Happy New Year! Our annual tradition is to take some time to reflect on the year past and share some highlights from each month. Thank you to all the friends and family that continue to make us smile.
After another amazing year together, we ended 2023 with the uncertainty about Bryan’s career mixed in with the anticipation of our longest vacation ever. And then that small fitness goal of Bryan’s to run his first marathon in February (see the 2023 recap posted here). How did 2024 go?
January
Bryan went to work each day unsure when Broadcom would announce it had sold the End User computing division, formerly Airwatch. The VMware and Broadcom culture were polar opposites and many of the fears from the VMware side of what would continue under Broadcom came true over the rest of the year. Employee benefits and perks and celebrations and the overall casual party atmosphere of “work” quickly disappeared and was replaced with the cold, stark mentality of factory work where driving profit was the motivating factor. As an employee watching the removal of the Coca-Cola Freestyle vending machine, the removal of the gourmet coffee machines, the removal of all of the all-you-can-eat gourmet snacks, the closing of the employee cafeteria, the ending of free swag, the removal of the computing accessory vending machines and dozens of other perks being removed reminded all of us that we were back to work. In a classic corporate HR move, the previous head of VMware’s HR swore up and down that work from home would continue post-Broadcom. The merger closed and within a week, she was no longer employed and work from home would come to an end for a majority of the company. A number of talented people decided that was enough and began leaving the company. Long tenured employees leaving the company would continue to be a theme through the end of the year. It would be six more months before a buyer was found.
On the home front we kept things low key and went into money saving mode due in part to the uncertainty about what this job situation would evolve into but mostly because we also had a huge vacation coming up that we needed to save money for. The result is that January went by in a flash of the routine: wake up, work, eat, workout, sleep. repeat.
Bryan did drag the family to see Batman (1989) Live in Concert. This is one of those live events where the movie is playing on the big screen but the music is played live by a full orchestra. What they don’t tell you before you arrive is that many the special effects in film is sound mixed alongside the background music, so when you turn off the background music from the film so the music can be played live, you turn off most of the sound effects rendering a comic book movie not so magical. The orchestra was fantastic but this was likely a one-and-done kind of experience.
February
Mom celebrated another trip around the sun.
One of our favorite travel bloggers, Away Together, hosted a private online class named “Europe For Less” where they shared travel tips on saving money. We signed up, picked up a few tips for saving on flights and started trying to apply some of them for our upcoming vacation.
The big event this month for us was Bryan’s first marathon. A full blog on the subject can be found here but after months of hard training he completed it without stopping and crossed the finish line with a time of 4:47.34.
March
March was another chill month for us. We went to Tennessee to visit with Haley.
Jack turned 16. This generation of children seems to no longer care about the right-of-passage that comes with turning 16: getting a drivers license, getting a car, and never having to spend time with your parents again. Jack has his learners permit to drive but he’s taking his time with the next steps. So instead of getting a car for his birthday Jack celebrated with cookie dough.
April
The running bug just won’t leave Bryan alone so he forced Cherish into a 10K run. Not sure about globally, but in the USA the Atlanta Peacthree Road Race is the largest 10K race in the country with 65,000 runners. Curious about the 2nd and 3rd largest we found that the Bolder Boulder 10K (46,000 runners ) is number 2, and the Cooper River Bridge Run is number 3 (35,000 runners). Charleston is closer to us than Colorado so we decided to give the Cooper River Bridge run a shot. I’ll let Cherish explain how it went in this 4-second video which is one of the funniest race recaps I’ve ever witnessed.
Our friend gave us tickets to attend our first golf tournament – the Mitsubishi Golf Tournament. While the event was nice and well organized and we enjoyed the time spent, we confirmed that we are not golf-people and likely won’t be attending golfing events in the future.
April was also a month of celebrations. April 9th is the anniversary our first date. Fun fact: Cherish can’t remember the date of our wedding (June 15), but without skipping a beat she remembers this anniversary every year.
We are proud of Haley for receiving her Associate’s Degree!
May
Vacation month arrives! 19 days, 4 countries, 8 hotels and no checked bags. And a birthday celebration for Cherish. We came back with 537 photos, 27 videos and an amazing set of memories. If you want to learn more we broke the trip into 3 blogs that you can find here.
June
What do you do with yourself after nearly a month on vacation? Well life doesn’t stop so neither did we! June found us doing our first home improvement project of the year: replacing the lighting in Jack and Haley’s room with Philips Hue lighting.
We were sad to learn of the passing of Cherish’s grandmother Tammy and attended her funeral services.
We celebrated our actual wedding anniversary with a simple meal at From the Earth.
We upgraded the Tesla by tinting the windows and we saw our first Beatles Cover Band with Adi and his family.
July
On the work front, Broadcom completed the sale of the Airwatch technology and the Horizon technology and its employees. We were all sold to an investment company named KKR. The KKR investment group launched a new company named Omnissa with just under 4,000 employees. Bryan stuck with it and would once again be working for a start-up company. Over the 10 year span of this drama, Bryan started at Airwatch in 2014, the company changed names to VMware in 2016, changed names to Broadcom in 2023, and changed names to Omnissa in 2024. It’s a good thing we don’t print business cards anymore.
For those that have been through corporate transitions, being employed and knowing a paycheck will continue to arrive is the most important aspect of the transition, but the day-to-day details and stress of the job itself are different when the company has 30,000 employees to achieve its vision and now that vision has to be achieved with 4,000 employees. Some love this change and thrive in the chaos. Bryan has been lucky enough to keep mostly the same role over the last 10 years so aside from changing names, the most stressful part has been watching so many talented people leave the company. Let’s hope the computing market accepts the new company name and that customers stick with the brand. Go Omnissa!
