Things Worth Doing

What did I get up to in 2025? Well, lots of things. Some of the highlights include…

2025 by the Numbers

Meals cooked for friends

By my estimate I cooked (around) 145 meals for friends, family, and other loved ones this year. Between Tuesday night dinner and a movie (or show) with some of my best friends, potlucks for my volunteer group, holidays, or just your average friendly get-together. I think this is the stat that I am most proud of this year, my mom was a big foodie and any time I can give someone else a warm home-cooked meal made with love, I feel like I’m living up to her memory.

Nights Volunteered

Without going into too much detail, volunteering has become a large part of my life in the last three years and I’ve done around 30-40 volunteer nights this year. I’m proud to be able to give back to my community and to help those who were in need of support.

Devices Saved from the Trash

Working in IT, this is obviously part of my job, but I made it a mission to put the re-use in reduce, re-use, recycle. Beyond transitioning to the role of coordinating recycling pickups at work and linking up with a private school to increase the amount of equipment that is being recycled. I also was able to institute sustainable repair practices at said private school. This has been a big year for devices being end-of-lifed arbitrarily due to a change in support from Windows. On that front I was able to rescue about a dozen laptops as well as six mini-PCs to give them new life as linux machines, and had the good fortune and opporunity to repair the desktops of three other people, and around a dozen laptops aside from my actual work-related repairs.

Games Played (Digital)

I’ve struggled a lot with the idea that time spent on good intentional leisure is time well spent, but I’m putting it in my year-end wrap-up so it must be true. The biggest marker for me this year was a discontinuation in my tradition of trying to hit Gold in League of Legends every season. More on that later, but I actually stopped playing most online games. I briefly resubscribed to World of Warcraft to, as promised, join in with my friends guild. I cleared two raids and then called it quits, I don’t think the MMORPG genre really works for me any more. I don’t want to play games with folks when that is my only connection to them. They are wonderful lovely people, but I’m not going to sink the time into an MMORPG just to hang out with them. That said, I also played many wonderful single player games this year, I think I managed to beat about three, the two standouts being Expedition 33 which had a wonderful heartwrenching motif about grief and mourning. The other big standout for me was Hades II, where they did a really great job fine-tuning the mechanics that made the origina Hades so good. I have to admit, as a huge fan of Transistor, and Bastion, both also by Supergiant Games, I was sad to not see something else new set in a new universe. But it was a game worth playing nonetheless.

Books Read

This is one I didn’t aggresively track this year, but from a quick count of just the books on the Kindle app, and a handful of others I have laying around near my right now, I’m at around 32. Every year I set a goal to read 12 books, at least one per month, any year that I clear or beat that I’m very happy. None of my reading this year felt particularly transformative or mind-blowing. I think standouts would include Will of the Many, an excellent intro to a unique fantasy series by James Islington, that does an excellent job of carving its own space in a genre that sometimes feels incapable of “nothing new”. The characters are well written, the mystery is intruiging, and it is willing to engage with its Greco-Roman inspirational roots in a way that feels “trusting” of the reader, that they will give it the time to understand what the book is about. I just picked up the second book in the series and am looking forward to seeing where it leads. Another noteworthy book would be The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang. A romance that follows, in my opinion, a lot of the standard tropes of many women-written romance novels (my preferred kind) that I’ve read in the last few years, but does them so well that I got completely lost and finished it in one sitting. A few days later I felt almost as if I had been tricked, tricked into reading anothe romance that follows the same formulae of miscommunication about past baggage with a too hot guy that can’t resist a plucky and brilliant leading woman. But it did have some really standout dialogue and a unique take on writing the more “steamy” scenes.

Card Games/Board Games Learned

I had the opportunity to meet a lot of new friends this year through card and or board games. A wonderful couple taught my wife and I to play Everdell. An engine-building game with a lot of cute critters. My wife and I also sat down to play our first game of Wingspan, a game with a shocking amount of depth that I expect to come back to over and over again before we even get into the expansions. Other noteworthy games would be Magical Athletes, which I had the opportunity to play at Shore Gamers with Maggie, Leah, and John, two people who were new to me and one who helped shepherd me into the world of in-person gaming in my early teens. There were others, a cute and quick magical unicorns game with another lovely couple, and some single-player board games introduced to me by my friend Dave. Or a fun sealed event where I got to play the new Bandai Namco Gundam TCG. I think, similar to MMORPGs, I will not get back into playing constructed formats of trading card games, which feel more an exercise in speculation than social gaming these days, but I will likely play limited formats when given the opportunity. I believe in total I got to learn six new board games this year, certainly others have done more impressive numbers but this was a pretty good year for me.

