Over the 2019 holidays we spent a month in Italy, working remotely for a while, seeing family and friends, then crowning everything with a few days in Sicily, where I hadn’t been in over thirty years. Just a few days before the new year, as I was leaving one of my favorite restaurants in Imola, they gave me a 2020 daily calendar, with the day’s saint listed on each page. My thought then was that between work and all the trips we had planned for the year we’d end up falling behind and having to tear off entire weeks at a time.

“Are you studying or reading a book?”

That was the question my grandma asked me whenever she saw me reading. That was always her curiosity, even before her illness compelled her to ask that question every ten minutes, making it challenging for me to read anything around her.

My parents got Klara in the late summer of 1999 when she was still a pup. I had just moved to California for a year, and I’ll admit that before I met her I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Maybe I was even a bit jealous.

After my first post on The Pastry Box Project last year, I was invited to be a baker for 2015, which is also the project’s final year. I started my tenure on January 31, with a piece titled “Pixel-Induced Alienation.”