothing and engrossing and comforting in a way that I really needed. I’d have to go check the app to see how many hours I played, but I’m sure it was more than a hundred, possibly two hundred. I reached a global ranking of Master and something like top 7000 online players in the world at one point.)

 

June 19, 2020

I know this isn’t a mandatory thing anymore, but I separate my lights and darks when doing laundry. I had a cat who died three and a half years ago. To this day, I am still surprised whenever the contents of my lint trap comes out light or dark instead of a uniform tabby grey.

(This tweet proved hugely popular. Someone I’ve never met but follow on Twitter reached out to me and called it a poem and encouraged me to submit it somewhere. As he himself is a poet, I took that as praise from Caesar.)

 

June 27, 2020

My hometown radio station has a guy who I guess writes jingles. I can only hope it’s not his day job: The tunes are unmemorable; the words don’t rhyme or fit into a cadence, and sometimes I’m not sure which company is being plugged. These aren’t jingles. They’re at best jangles.

 

July 29, 2020

I dreamt I was watching a TV show where two men were speaking Yiddish, but because I don’t know Yiddish they were just making gibberish noises, which I thought was pretty racist. They then became aware that they were speaking gibberish and turned to look at me accusingly.

 

October 7, 2020

I’ve bought myself a new laptop, and I’ve decided to name it, “The Other Woman.” Now my girlfriend can have a lot of fun when she complains about how much time I spend with this thing.

It’s called being thoughtful, fellas. Do something nice for someone else once in a while!

(This marks the end of my ‘playing Risk online’ and the beginning of my ‘playing Crusader Kings 3’ phase of 2020. I’ve played almost 250 hours of Crusader Kings 3 since early October. It’s basically been a part-time job. I was right to give my computer such an amusing name.)

 

November 3, 2020

Today is the day, and I don’t know what to say. All day, I’m not going to know what to say.

I keep writing a tweet and then deleting it.

To my American friends? Show us who you are today. Now is the time you get to tell us how you see yourselves, and how you want us to see you.

(For the sake of context for the distant future, this was the day of the American election that —eventually— saw Joe Biden deny Donald Trump a second term. It was a stressful, nail-biting experience.)

 

November 25, 2020

I just told a co-worker, “Well, go forth, young man, and prosper!” (I often dip into 19th Century colloquialisms.)

No sooner were the words out than I felt a pang of nostalgia. I’ve been saying that to him for almost a decade; since we were young men in search of prosperity.

 

December 2, 2020

Someone on reddit just said, “Your posts read like someone tweeting from 150 years ago.”

I am ridiculously proud of that compliment. (I assume it was a compliment…)

 

December 9, 2020

We’re all familiar with the ‘No Glove, No Love’ condom education campaign, yes?

While running an errand I just came up with, “No Mask? No Task.”

So… Do they mail me my Clio Award to my home, or my work address, or what?

(Another COVID-19 tweet makes the Top 20 to round out the year. I thought it was pretty good. Right? Now onto the honourable mentions.)

 

COVID-19 Honourable Mentions

(As mentioned, this is a subset of tweets relevant to COVID, otherwise my Top 20 list would have been drowned out by the pandemic.)

 

March 9, 2020

Me: Minding my own business and growing the first proper beard of my life in my late-thirties.

WHO and CDC: “One big thing you can do to protect yourself from COVID-19 is avoid touching your face.”

Me: “Well, shit…”

(This was my very first tweet about COVID-19. At the time, I thought COVID-19 wasn’t going to be that big a deal. One week later my office closed and I have worked from a small desk in my bedroom ever since with the exception of eleven and a half days where I did go into the office to run some virtual conferences from a studio we set up in one of our boardrooms.)

 

March 13, 2020

I went out to lunch with a coworker. The waitress apologized as she handed over the menus. “Sorry if they’re damp. I just sanitized them. I’ve been doing a lot of sanitizing…”

(This was the last meal I had in a restaurant in three months, and the last meal with a non-family member or my girlfriend in five or six months.)

 

March 26, 2020

Score! I played a hunch and swung by Shoppers at 8 am. You’re looking at the proud owner of enough toilet paper to see me through to May, easy. They’ll be sold out again by 9 am I bet. That’s now an ‘other people’ problem. #Toronto #COVID19Ontario

(My girlfriend and I live within walking distance of each other. Those early morning walks home provided lots of opportunities for me to get into stores before the lines formed. This was my biggest victory during the shortages.)

 

March 27, 2020

I’ve now finally tried Zoom. I’m not a connoisseur of such things, but that’s the best video chat for large groups I’ve seen so far. I expect I’ll be using that a lot moving forward.

(And I have, although funnily enough not so much for work purposes. Oh, I’ve done some work stuff on Zoom, but we also have other tools for that. When I think of Zoom now, I think of my monthly Writers Group, and of an old Air Cadet reunion I did, and of the virtual parties I enjoyed with some friends with a subscription to Jackbox.tv. Zoom has kept me connected in a way I really, really needed. I wonder why we didn’t all just use Skype? Wasn’t that the dominant brand going into all this?)

 

April 8, 2020

I’m typing up a bunch of old notebooks during downtime between projects while working from home during self-isolation.

Funny, it took a global pandemic for me to finally get around to learning the hotkeys for an em dash.

