The Jersey Shore has a lot of connotations, mostly negative ones about clubs and wild night life. However, for the second year in a row, we’ve found that the shore town of Cape May, and even the surrounding areas we branched out more to this time, like Wildwood, are more down to earth, relaxed, and family-friendly than just about any other beach town. For our second annual trip with the whole family for the end of summer, we fell in love with the town and the other families that visit Cape May and the beaches.

A decade ago, I had only just recently been married, bought a house, and got our dog together. We also had exactly zero children, so life was pretty different then. I doubt I could have predicted any of these big changes in my life, but actually the thing that I thought was probably least likely was that I’d still be in the same company ten years later. Leaving the financial industry and joining Audible / Amazon, I knew it would be different and more to my liking, but I didn’t expect to still be at Amazon over a decade later.

We moved to Florham Park less than six months ago, and yet I feel like I already know more about the area and the history of the town better than I did after ten years in Wanaque. Maybe it’s running around a far more accessible town, seeing more of it, maybe it’s the tighter sense of community, or maybe it’s the pride the town has in its history through volunteer clubs and a historical society.

When we moved, I had no idea that we would be completely changing our lifestyle thanks to an actual community around us. It turns out that having tons of families in similar positions around town, a walkable town, and one that actually runs events to encourage the community makes a huge difference when raising a family. In the few short months we’ve lived here, we’ve started to feel like we belong thanks to the incredible support from all around.

It’s become impossible to ignore some of the worst aspects of the olympics, like the arbitrary and inconsistently enforced rules, the blatant nationalism it encourages, and the attempt to silence athletes voices while doing absolutely nothing about rampant doping. Yet, in spite of all of this, I still find myself more and more drawn to the games each time. I’ve become even more invested in the stories of the athletes, far more into the track and swimming to the point that we watch the trials, and devoutly tuned in every single night of the whole games this year to watch any event that was on (except I would read when diving came on).

It was supposed to be a hot vax summer, but with the Delta variant spreading throughout the country and cases spiking again, it looks like this summer may have been an outlier and this winter will feel just like last year. Just when it was starting to feel normal to hang out with friends and family again, travel a bit, and sit at a bar or restaurant, it seems like we are going to be forced back to choosing between those things and the risk to our health, especially parents with kids too young to get vaccinated.

I’m sitting on a Coach bus at 100% capacity with about 50 other humans at 8:20 in the morning at the gray entrance to one of the barrels of the Lincoln Tunnel when the bus was supposed to be in New York City by 8:00 and it feels like the walls of the tunnel are closing in. It’s my first day heading back into the office since March, 2020, and my first time heading into a new building from our new house.

Last week’s post seemed pretty popular, so here I am again with an update on some stuff we did as a family this weekend. It may not have involved downloading iTunes for the first time in a decade to get an iPod working, but the music I listened to on it definitely helped while I got some work done. This weekend involved much more time out in the sun, and I’m still paying the price in exhaustion from it.

I’m in a bit of a writer’s block phase right now. I haven’t been able to think of anything interesting to write about for the past few weeks, and completely cleared my queue of posts. I really don’t want to lose momentum on writing though, so I figured maybe the best think I could do was just write about what a fun but crazy weekend we had, especially since that’s a major reason I didn’t have any time to write something else.

There are a ton of incredible books to read in 2021. 2020 changed my reading habits considerably. I now read almost entirely from actual paper books from the library, unlike before when the bulk of my reading was on audiobooks. Moving closer to a library, and the recent reopening of the library meant that I could get just about any book I wanted fairly quickly, so I’ve been tearing through books from the library ever since.