Tarot Readings Done for Others

In October I had the opportunity to take a six week long Tarot reading class at our local New Age store, Earth Spirit. It was an interesting class and while the man teaching the class and I did not agree on the common definition of every card, it really pushed me to do readings for others. After doing the class I worked on my readings and offered some to friends and relative strangers, doing a total of eight readings between October and December.

Art Framed

One of my best friends sent me a beautiful piece of art for my birthday, I was able to get it a custom frame and it looks incredible and provides me a great sense of comfort hanging up in our bedroom directly over our bed. In addition I was able to get two new frames for pictures of my wife and my mother that I keep on my desk at work. We also framed several other pictures in our apartment, I think in total we found new homes for 8 pieces of art this year.

Gardening

My wife, my sister, and my brother-in-law all worked together (with me) to take over my dad’s community garden this year. My wife and I did a lot of the initial setup and my sister and brother-in-law took over when we crashed out. I spent a good 15-20 evenings there this year working on prepping or cleaning up the garden, picking flowers, and harvesting what meager tomatoes I could. Definitely not our most productive year, but not a bad shout for our first. Our most successful crop was basil, by far, which I got to give to friends as well to make pesto.

Softball Games

Three, I got to play in three community softball games this year, I know that number isn’t impressive but I was happy to play and I got a really great number of runs in. I expect to play much more next year, and maybe to dial it back just a little bit so that I can still walk the following week.

Books from my Mom’s cookbook collection that found new homes

In July my dad moved in with his new wife. In June my wife and I had a frantic dash to transfer what remained (the ones my dad and sisters did not take) of her cookbook collection (around 400 books in total) into our one bedroom apartment. I want to say my wife was a good sport about it, but she was more than that. She took the lead in categorizing and documenting all of the books, I worked with her to create a spreadsheet of all of the cuisines they covered, who they were authored by, and then I did my creative thing and made a stamp to note all of them as being from my mom’s personal collection. Over the course of around two months we managed to find new loving homes for 261 of them. This… was a particularly heartwarming and healing experience for me.

Some things I care not to number

But that I do want to mention

I did a lot of continuing education this year. I built out my homelab significantly, transition it away from Windows Server and onto Debian,eventually making my way to Proxmox, working out a system with Proxmox Backup Server on a second system for a total of about 120TB of storage between initial and local backups. I used this to transition away from Spotify, ripping literally over 1000 CDs found in my parents old apartment into my music collection. I also was able to cancel Google Drive, iCloud, and Onedrive, taking a more local approach as well as paying for a storage box with another service, a total of less than a quarter my previous monthly bill for something managed and maintained by me. The initial setup was time-consuming but enlightening and now it “just works”. The good news is, I was able to document the entire process for myself, so if it ever stops “just working”, I’ll be able to figure out why and fix it.

This was a big year for linux outside of just the homelab, I actually took the plunge in early November to move away from Windows on my primary workstation. Taking the time to configure Arch from nothing into a relatively modest system that handles my day-to-day needs. It got me back into playing single-player games, helped me to kick my League of Legends habit, and I can still do almost everything I actually want to do. My biggest challenge to overcome right now is book layout, it’s hard to sink so much time into the adobe suite only to not be able to use it. Affinity works, but only with workarounds and it’s still not the smoothest or greatest experience.

Something that I did enjoy this year was getting into programming. I signed up for the boot.dev course and made it through their Object Oriented Programming lesson right on time for them to host a hack-a-thon, a contest where we were able to work with up to two other individuals in the community to put together and submit some feat of programming in a long weekend. My partners and I came up with a snake-like game that can be played in the terminal, but not just any terminal. Anyone can SSH in to vimwizard@vimwizards.sh and give it a shot. All the code is open-sourced on Github, and it earned us a (joint) fourth place prize in the professionals category.

In the process of breaking away from other services I also canceled two hosting plans, centralizing onto Github Pages for my static sites omnimyth where I do all my tabletop game publishing, this site bericson.com, and transitioning my moms blog flavorchronicles to a new VPS, which I’m also using as a redirect to host my personal music service, my knowledgebase for all my continuing education, all secured with 2FA, and the minecraft server that I host for friends.

The stuff unmentioned

There was plenty of other stuff, a new dentist, some webapps for personal media management and use, more things related to digital footprint cleanup and redundancy, just time well spent being with the people I love. I just wanted to write this out as a reminder to myself, that even if the year felt rough at times, I did things worth doing, and I expect that I will do the same in 2026.