Despite me not being 100% sold on this coming week being the last week of decade, I’ll still go ahead with my own retrospective. Before diving into that, what I meant is that I am partly of the belief that the decade starts in 2021. But if everyone is going with 2020, then I will be there to party.

This is the first time that I can remember looking back at my own decade. I’ve never thought of it before. I don’t quite know what that means or says about me. I do know that I love televised decade retrospectives.

Nonetheless, here I go.

Here are some basics. I saw my son grow into a tween. I’ve had two dogs extremely different from one another but each very loving. I owned two houses. Lived in ten different houses/apartments. Lived in five cities. Had six different jobs. Whew. I’m tired just counting that all up. Let me see if I have it in me to continue.

The decade can be characterized as frenetic movement. I have no balance but I insist on not standing still. This is both physically and mentally. From the start of the decade to today, I’m two pounds heavier. Not an important statistic but it’s a number for the decade. I have probably bought over 500 pairs of shoes. I honestly don’t know and lost count a long, long time ago. I believe I have taken over 45,000 digital photos.

And, those are a few numbers describing this past decade for me.

This decade I traveled far and wide to Australia, Japan, Panama, Hong Kong, and Italy to name a few. I also fell one state short (Alaska) of having been to all 50 states. I’m a bit bummed out by that. I must work harder next decade to achieve this milestone. I do have wanderlust and I hope to keep cultivating that in my son. We both got new passports and are ready to hit the road.

This decade, my love of carbs increased and I discovered I love risotto, red velvet and pickles. However, I stopped cooking this decade. The rise of apps dominated my life and made it easier to not cook. Hooray for the rise of the gig economy. More on that another day.

I left but returned to my beloved city. I never stopped being a New Yorker. Only became a fiercer one.

I suffered some major losses and experienced some horrific heartaches but my son was a constant source of love and comfort. Seeing him and helping him grow into this little man has been an amazing, life-altering adventure. Everything else was noise. He was a constant melody. While we were in frantic motion, he kept us firmly rooted and centered.