Burbols in the Year 2023

Above: Nintendo Live 2023 at PAX in Seattle, WI

Left: Our Christmas hotel stay at the luxurious Inn at SentryWorld.

Something Sam and Steve have started doing together during the month of December (one of our advent calendar dailies, if you will) is to each write emails of gratitude to each other. We thought this year that we would start sharing with you our letters to ourselves for the new year – compiled and put together by Sam with their spectacular writing skills. Steve’s strength in these activities has been his ability to sweetly summarize everything into a few lines, which will help keep the first of this kind of post digestible. If left up to Sam, you’d be interpreting meaning out of a mentioned breakfast choice. Luckily for this reading space, below is a combined effort lookback at our year in 2023.

Left: Good Times Brewery in Greenwood, South Carolina.
Below: Somewhere, Wisconsin camping

The year 2023 was kicked off by a surprise invitation to dinner at the Harvey House for their New Years Eve party. Very fancy stuff there. We saw Too Many Zooz in concert at the Majestic earlier in the year, where we were able to both bring a new friend and run into old friends. We took our first Wisconsin road trip “up north” and stayed with friends who visited the local ski resort during the day and in the evening collectively watched way too many hours of Bob Ross reruns. When spring began to come around to these parts of the frozen tundra, we took off on a road trip to visit Sam’s family in Greenwood, South Carolina. This was the first time we’ve visited with Sam’s family in about 5 years. There were so many young children demanding attention from every adult that the trip was a real whirlwind! We also secured tickets to see Babymetal at this time but had to wait literal months to go. As the weather warmed, we camped…a lot. Of which, each time created their own memories with cherished friends.

Left: Sam and Steve drinking in Chicago for their 34th birthday month in July.
Below: Sam and Steve drinking by the community clubhouse/pool of their apartment building.

In the summer, Steve and Sam discovered that they do not enjoy golf by attending the U.S. Senior Open at SentryWorld. We celebrated our birthday months mostly grilling with their neighbors by the pool. For an extra special night, for Sam’s birthday, we got a hotel in downtown Chicago and ordered in pizza for a weekend. 10/10 we would recommend. We also attended another annual “Gathering of the Wizards” camping event with our friends and although there were no trophies brought back to the Burbol home this year, we feel honored to have won in previous years and helping crown new friends in the year 2023. We attended our first ever Renaissance Fair, and went to the Great Taste of Madison, which is an outdoor beer festival. Towards the end of the summer, we saw Jungle at The Sylvee. Since then, we have proceeded to watch their motion picture of their album on YouTube for the rest of the year.

Left: Anniversary photos taken in Seattle, WA
Below: Before the best concert of the year, Jungle

In the fall, we celebrated twenty years of companionship and eleven years married. Yes, we too think it’s incredible to grow old with someone like this! We visited friends in Milwaukee and saw Babymetal in concert, finally!! We also attended the first ever Nintendo Live in North America at PAX West 2023 – another indescribable experience that we would love to eventually do again. You can read more about how we celebrated both of these in previous post about PAX and our anniversary. We started a Health Improvement Group with some friends and started working on our fitness. For the first, three month season of this, the two of us lost a combined 50 pounds! And we still camped as much as we could until the warmth finally went away.

In the winter, we kept the live music train rolling by seeing The Chats and Gymshorts in Milwaukee. Sam literally broke her glasses in the mosh pit and she was able to fix the plastic frames easy with some super glue. We decided to stay at Steve’s work’s fancy golf hotel (Inn at SentryWorld) for the holidays and we really loved it. Maybe a new holiday tradition for the Burbols? We also started a second season of our health group, which has been good for accountability during the holiday months of cookies, pies, and lots of other food. Basically, we’re hunkering down in the gym and good eating habits until the holidays, and the coldest days, go away.

Sam saw Amyl and the Sniffers at the Sylvee towards the end of the year, concluding her recent punk music binge for this year. This year also saw the end of her 15 year-long teaching career. She is leaning hard into another lifelong passion of hers – writing – and hopes that this skill will eventually lead her into a career that requires less caretaking of others and has a more sustainable salary. She’s dreaming big on either freelance journalism, finally publishing herself as a poet, or writing that modern historical fiction about Ninety Six, SC she’s been known to rabbit hole research into. She started streaming on Twitch in the meantime as a way to keep herself consistent and social, since her tendency lately, is to isolate. She is looking forward to meeting new people in the new year and making friends around shared interests while she fosters her new path forward.