Alt+0151 = —

This has been today’s Twitter Confession.

(I include this one because in a previous Top Tweets list I confessed I just Google em dash and then copy and paste the search result. Here I finally broke down and learned the code. It only took me my entire adult life. From now on if you see me write — instead of — you’ll know I’m on my phone. I have no idea how to get an em dash on my phone. It’s good to have limits. It keeps me humble.)

 

April 17, 2020

#WFH Day 35: I arrive at the (home) office in a stunning ensemble of a baseball hat sporting my company logo, an orange short-sleeve shirt, red bathrobe, blue pajama bottoms, tan slippers, & no socks. I call this ‘Lazy Comfort,’ and it’s taking the world by storm in Spring 2020.

 

June 5, 2020

‘Quarantine’ comes from an Italian word meaning ‘Forty Days.’ Today is Day 81 of my #WFH . By the medieval laws of not allowing sailors off ships returning from plague ports for 40 days, I have now completed two back-to-back quarantines and am beginning my third. #covidontario

 

September 17, 2020

Today is a #WFH day after two days in the office. I’m not going to lie: Sitting at the desk in my bedroom with a cup of coffee and going through my inbox now feels like the normal thing, and that ‘going to work’ is the weird, scary thing. I may have COVID19 Stockholm Syndrome.

 

November 16, 2020

Tales from the (virtual) conference producer: I spilled coffee on myself. I was on camera for 5 self-conscious minutes, and then on the break I sprinted to the nearest department store to buy a new shirt. The staff there —starved for customers by COVID19— greeted me like a hero.

(This was one of the rare days I did go into the office to run a virtual conference remotely from a studio space set up in one of our boardrooms. Our office is down in Toronto’s financial district. The normally thriving retail scene —especially in the run up to the Christmas holidays!— was a ghost town. I had easily five different staffers greet me and chat with me about my coffee-stained shirt in the space of five minutes.)

 

—

 

My Favourite 19 Tweets of 2019

 

January 3, 2019

My coworkers were admiring a story on CP24. “Good for her!” One exclaims.

My desk doesn’t face the television. I turn around. “What happened?” I ask.

“She’s old, and she’s going to a Leafs game.”

Even with 24 hours of airtime to fill, how slow is today’s news day?

(For context for all the non-Torontonians out there, CP24 is a 24-hour news channel with the screen divided into four quarters: Traffic, weather, an all-text headline newsfeed, and video footage recorded within the past few hours. Some of the things CP24 does to fill that video footage quarter gets pretty ridiculous. One sixth of all Canadians live within an hour’s drive of Toronto, and you have to think some of those people are doing something. How did this old woman going to an NHL game make it on the air? NOTHING else was happening?
Also, upon reviewing past lists, this is the third time I’m highlighting a negative comment about CP24. I didn’t realize how often I chirp that channel…)

 

February 7, 2019

While standing six feet back from the curb, I got hit full in the face by a blast of icy, muddy water. There’s a new pothole on my street. A van hit it at speed and the water pooled within leapt up and out a good twenty feet.

That’s one way to start your day…

 

February 7, 2019

Scarves make excellent towels, but afterwards they no longer make excellent scarves.

(This tweet was written about five minutes after the previous one when I realized using my scarf to get the freezing, muddy, salty water out of my eyes and off my face was the right thing to do, but putting the scarf back around my neck afterwards was not.)

 

February 28, 2019

Let’s discuss weather-predicted groundhogs for a moment. Where is the accountability? What steps can we put in place to get better forecasts?

Here’s a bold proposal for you: Kill the wrong groundhogs, breed the correct groundhogs, & let eugenics produce a better prognosticator.

 

March 14, 2019

I was just asked a question whose answer led me to give a brief summary of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 where Spain and Portugal divided the world outside of Europe between them with Papal blessing. I got my history nerd on before 9:30 am. Today will be a good day!

 

May 3, 2019

We’re playing ‘Name The Movie That Goes With This Tune’ Trivia at the office.

A woman’s voice whispers, “…If” and I cry out, “THE BODYGUARD!”

The whole office stares.

For easily three years my sister listened to that soundtrack every morning while getting ready for school.

(For the record, I have zero regrets about my sister loving The Bodyguard soundtrack. If you have to listen to one CD every morning for a good chunk of the 90s, you could do a lot worse.)

 

May 23, 2019

One of my earliest memories is of my father picking me up, putting me on his knee, pointing at the television, and saying, “Pay attention. This is going to be important to you.” It was an episode of Star Trek: TNG. Words do not easily convey how hopeful I am for #StarTrekPicard.

(A note being added in 2025: Star Trek Picard was actually pretty disappointing. There were parts of Season Three that almost make up for Seasons One and Two, but I was wrong to hope this would be a great show. Star Trek as a franchise has swung from utopian to dystopian in its soul, and that’s a real shame.)

 

June 5, 2019

I’m at O’Hare, and the Berghoff Cafe offers beer, small $9.01 and large $9.19. Who the hell is getting the small to save 18 cents?

 

June 6, 2019

Last week I was testing some registration pages for my company’s websites. I guess Chrome was paying attention to my test input? I just registered for something and hit submit without checking my form. Chrome ‘did me a favour’ and autopopulated my name as ‘Fakey McFakerson.’

