danoshinsky.com

In early 2012, I got serious about publishing to this blog. That January, I wrote 14 posts. Most months, I published 10+ things to danoshinsky.com. I was going through a huge moment in my career. Stry.us was ramping up, and I had a lot to say!

When I got to BuzzFeed, I started to slow down on my posting. I went through stretches in 2014 and into early 2015 when I was writing one thing a month on the site. I knew I needed an outlet to write, though, and in spring 2015, I committed to writing weekly on this site. I’ve kept up the habit for more than a decade.

But lately, I’ve had this recurring problem: I’ll come up with a really good idea for a post, then check to see if I’ve written something on my site about it, and realize: Yeah, I’ve written about that already. (Sometimes, I’ve written about it two or three times!) Over the past 10+ years, I got married, had a kid, moved across the country, started a business — and yes, somehow managed to write 500+ blog posts, too.

These days, I have other outlets for writing. I’m still journaling, still publishing new stuff to the Inbox Collective website, and doing quite a bit of writing in my newsletter, too.

I also don’t want to write just to write. My bar for publishing new stuff should be higher than it was a decade ago.

So yes: Expect more from me on danoshinsky.com. I’ve got plenty more to say.

Maybe just not every week.

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That’s the homepage from January 2012. My navigation included an about page with the hyperlinked phrase “About The Idiot Who Runs This Site.” I mentioned my mother in the title of the site. It was a different time!

This summer, we visited Portland, Maine, and brought Ben along. He brought one of his favorite stuffed animals, a little dog, with him.

On the very last day of our stay at the Portland Sheraton, we couldn’t find the dog. We looked everywhere: Under beds, in cabinets, behind curtains, and outside, in case he had dropped it while playing on the grounds of the hotel. We couldn’t find it anywhere, so we asked the team at the front desk if they could be on the lookout for it.

They were so incredibly kind to Ben. They told him that there were 100 people on staff at the hotel, and they said the entire team would search for his doggy.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect them to find the dog.

But on the very last day of our trip, just as we were arriving at the airport and about to fly home, we got a call from the hotel. They said they’d found the dog. (It turned out Ben had thrown the dog and gotten it lodged it behind the TV.) They even mailed it back to us.

The look on our little guy’s face when that dog showed up in our mailbox was priceless. He was so happy to be reunited with his doggy.

And I’m so grateful to the team at the Portland Sheraton for going that extra mile for Ben.

Jacques Doucet, the longtime voice of the Montreal Expos, died this week, and I wanted to say a few words about him.

I interviewed him 20 years ago this summer. I was an intern at a small daily paper in Washington, D.C., and I was covering a lot of Washington Nationals games that summer. During a week off between games, a few friends and I decided to visit a friend who was living in Montreal. While I was there, I decided to see if I could interview some people who had been connected to the Expos. It had been two years since the Expos left for D.C. The players had moved to D.C., but the fans, staff, and media stayed in Canada. I was curious: What happened to the people who the Expos left behind?

I’m not sure how, but I got connected with Jacques Doucet, and he agreed to an interview. He was the former French language radio voice of the Expos. He’d been the lead broadcaster for 33 seasons. For the two years before that, he covered the team as a newspaper reporter. As he told me, he was the guy who’d seen the team from the very start to the very end. When they left Canada, they left him without a job.

There was no real reason for him to make time for me. He had nothing to gain from the conversation, and all the reason in the world to be angry at anyone even remotely connected to the Nationals. And I was a 19-year-old summer intern. It would’ve been easy to have declined an interview request.

And yet: He invited me to his home, and we chatted for more than an hour. I wish I’d kept the tapes — this was long enough ago that the entire conversation was recorded on tiny cassettes in a tape recorder I’d purchased at RadioShack, and those tapes are long gone — but I remember how generous he was with his time and patient he was with my questions.

I only spent a bit of time with him, but it was so clear that he loved broadcasting, loved baseball, and loved bringing joy into the homes of so many people across Quebec. (In the years after the Expos left, he continued to broadcast baseball, even calling minor league games.)

When I think back upon that conversation, what I know now is that it’s not every day you get to talk with someone who truly loves what they do. Some people like their jobs, but I’ve only met a handful of people who truly loved theirs. That’s a rare thing in this world.

Thanks for making time for me, Jacques. I know you’ll be missed.