I’m not a big fan of the year-end holiday letter, mostly because I don’t care if your cat had a bladder infection in August. But the busier we all are, the less opportunity we have to connect in real life — and frankly when you have 1,000 “friends” on Facebook it’s easy to miss big life events. It turns out we’ve had some pretty big life events in the past few months alone, so in the spirit of connecting I figured I’d write a quick blog post to share the biggies.

There’s no question 2016 will go down as one of the worst years in memory for celebrities, who died at an alarming rate. The NYT ran a list of 2016 celebrity deaths earlier this week and it was scary (RIP Fyvush Finkel). And of course, 2016 will always be remembered as the year the lunatics took over the asylum that is the American government. Yet, for some reason, 2016 has been a pretty good year for my immediate family. We’ve had some big career events, some big life events, and one third of us moved across the country for a big adventure. Here are some highlights:

• Leslie passed her Certified Financial Planner license exam last month after what seemed like a lifetime of studying. Big kudos to my amazing life partner!
• I took a lateral move at the American Heart Association in June in order to better position myself for the future, and that move was rewarded this week with a promotion to a Foundation Relations Adviser role. The position is on our national Mission Advancement team based in Dallas, and I’ll be focused fully on building relationships and writing grant proposals to support the AHA’s mission. My territory will include foundations across the organization’s western region that makes up 16 states. I had my three year anniversary with the AHA this month and can say with all certainty that deciding to work in the nonprofit sector was the best career decision of my life.
• Also this week I landed the largest single foundation gift of my short nonprofit career, a $75,000 grant to provide CPR training kits to high schools in rural Arizona. I hope this is the first of many partnerships I will develop to help improve the cardiac care of Americans across the western U.S.
  

  Madison Place at Greer Manor

• This morning we found out that the offer we made on a townhouse has been accepted. My financial adviser (AKA brilliant wife) made it clear recently that given the financial climate and our desire to actually retire one day, we needed to get off the sidelines after nearly five years of renting. We have had a blast in downtown Phoenix in our luxury apartment in the sky, and while we like downtown we didn’t want to buy here. Our new townhouse is located in a great neighborhood (16th St. and Missouri) that is a nice mix of urban and suburban appeal, and it’s only 1.2 miles from Leslie’s office and zero miles from my office (yep, I will continue to work from home in my new role). So, we’ll be moving to the “Biltmore” area in February. If you live in Central Phoenix I look forward to seeing you soon at Luci’s Healthy Marketplace or Duck and Decanter – both walking distance to our new home!
• 2016 has been a bittersweet year for us in terms of our amazing son Connor. In May he informed us that college was not his cup of tea and that he was dropping out of ASU after one year (this coming as we received a letter from ASU that he’d made the dean’s list). On top of this news, he also informed us that he was moving to New York to follow his dreams (and his amazing girlfriend Clare, who was accepted at the New School in Manhattan). After a few months of going back and forth to the Big Apple, he will be leaving us permanently next week (that’s the bitter part). The sweet part is that he has a great apartment in Brooklyn, he’s making a living as a freelance web developer, and this week, thanks in part to some dual enrollment credits from high school, he’ll be completing his associate’s degree from Rio Salado College. In January he’s enrolling in an innovative Nanodegree program through Udacity that will ultimately lead to him learning even more advanced web development skills. Whether he continues as a freelancer or decides to join a company, after the program he’ll be well positioned to earn a great living in this very competitive field. I am ridiculously proud of him for chasing his own dreams and doing it own way.

There’s more, but these are the big ones. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!