(The thing I was registering for involved printed name badges and wouldn’t let you change your name online once you registered. I had to contact customer service. They said my email made the team’s day. Happy I could help.)

 

June 7, 2019

I just told someone Twitter says VanVleet lost a tooth. His response? “He’s got lots of teeth!” Hockey breeds a hard kind of basketball fan, I am learning… #Raptors #WeTheNorth #RaptorsvsWarriors #NBAFinals

(I tweeted a lot about the Raptors during the playoffs, and there were a lot of very fine tweets that were candidates for ‘Top 19 of 2019.’ I went with this one because a million other people tweeted during those games. No one had this experience but me and maybe the guys up and down the bar from me. I am a regular at a neighbourhood sports pub. I know most of the other regulars as hockey fans, and they really did expect the basketball players to just roll with injuries like enforcer-era NHL players. It’s the playoffs!)

 

July 31, 2019

I do not know the hotkeys to create an em dash. When I need one, I Google “em dash” and then copy and paste the example Google gives me. I could look up the hotkeys, but my “This is stupid but it works” approach keeps me humble.

This has been today’s Twitter confession.

 

August 7, 2019

Someone across the office just sneezed at the exact same moment someone turned the tap on in the kitchen behind her. For a moment there, it sounded like that sneeze had developed into a potentially life-changing problem.

 

August 28, 2019

My sister reminded me of an update to a story I needed to tell our mom. I began from the start for my sister’s sake.

At the end she said, “That is the longest story I’ve ever heard. It only got interesting at the end.”

I said I needed to give context.

“I have context PTSD.”

(Strictly speaking this is entirely my sister’s witticism, not mine, but she doesn’t have Twitter, and I’m the one who recorded the incident for posterity.)

 

September 2, 2019

Years ago I worked for a British-owned company. Senior management was very comfortable going out for a pint after work. Part of the culture. When they switched to Gin & Tonic I always perked up. That’s when they wanted to tell, ‘SECRETS.’ To this day, G&T makes me smile.

 

November 7, 2019

First proper snowfall of the year here in #Toronto. I go into the box in my closet where I keep my winter gear. Can someone explain to me how I have five right gloves, two right mitts, but nothing for my left hand at all? Is this a prank? Am I being pranked right now?

 

November 7, 2019

A friend passed away a few weeks ago. I just received an email from him. Subject line? “My eulogy.”

His widow was logged into his email account for something and didn’t think to switch accounts before asking me to proofread her speech.

My heart will stop hammering soon, right?

 

November 25, 2019

Three or four years ago I switched to black coffee, and every day since when I see someone fussing with their milk & sugar I think, “What am I doing with all the extra seconds I save daily now that I don’t have to do that?” Then I remember I use the time to think that thought…

 

December 8, 2019

I’m 37 today, and I feel truly blessed: I have my health, the love of friends & family, a good home, and a challenging career I enjoy. I’m artistically fulfilled, and I’m in the heady days of a new romance. I have no ambitions for a 2020 New Year’s Resolution. Life is beautiful.

(A note added in 2025. ‘The heady days of a new romance’ was the first passing reference to the woman who is now my wife.)

 

December 20, 2019

I’m walking through a Toys’R’Us. I can’t wait until my nephew gets a little older. Christmas shopping for him is going to be so much fun in a year of two once he’s ready to play with stuff rather than just jam it in his mouth. #HoHoHo

 

—

 

My Favourite 18 Tweets of 2018

 

January 15, 2018

Reading J.P. Mallory’s The Origins of the Irish. He begins with the supernova(e) creating the heavy elements in our solar system. Two years ago I read an Irish history written by a 19th C nun who began with God creating the Earth then drowning all the poor sinners except Noah.

 

February 8, 2018

It snowed yesterday.

It’s snowing today.

There is snow in the forecast for the next three days.

February? If something is bothering you, use your words. Acting out like this is unhealthy for you and for the people around you.

 

March 20, 2018

‘Probity’ is a word with a positive meaning that you only ever see used in bad connotations: Someone either lacks it enough that people bemoan its absence, or the abundance of it has rendered a straight-laced person so boring that praising their probity is the go-to compliment.

 

April 5, 2018

My Dad is home alone. I asked what he was going to have for dinner.

“Well, I’d order a pizza, but your mother threw away the Yellow Pages.”

I explained his computer or phone could get him the phone number. It was a brand new idea to him. He said it sounded like a lot of work.

 

April 19, 2018

There’s a little girl in a #Bruins jersey outside the Air Canada Centre waiting for the game to start. A reporter interviewing people in the crowd asks a #Leafs fan, “How can you boo that little girl?”

“Age is just a number.”

#BOSvsTOR #NHLPlayoffs

(Worth saying I tweeted a lot about the Toronto Maple Leafs’ post-season in 2018.)

 

April 24, 2018

On my walk home I buried my hands deep into my jacket pockets and came up with fragments of broken candy cane. My first thought was, “How old are these?” My second thought was, “I sure hope they’re only four months old…”

 

April 25, 2018

Sometimes strange words pop into my head unbidden. While examining a picture I thought, “Look at the gormless expression on that guy’s face.” I had to look up the definition: Dull, slow, stupid, without understanding.

Well done, Brain. That was obscure, scathing, and accurate.