I suspect this is why Bryan continues to run, so just like the previous year, we ran the Peachtree 10K Road Race again.
And then we plunged into our most expensive and longest running home improvement project-to-date:
We built a home theater! The project kicked off in June and continued through late October. We detail the experience here!
August
It had been a few years since Bryan has traveled on a work trip and to celebrate the birth of Omnissa, a sales kick-off meeting was help in Las Vegas. Haley had never been and now that she’s 22 she could partake of all that Vegas has to offer. Cherish came along for the journey and they celebrated the week while Bryan attended the sales kick-off.
In another milestone, Cherish attended her first Dragoncon.
The highlight for her was getting to be in the same room with her Hollywood dream guy: Nathan Fillion (he’s on the right in the photo below. If you don’t know who Castle is, here’s more info about him over at IMDB, though everyone at this conference knows him as Captain Malcolm. Alan Tudyk was also in the room. Their session was one of the funniest and overall best interactions at Dragoncon. We waited in line for several hours to attend and barely made the cut to get in, sitting on the 2nd to last row of the event hall. As soon as it was over Cherish ran toward the stage trying to get closer and snapped the photo below. She was on Cloud 9 for the rest of the day. Bryan hope’s he comes back in 2025 so we can return to the conference as we’ve skipped attending for a number of years.
September
A chill month for us, except for some drama with the Peloton Tread.
Our tread belt wore out and Peloton does not offer tread replacements. Instead the entire base unit has to be replaced. Luckily ours was still under the extended warranty so it was no extra cost to us, but when the 3rd party delivery crew showed up with a new one they refused to take it upstairs to the gym saying they needed a 4-person crew to lift it. It’s 290 pounds so I get the complaint, but Peloton didn’t ask us if it was upstairs and the previous one was delivered by a 2-person crew. So they left without replacing the treadmill and after some customer support phone calls a second 2-man crew arrived a week later and begrudgingly brought it up the stairs. They broke off a piece of our brick steps in the process, and did such a poor job assembling the new one that Peloton sent us another new replacement and another new crew to make up for the experience. We purchased the Tread in November of 2021. This will be our 3rd new Treadmill. The lesson here: this is the only product in my entire life where buying the extended warranty turned out to be a good decision.
October
Halloween month is always fun in our neighborhood. Bryan tried something new this year….
November
A life-changing month for sure, Bryan celebrated another trip around the sun turning 47 and celebrated by getting his first Colonoscopy followed by a Vasectomy. Dad turned 77 and has already had both of those procedures so he had more cause for celebration this year.
We also decided to start a new annual tradition. We hosted a Friends-Giving Party. It’s like Thanksgiving but with your friends instead of your family. We had a good turnout and enjoyed a wonderful evening of good conversation. We look forward to trying this again next year.
December
Back in July we ordered a bar cabinet from Sierra Living Concepts. It arrived in December. The company wanted an extra $500 for what they call White-Glove assembly and we couldn’t imagine why we might need that so we skipped it. Boy was that a mistake. Below is an image of the 233 pound pallet that arrived. This is 1 of 3! The second pallet weighed 215 pounds and the third pallet weighed 129 pounds.
This first attempt at getting it in the house involved Bryan and John and some moving straps. We thought perhaps if John and I could lift it up to the stoop that we should be able to angle it in such a way as to allow Cherish to catch it from the inside and then slowly lower it to the floor where we could then push it inside. The only part of that plan that worked is that we got it up the two steps. If you look closely at the bottom steps toward the center you’ll see the chipped brick from the Peloton Tread mishap earlier in the year. We still have not fixed this.
Realizing two people were not going to be enough to handle this job, we are fortunate enough to live next to a very nice family who has three college aged boys. It took 6 of us to get this thing inside the house. Unwrapping took another hour, assembling it took half an hour and after some final shoves, we got it positioned into its final resting place. The end result turned out perfectly for us.
For Christmas this year Cherish brought the kids some artwork to color. We also played the cellophane wrap game. If you have not heard of this, you grab a variety of small knick nack gifts like candy, gift cards, drinks, food and anything else than you began wrapping it in one continuous giant ball of cellophane. The ball of stuff is placed on the table and your family gathers around. Each person gets a turn. Wearing a pair of oven mitts your task is to attempt to unwrap the ball while a timer counts down. Whatever falls out as you unwrap is yours to keep. The ball of joy passes to the next family member when the time is up. This repeats until the game is over. It’s much harder than you think it would be.
Atlanta has a Christmas event named the Atlanta Christkindl Market. It started in Buckhead, and has grown into several additional markets. Having never been, we decided to try out the one held at Cumberland Mall. Bryan got the date wrong so we drove down to see it the Saturday BEFORE it opened.
We came back the following Saturday while it was open. While time with family is always time well spent, this thing was tiny and not worth the one hour drive for us. It’s cute though.
To close out the year, we took our family photo, though its aways sad when Haley is not available to join in on the fun.
Final Thoughts
Another year in the books. It really does go by quick. With a marathon under Bryan’s belt and months of “what’s next” thinking in mind Bryan declared that 2025 was going to be the year of the 10K. His crazy idea: We are going to run a 10K every month of the year, but for the first time we are going to travel around the US to do them. 12 states, 12 marathons. It took some convincing but Cherish agreed that having 12 mini-vacation would be fun. 2025 here we come!