- I have a very large extended family. My dad was one of 11 children. My mom was one of nine children. They both grew up on dairy farms, so having large families was helpful. I have 37 first cousins, and some of them are hardly older than my own kids (who are adults now). Growing up, we would go to a reunion for my dad’s family every summer, and I honestly did not know about a third of the people at the reunion or how they were related to me.
- I play a lot of board games, paper and pencil games, and card games, but never was very passionate about video games. Growing up, I played traditional games like Monopoly, Risk, Parcheesi, Yahtzee, etc. Now my family has quite a wide variety of less well-known games, such as 7 Wonders, Sushi Go, Munchkin, Fealty, Oceans, Dixit, Snake Oil, Paperback, Sailing Toward Osiris, Alhambra, Loot, Phase 10, and Mangaka to name a few. We taught a variety of friends how to play some of them, and my summer research students get to learn a couple when my wife and I host them for an afternoon.
- My dad always worked on his parents’ farm and now it’s his farm. I never had to do daily chores as a kid (my aunts and uncles were still around for those), but helped with other work that required extra hands, including putting in hay in the summer. Several years ago, I started helping with hay again, driving tractors that are older than me and stacking traditional rectangular/box-shaped bales in the haybarns. It’s a 1.5-hour drive to the farm, and my dad puts in over 30,000 bales of a hay per summer, so it’s a lot of traveling and many hours of weather-dependent work. When I was younger, we often put as many as 2,000-3,000 bales in the barn in one day, but there isn’t so much help around anymore, so the work goes at a slower pace nowadays.
- I like to walk in the woods, hike trails, and I would walk almost everywhere I needed to go if I could. When I first moved to the Albany area for a postdoctoral position, I walked 2.5 miles one-way to work so my wife and I could have just one car. At a couple points I biked to work, but I honestly prefer to walk. I sometimes walk two to three miles for errands, and have made the four-mile walk to Siena graduation a couple times carrying my robes.
- My wife and I were one of those “love-at-first-sight” couples in college that would get on people’s nerves with our public displays of affection. People in her dorm thought we had been dating for years, when we had actually only been together a couple months. We had kids early; my daughter was born several months before I received my Bachelor’s degree. We were married shortly after that and just celebrated our 29th anniversary.
- I don’t think of myself as anti-technology, but I do a lot of things old-fashioned ways. My push lawn mower has no motor other than me. I trim my yard with hand clippers, work up soil with a shovel, and would rather wash dishes by hand than use my dishwasher. When I still had a maple tree in my front yard, I used to climb up it with a hand saw to trim off dead branches. I also did not have a cell phone until 2015, and only started using a smartphone in 2021.
- When my son and daughter were younger, I preferred to guide them to figure things out on their own and be responsible for themselves, even if that led to them making mistakes. My wife and I (mostly my wife) homeschooled them from kindergarten through high school. One notable example was my response to their question of whether Santa Claus was real. I never gave them an answer, but instead told them, “Some things you have to figure out for yourself.” When they were in their early teens, my wife and I let them take the train from Albany to New York City by themselves and then take the subway to meet up with their grandfather for the day. They both had to fill out their own college applications and FAFSA forms; I only helped when they needed specific financial information for the FAFSA.
- I like to cook, and my wife and I cook dinner six to seven nights a week. I tend to use recipes as inspiration when cooking meals, making up a lot of dishes, and don’t like to measure seasonings or other ingredients unless it is really necessary. So, I make a lot of meals that are slightly different each time. I follow recipes more carefully when baking, but my family teases me that I still always substitute something or change the recipe. My daughter claims that I once substituted every ingredient in a recipe.
- I like to grow vegetables, but my approximately 200 square-foot garden is miniscule compared to my parents’ garden that is about 2000 square feet. Growing up, my two sisters and I did all kinds of planting, weeding, picking and snapping beans, hilling potatoes, shelling peas, other garden jobs, and ate mostly our own vegetables. Potatoes about five nights a week got old when I was a kid, but now sometimes I miss that.
- If you made it this far, thanks for reading my list. I will share the best thing I ever heard an undergraduate student say, which was at an undergraduate experience workshop when I was in graduate school: “Embrace failure.” Fear of failure holds too many of us back, and we often have to own our failures to succeed in meaningful endeavors.
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