 

May 11, 2018

Tonight’s party theme is superheoes, and also drag queens? Drag queens, of course, are the superheroes of the LGBTQ community. Anyway, there are some pretty awesome costumes walking around. I am here as ‘Man Wearing Tie.’ My superpower is undoing my top button.

(The Royal Ontario Museum throws themed parties on Friday nights from time to time. This was at one of those parties. It was a lot of fun.)

 

June 1, 2018

Hey, @NASA? If something is put into an orbit around Venus equivalent to a geosynchronous orbit around Earth, would that be an aphrodiosynchronous orbit? If we don’t already have a term for that, can it be aphrodiosynchronous? I sure would like to coin an astronomical term.

(Seriously, if this becomes a thing, I want credit for coining the term.)

 

July 5, 2018

Who writes the @CP24 headlines?

“Health officials say people who died had health issues”

This can be read several different ways: Obvious? Oblivious? Suspicious? Mendacious? Malicious? Callous? Lazy? Farcical? Factual?

If it wasn’t just bad writing, it would be genius. #Toronto

(CP24 is the news channel you can have on all day in Toronto with the sound off. One quarter of the screen is always weather. One quarter is always traffic. One quarter is people doing 24-hour news, and the last quarter is news stories as text in a loop that updates several times an hour. There isn’t a lot of room to actually write content in one quarter of the screen. This tweet is regarding something I read that obviously shouldn’t have been summarized down quite that far.)

 

July 9, 2018

My internet discovery of the day? The Finkbeiner Test. In short, journalists covering female scientists should ask themselves, “Am I making this story about her work, or her gender? Her work, or her struggle as a woman to do her work? Her work, or her family while she’s working?”

(I used to date a research scientist. She would have LOVED this term. There are many reasons I regret we are no longer on speaking terms. Not being able to share this with her is one of them.)

 

August 3, 2018

Upon exchanging good mornings, my coworker says, “I have a serious problem! You see, my house is a square–”

“–That is a problem! I keep telling you, rhombus houses, buddy. You need to live in a rhombus house.”

I am an insufferable conversationalist before my morning coffee.

(I call the man I am before my morning cup of coffee ‘Gibberish Geoff.’ He’s a free-thinker who says exactly what he’s thinking. Sometimes it’s funny. Most of the time it’s not.)

 

August 15, 2018

There are drunk teenagers in a backyard a few doors away in my neighbourhood playing a vicious game of ‘Turn the volume up! SING WITH ME!’ versus ‘Shhhh! You GUYS!? The neighbours..?’

I actually don’t care. I’m up anyway. I just think it’s funny.

 

September 17, 2018

There are a couple of trees on my street whose leaves are already changing despite yesterday’s ridiculous heatwave. I dub these trees ‘Quitters,’ and I will hold them up as an example of how this Millennial generation of trees lacks grit and moral fiber.

 

November 20, 2018

As a rule I do not mention people by name on Twitter, but my best friend just had a baby. Her name is Colette. I expect to be a big part of that little girl’s life, and I just want to say something here to mark the occasion.

 

November 24, 2018

For the last ~175 Saturdays I’ve either been #writing and editing my trilogy, or feeling guilty about not writing and editing my trilogy. I published the last book yesterday. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with myself today.

(A note in 2025 for people who have been hearing me prattle on for the last several months about my Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast? This is me finishing the books upon with the audio drama is based.)

 

November 24, 2018

Someone just described me as, “Awesome but not a dick about it.”

Strong contender for my headstone, right there.

 

December 19, 2018

I’ve Just interviewed someone for an entry-level copy-writing job. “Where do you stand on the Oxford Comma?” I asked.

“Love it. Love everything about it,” she replied.

Not only did she answer correctly, but she did so with gusto. That’s a major point in her favour.

 

—

 

My Favourite 17 Tweets of 2017

(A quick note at the top of 2017? At the time I made a comment about Twitter upping its character limit in this year. I would have guessed that happened in 2016. Anyway, there are going to be tweets of uneven length here before and after the limit changes. Enjoy!)

 

January 24, 2017

Dry winter air plus layers of warm clothes has made me more static electricity than man. The bathroom door handle is metal. God help me.

(Someone on Facebook advised me to touch the drywall before touching the doorknob to ground me. That tip saved me many a painful shock.)

 

February 5, 2017

Just overheard little kids and their father grocery shopping. A kid says, “Mommy doesn’t let us eat this stuff.”

“Well, Mommy’s away.”

 

March 13, 2017

Work conversation:

“Is this bag of stuff on my desk yours?”

“Nope, not mine.”

“It’s full of mayonnaise packets?”

“Hey! That is mine!”

(The coworker in question has since upgraded his condiment collection from a bag to a series of sorted cups. Any day now I expect he’ll open up a fast-casual dining restaurant. He has half the ingredients already stored up…)

 

May 12, 2017

My 91-year-old grandmother has expressed a desire to get in a canoe again. I’ve booked the day off work. I’m taking her to Algonquin Park.

(A fun thing? This actually went viral. In the end, I got my grandmother featured in a canoeing magazine’s blog.)

 

May 15, 2017

Sometimes when my computer freezes at work I anthromorphize its struggle into a type of pain. Right now it’s having an ice cream headache.

 

June 3, 2017

You know they put ‘Hertz’ right in the name, but renting that car was painless.

I’ve workshopped that Dad Joke for 36 hours now. Nailed it.

 

June 16, 2017

Trouble #1: When you use a stapler as a paperweight, it ceases to be a paperweight when you use it as a stapler.

Trouble #2: Powerful fans.

 

July 1, 2017

This Canada Day BBQ is now devolving into an argument about which Star Trek is best, and which is worst, as is tradition.

 

July 3, 2017

Using my vacuum to vacuum the vacuum: Physician heal thyself.

(I really did this. When I moved into my apartment more than six years ago, the previous tenant left a vacuum cleaner behind. This was the first time I ever fired it up, and the first thing I cleaned with it was itself.)

 

July 11, 2017

My coworkers are comparing their pigeon coo-ing impressions to see who does it best. We don’t really get a lot of work done after 4:30…

 

July 16, 2017

A man drove up my sister’s driveway in the middle of a family BBQ to tell her everything she is doing wrong with her lawn. #SmallTownMadness

(My sister bought a house and decided to resod her lawn. Little did we know this would become an all-consuming topic of interest to a man who lives ten blocks away but drives by her house regularly…)

 

September 7, 2017

Someone just greeted me “You’re looking fresh & clean today.” I’ve decided to take that as a compliment while rethinking my usual hobo chic.

 

September 15, 2017

I stepped on a tiny shard of glass. My landlord had to pluck it out of the sole of my foot with tweezers. That’s one way to start the day…

 

September 20, 2017

Pleasantly surprised to see a corner store with a toy section. The shelf above the toys? Hardcore porn. Here’s hoping the kids are under 5′.

 

October 25, 2017

“Let’s go into the boardroom. If I’m going to pontificate, other people don’t need to hear me bloviate.” A thing I really said this morning.

 

November 3, 2017

Someone just wagered a beer I couldn’t guess the GDP of China to the nearest trillion. I love my friends, and I love my victory beer.

 

December 12, 2017

The polite young men who stand at the corner of Yonge & Eg wishing people #HappyHanukkah have upped their game this year: They’ve acquired what I assume is an off-duty icecream truck and rigged up its PA to play Jewish fiddle music. #Toronto

 

—

 

My Favourite 16 Tweets of 2016

(A quick note about 2016. Somewhere in here it looks like Twitter both upped its character limit and allowed you to start using line breaks? This functionality goes away as we continue backwards through time.)

 

January 9, 2016

I’m a bachelor. I don’t know how to shop for babies. I’m about to give a 3-month-old a copy of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. He’ll grow into it…

 

February 20, 2016

There must be a class at Barber College about hating sideburns. I asked to keep mine as I sat down. “What? You want-a look-a like Elvis?!”

 

March 17, 2016

An old man asked if I was in line. I told him there’s no line at the bar.

“Aye? Then it’s a race, then!” He said.

I won.

#StPats

(This was on St. Patrick’s Day at a crowded Irish pub. I ruled that place with an iron fist. No one seems to understand the importance of eye contact, tipping early and well, and knowing what you want when it comes to getting a bartender to serve you over someone else.)

 

March 31, 2016

Shooting some of the best pool of my life on a first date. This was not the plan.

 

April 21, 2016

I’m trying to think of the last time I bought new underwear when I was not also out of clean underwear. So far nothing. #BachelorLife

(The hashtag #BachelorLife is a barrel of laughs, by the way.)

 

April 24, 2016

Just thinking about lucky rabbit feet: How lucky can they be? The rabbits had four apiece, and it didn’t do them any good.

 

May 22, 2016

I just passed a man walking a dog so pregnant the word ‘gravid’ came to me unbidden. That was one gravid bitch, technically speaking.

 

May 27, 2016

Some say I chose the Procrastinator’s Life. I disagree. The Procrastinator’s Life chose me… Eventually.

 

June 17, 2016

Sentences you don’t expect to say? I’ve joined my mother & father at a high-end hotdog joint to hear what Dad describes as, “A Hootenanny.”

(Note: This may have been tweeted after midnight on the 18th. If so, I stayed at the ‘hootenanny’ for a long time. It was a lot of fun!)

 

June 18, 2016

After the first stop, the only free seat on an otherwise sold-out bus is the one next to me. I feel like a leper: A leper with elbow room.

 

June 23, 2016

If I can liken my work computer to a dog –and I believe I can– it is starting to look like the last twenty minutes of Old Yeller in here.

(I did not end up having to put my computer down.)

 

July 8, 2016

‘By the skin of my teeth’ is an expression in the Bible. Exactly how much dental plaque do you need before you start calling it skin?

 

August 9, 2016

Trump gets that it’s not a dog whistle if everyone can hear him, right? I’d make a slide whistle joke, but he’s in trombone country now.

(This was when Trump said Second Amendment People should do something about Clinton after she wins the election. I’ll add a note to this note in 2025 that I had no idea how much I would be tweeting about —or consciously choosing not to tweet about— Trump over the next nine-plus years…)

 

September 24, 2016

It’s interesting how often men in their 60s refer to table salt as ‘White Death.’ Oh, they still eat it, but they know they’re doing wrong.

 

October 20, 2016

“Trivia starts in 15 minutes. It can get a little loud.”

“That’s my fault,”” I admit.

The cafe’s polite laughter confirms it is true.

 

November 20, 2016

Baileys on the rocks? Check.

Music from 30-300 years before my birth? Check.

Very old Santa hat? Check.

Let’s decorate a Xmas Tree!

#HoHoHo

 

—

 

My Favourite 15 Tweets of 2015

(We are definitely going back into ‘early Twitter formatting’ rules now…)

 

February 21, 2015

Through a Toucan Sam-like ability to follow my nose, I have found a bar specializing in local craft beer. I am establishing base camp…

(I tweeted this upon my first visit as an adult to Atlanta, Georgia. The beer was excellent.)

 

April 3, 2015

Saw my first guy out in shorts non-ironically: His legs are the same sun-starved white as his tube socks. #Toronto #SpringHasSprung.

(Spring in Toronto is often a fickle, tentative thing.)

 

June 8, 2015

This is a lot of rain, #Toronto. I’m pretty sure there’s a field mouse equivalent of Noah leading earthworms two by two into a shoebox ark.

 

July 24, 2015

A friend and I were talking politics at lunch with such gusto that the guy at the table next to us bought us a round and paid for our meal!

 

September 5, 2015

I have a theory that my cat’s joy in life is eating spiders while I’m away. In four and a half years I’ve never seen a spider in my home.

 

September 27, 2015

I just caught myself having an opinion about soup spoons: I prefer a broad, shallow bowl. Child-Me is appalled at what Adult-Me cares about.

 

September 30, 2015

That raccoon (or “trash panda” as I’ve lately heard them called) was the size of an obese border collie. I’m crossing the street. #Toronto

 

October 3, 2015

Forgot to buy cat food yesterday. My cat is having cat treats for breakfast. This does not bode well for my hypothetical future children…

 

October 10, 2015

Ah, the old ‘Visit your parents on Thanksgiving weekend with a suitcase of dirty laundry’ trick. It’s a classic!

 

October 29, 2015

Co-workers have discovered a service that rents kittens by 15-min increments. A new office threat? “I’m going to rent you so many kittens!”

 

November 12, 2015

#FIFA’s presidential candidates sound like Bond villains: Prince Ali Al Hussein? Jérôme Champagne? Gianni Infantino? Tokyo Sexwale? C’mon!

 

November 14, 2015

Thoughts on the flight: The distance between Air Canada Rouge’s seat rows is exactly equal to the length of my femur. Ask how I know that?

 

November 15, 2015

Disconcerting: When my drycleaner puts a note in with my suits & shirts saying, “Sorry, this is the best we can do” but nothing is wrong.

(I never did figure out what was wrong.)

 

November 22, 2015

Half of the conversations at antique fairs are customers telling exhibitors what they would do if they were exhibitors instead of customers.

 

December 10, 2015

My co-worker has taken ordering food online too far: He just had a cup of coffee delivered by bike messenger. He’s gone mad with power.

 

—

 

My Favourite 14 Tweets of 2014

 

January 1, 2014

14 years ago to the minute I started watching a Y2K paranoid fellow repeatedly pratfall on ice while trying to pull-start a generator.

(Strictly speaking I tweeted this after the ball drop, so it wasn’t to the minute, but I’m guessing I started to compose it in 2013 and hit submit in the New Year. Anyway, it was a funny memory I think about almost every New Year’s Eve. We almost missed the Year 2000 ball drop watching the man fall over and over again. I think the countdown was at 7 before we could pry ourselves away from the window.)

 

February 7, 2014

Good luck to all of the Olympic athletes! (Especially the Canadians… Especially the Canadian men and women who play hockey or curl…)

(Canada went on to win Gold in men’s and women’s hockey, men’s and women’s curling, and men’s and women’s moguls, among other sports. I was very happy!)

 

March 6, 2014

Snow? Your mother & I have decided we don’t like this new friend March you’re hanging out with. She’s trouble! With all her lions & lambs…

 

April 2, 2014

If tonight at my local pub was a sitcom episode, the title would be, “That Time We All Drank Red Wine For Some Reason.”

(I am a regular at a local pub. I saw more glasses of red wine on the bar in that one night than in all my time at the establishment before or since combined. Someone asked about red wine, and that somehow translated into everyone in the room trying a glass of each of the reds the bar stocked. They were all terrible.)

 

April 13, 2014

While playing dominos, my mother persistently & with intent to wound called me an SOB, even after I explained why that’s a boomerang insult.

 

June 4, 2014

Three days into the new job and I’m only just discovering my desk has drawers, and that those drawers are a veritable cave of wonders…

 

July 4, 2014

A very Happy Fourth of July to all my American friends! May your apple pies be flavourful, and your fireworks deafening.

 

July 16, 2014

Hey, July Heatwave? It’s none of my business but is everything okay at home? It feels like you’ve really been phoning it in lately. #Toronto

 

August 31, 2014

The groom is a neuroscientist. His toast was about monogamous pair bonding in mammals, referencing the Prairie Vole. #RoadTrip

(Over the Labour Day long weekend I drove down to a wedding in Birmingham, Alabama. I tweeted the whole trip there and back. About three quarters of the attendees had PhDs and/or MDs. This was the tweet about the groom’s toast, during which he never mentioned his wife.)

 

September 23, 2014

That was the best “I’m in the middle seat” flight I’ve ever been on. Many thanks to the tiny women with blunt elbows on either side of me.

 

October 26, 2014

My goodness! Is that you, Hangover? I haven’t seen you in ages. You’re much bigger than I remember. My how you’ve grown. #BacheloretteParty

 

November 1, 2014

My cat equates making the bed with Satanic ritual. Her terrified eyes try to tell me she accepts what I’ve done. We both know it’s not true.

 

December 20, 2014

OK, Toronto Symphony Orchestra: Give me all the Messiah I can Handel! (It’s my third year in a row making that Dad Joke; I regret nothing!)

(Someone at the TSO retweeted this. I was finally vindicated after three years of picking that pun!)

 

December 21, 2014

If I were to write a book about running a backyard chicken coop, it would be called Cock-a-doodle-dos & Cock-a-doodle-donts. #RandomThought

 

—

 

My Favourite 13 Tweets of 2013

 

January 1, 2013

I just asked a fellow where he was for the Year 2000 ball drop. “In prison.” I changed the subject. #NewYear

 

February 21, 2013

Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” How do I become an arriving streetcar, Gandhi? It’s freezing out here! #Toronto

 

April 5, 2013

Okay, solid weather this morning, April. Good effort, nice hustle. Now give me ten laps and don’t you dare cool down or hit the showers!

 

June 13, 2013

Ah, buying beer from a corner store. Are you watching, Ontario? Did you note the lack of fire and brimstone smiting one of your citizens?

(I was in Colorado running a mining conference. On principle, I bought a six pack of local beer from a corner store, a luxury that at the time I thought would never be made available to me in my native province. Ontario actually DID make this legal… As of September 5, 2024.)

 

August 2, 2013

Sometimes life’s stories don’t fit in 140 characters: Yada Yada Yada; Hide-a-key; Yada Yada Yada; I slept in a hallway last night.

 

September 7, 2013

The bouncer at a bar pointed out my driver’s license says I’m 170cm tall. I guess I was when I was 16? I’m over 190cm at 30. He bounced me.

 

November 1, 2013

Trapped in the elevator for 30 minutes with 5 coworkers and a mailman. I was THIS close to leading them in song to keep their spirits up.

 

November 1, 2013

Well that was exciting. I just watched a very one-sided bar brawl. It is way too early on a Friday night for all that drama. #Toronto

 

November 5, 2013

An eerie calm has descended on my Twitter feed as every journalist, columnist, and editor in #Toronto turns to frantically type copy.

(I followed three quarters of the Toronto press corps’ twitter accounts during the ongoing scandal of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford. On November 5^th, apropos of nothing, he finally confessed to having smoked crack within the last year. The Twittersphere frothed frantically for about five minutes, and then a deathly silence fell across the journalists of my fair city as they put down their phones and fired up their laptops, desperate to be the first to file a story to their various websites.)

 

November 9, 2013

I will concede Tim Hortons is decades out of dates when it comes to cups and lids, but you can say that of most Canadian infrastructure.

(This was funnier before Brazilian-owned American-branded Burger King bought Tim Hortons the next year.)

 

December 1, 2013

So in Pictionary, the answer is never ‘Box’ even though that should be your first guess nine times out of ten. #RandomThought

 

December 9, 2013

So apparently you’re not supposed to pet the baby hammerhead sharks in the stingray petting tank. Too late! They feel like velvet…

(Toronto’s Ripley’s Aquarium opened shortly before this tweet. My company took the afternoon off for the non-sales staff to go on a team-building field trip. A shark got into the stingray petting tank. I was reprimanded for touching it after the fact, but the deed was done and tweeted!)

 

December 26, 2013

Dad thought he was the only one who knew about Boxing Day shopping. The reality check of this Future Shop parking lot was swift & furious.

 

—

 

My Favourite 12 Tweets of 2012

(My 2012 note really should just explain this was the year I formalized what I would consider a ‘best of’ tweet.)

 

January 27, 2012

Who decided to give the CP24 traffic cam guy the ability to draw arrows on the feed? “No kidding? The cars go that way? Top-notch analysis!”

 

February 6, 2012

What happened to you, Monday? You used to be cool. (Don’t ask me to cite examples right now. That’s such a Monday thing to do.)

 

March 7, 2012

Just watched a baby snatch a set of jingling keys out of her mother’s hand and hurl them the length of a city bus while Mom wailed, “Nyet!”

 

March 31, 2012

“Sara Three Cats: That’s a great name for a pool shark,” I said to Sara Three Cats as she proceeded to hustle me.

 

April 18, 2012

Sorry, I never do this, but my April morning is cold: Please send it back to the kitchen, and I’d like to speak to your manager. #Toronto

 

July 17, 2012

I’m not an incompetent hyperbolic scientist, but I play one on Twitter: If my calculations are correct it’s a billion degrees out today!

 

July 21, 2012

Random Thought: If plants had ‘the sex talk’ it would literally be about the birds and the bees. Practice safe pollination, saplings…

 

September 14, 2012

I just saw a squirrel panic at my approach & try to bury a nut into interlocking brick. Conclusion? Winter is coming & squirrels’re idiots.

 

September 19, 2012

Cooking a premade frozen pizza that promises, “No unpronounceable ingredients!” I am not reassured: I can pronounce lots of awful things…

 

October 11, 2012

The new guy at work just asked if I stayed late last night. I did. He laughed and said, “Classic Geoff!” Not sure how I feel about that.

 

November 23, 2012

Walking through a mall, my buddy mocking all the Black Friday shoppers. Mid-sentence he stops, and now we’re shopping for luggage.

 

December 1, 2012

I’m sitting next to Typhoid Mary –patient zero of an Irish Wedding that saw dozens fall ill– but she coughs into her elbow, so we’re cool.

 

—

 

My Top 11 Tweets of 2011

(A quick note to say 2011 was my first full year of Tweets to break down to just 11 worth highlighting. This is also back when Twitter’s character limit was at its most limited. In a way, that makes this year my most competitive in terms of content, for whatever that’s worth…)

 

January 8, 2011

Had some company over to see the new apartment. Best compliment? “Now there’s the television of a man who reads books!”

 

February 8, 2011

Okay Tuesday *rolls head left and right until a pop-click sounds from both directions* let’s dance!

 

February 14, 2011

I like the word lampooning: It’s like harpooning without the attempted murder. You’re only stabbing someone with your words.

 

March 28, 2011

Geoff of the Future? Buy cat food. The natives are getting restless. Sincerely, Geoff of the Past (your biggest fan!)

 

April 24, 2011

Bachelor achievement unlocked: I have worn out my can opener.

 

June 4, 2011

Things you learn at 1 a.m.? Card-carrying communists bring tambourines to karaoke. Who knew?

 

August 28, 2011

Got my good deed for the day out of the way early (caught an escaped dog for an older lady). Now I can dedicate the rest of my day to evil.

 

August 21, 2011

I’m in a used bookstore. Along one wall are shelves for Religion and for Science. The bookcase between the two is labeled ‘Unexplained.’

 

September 6, 2011

My reaction to the first day of school: “That will take care of all those troublesome kids.” I think I’m becoming a Scooby Doo villain.

 

October 27, 2011

Lipton could bottle today’s weather and market it with a series of claymation parodies (it’s brisk, I guess is what I’m trying to say).

(For those of you who don’t get the reference, here’s some context. A further note from 2025, they have discontinued Brisk Ice Tea in Canada as of this year. I never would have guessed.)

 

November 5, 2011

Sudden thought: Why is there a jail in Monopoly? I’m playing a capitalist with huge swaths of real estate. My kind don’t go to prison…

 

—

 

My Top 10 Twitter Tweets of 2010

(A note about the 2010 blog post. I joined Twitter in late September, so my top 10 is really only drawing from three months of content. I was very new to microblogging back then, and of course the original Twitter character limit was 140 characters based on what was then the maximum length of a text message. Anyway, here’s what I thought was worth remembering my first early days on what was then a very happy social media platform…)

 

September 26, 2010

I’ve been putting this off, but I’ve lately caught myself thinking, “I could tweet that…” So here I am, internet. I tweet, therefore I am.

(This was my very first tweet.)

 

September 26, 2010

Bernard Cornwell isn’t on twitter? A sizable fraction of my hopes and dreams for this site are on temporary hold as of this discovery.

(This is where I realized I’m not the last person in the world to sign up for Twitter.)

 

October 15, 2010

Paraguay lost a war in the 1860s that saw 92% of its male population killed. How am I only just hearing about this? http://bit.ly/3G9lnW

(This was a good example of my spreading my random facts ‘Geoff-isms’ through a new and exciting medium.)

 

October 17, 2010

Half-marathon tomorrow. Possibly shouldn’t be drinking six hours before the start? Nah, I’ll be fine. Hubris never hurt anyone…

(This was before I did my first half-marathon with my mother and her friend.)

 

October 25, 2010

When John Wayne learned JFK won “Well, I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president and I hope he does a good job.” My thoughts on Mayor Ford

(This was my take on Toronto’s surprising municipal election results. The sentence doesn’t end in a period because I did not have enough characters, and this was before I decided to edit for that sort of thing.)

 

November 15, 2010

Great band name? Ugly Bitter Cupcakes. See, Rebecca? Your baking is actually an inspiration!

(I have a rule that I don’t use people’s names on social media platforms that they don’t use. I broke that rule here.)

 

November 16, 2010

They’re calling for 3 cm of rain tonight in #Toronto. You can find 2 in my running shoes right now. Seriously, I could host my own regatta.

(I think this might have been the first tweet I did that was retweeted by strangers.)

 

November 20, 2010

I thought I was sleeping in on a glorious lazy Saturday. Turns out I was up before 9. My inner teenager is appalled.

 

November 28, 2010

Saw a commercial for a sedative with side effects including hallucinations, suicide attempts, and choking to death on your own tongue. #WTF?

 

December 23, 2010

My Dad just asked me to bring 5 books from my shelves home with me at Christmas so he can read them. What does he think he’s getting? Coal?

(I believe I got my father eight books for Christmas… This was my Twitter outrage at his pre-visit request.)

—

And there we go. Quite a walk down memory lane. I look forward to doing it all over again in 2026. In the meantime, from me and mine to you and yours, all my very best, enjoy the holidays, and Happy New Year!