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Another year with my cute family

Another year with my cute family.

2025 wasn’t a great year for many people. For us, I’d call it an “okay” year—and honestly, okay still carried plenty of warmth. When I look back, what stands out most are the wholesome, silly moments: hosting our first friends’ dinner, and Joy and Dyson splashing around in a tiny kiddie pool like it was the best day on earth.

As the years pass, remembering a specific point in time gets harder. That’s why I’ve learned to **keep a few key moments—little anchors—**that can bring you back instantly. Photos help. Objects help. And for me, art helps most.

A Visual Time Capsule: Our Growing A to Z Art Collection

I’m a visual person, so this growing collection of A to Z illustrations has become my way of holding onto the moments that matter. It’s also a gift I love giving Angel—something meaningful, personal, and tied to the life we’re building together.

This year’s piece symbolizes:

The hope I have for our growth in Montour Falls
The love of our puppy babies (Joy and Dyson)
Building our next chapter with the Goldenrod Inn

And yes—there’s an Easter egg in the illustration: can you spot the goldenrod in the artwork?

Why This Matters to Me

It’s easy to let time blur. But I don’t want these years to disappear into a vague “back then.” I want to remember the tiny, ridiculous details—the laughter, the chaos, the small wins, the ordinary days that turn out to be the important ones.

This artwork is one of the ways I’m choosing to remember.

What I’m Looking Forward To

Montour Falls continues to feel like possibility. The Goldenrod Inn feels like a dream that’s turning into something real—step by step. If 2025 was “okay,” my hope is that the next chapter is steadier, brighter, and built with intention.

If you’re building something too—whether it’s a home, a family, a business, or just a better year—I’m rooting for you. 👨🏻‍❤️‍👨🏽🏳️‍🌈🐶

Bastianilkk Sabastian Delgado Illustration - Original

Bastianilkk Sabastian Delgado Illustration - framed

Illustration by Sebastián Delgado

I don’t know what we are doing but we are still in love

Sometimes the best moments happen without a plan. This photo captures one of those rare, simple joys—an effortless afternoon spent together at Sparkling Point Vineyard in North Fork, Long Island.

It was one of our final North Fork Line trips with friends, a bright and beautiful day surrounded by vineyards, laughter, and sparkling wine. Angel and I finally did what we always talked about: stepping into the vineyard and taking a photo together. No agenda, no overthinking—just a spontaneous, playful moment that felt perfectly us.

Dressed casually against a lush green vineyard backdrop, we balanced on one leg with outstretched poses, laughing through what turned into a sweet, unmistakably affectionate moment. Not a “boyfriend” moment—something deeper. A quiet reminder of who we are now: husbands, friends, and partners, still choosing joy in the small things.

Sparkling Point felt like the right place for it. Great friends, crisp sparkling wine, a little caviar, and that unmistakable North Fork calm that slows everything down. Days like this don’t need structure—they just need presence.

Our philosophy is simple: love deeply, laugh often, and sip slowly. We’ll keep chasing these unscripted moments wherever they show up—vineyards included.

In Austin, Texan Stars & Lips Abound

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When Angel and I flew to Austin, Texas for Ken and Joey’s wedding, we also took the opportunity to take a short vacation of sorts. We flew to Austin a day before the wedding festivities and celebrations commenced. While in Austin, we took the time to explore, peruse the city, and as self-professed “foodies” are wont to do—try restaurants and Texan delicacies.

(As a disclaimer: while on the trip, we didn’t live recklessly. Necessary precautions were taken and mask mandates were followed. We conscientiously adhered to any and all rules regulated by the CDC in restaurants, public places, and of course at the wedding. Upon arrival, we took a rapid COVID-19 test and continued to receive negative results throughout the entire week.)

After checking in, Angel and I explored the Austin Motel. A gay-friendly hotel, its signage took the shape of a penis set in bright neon lights. (I can’t say that we didn’t immediately buy a matching magnet of its likeness to put on our refrigerator.) The Austin Motel had an old-school motel feeling—a throwback modernized for its 21st-century guests. Full of novel architectural details, it followed the practice of pairing old historical bones with new modern minutiae. To speak to this, I slept in a room replete with lip print-patterned wallpaper, a big leather-bound bed, and a rotary phone.

Now, for food. While in Texas, it was almost an obligation to eat breakfast tacos at least once! Not too far from our hotel was a little roadside taco stand, where we bought and consumed our breakfast tacos on a couple of mornings. And when not eating tacos, we also went to a few restaurants with James Beard award-winning chefs. The first, called the Odd Duck, served several cocktails that were distilled in barrels on tap. With our drinks, we enjoyed a plate of seared scallops and a Wagyu beef burger in addition to some vegetarian turkey bacon. A couple of restaurants were also recommended to us—one being La Condesa Austin, which served huitlacoche quesadillas from fermented corn. A delicacy I couldn’t pass up!

While perusing the town, being New Yorkers, Angel and I wanted to walk everywhere. Turns out, Austin isn’t a “walking” city. There were periods where we walked amongst other pedestrians and other times when we felt like the last two people on earth. While walking around, we visited the state capitol, an interesting yet imposing building in and of itself. We noticed then, as we had been noticing for days—the Texas star is never far from sight. On our way to and from the Capitol, I took the opportunity to snap a few pictures of the various stars around town.

All in all, it was a great trip—a chance to celebrate close friends and travel!

My new snazzy sweater

There’s something quietly thrilling about a new sweater—like stepping into a slightly different version of yourself.

This one is snazzy in the way good winter things are: soft, sturdy, and a little unexpected. The knit is thick and pale, scattered with blue like weather moving in over an empty field. It doesn’t try too hard, which is exactly why it works. The kind of piece you throw on without thinking, and then later realize you’ve been wearing all day because it feels like a small shelter.

I caught myself looking down at it and smiling. Not because it’s “new clothes” new, but because it carries that calm, settled feeling—like something that can live alongside you. Like the familiar creak of boards in an old house, or the way winter air changes everything into a softer version of itself.

There’s no big story here, just a simple upgrade to the everyday: cuffs rolled, collar peeking out, the world a little brighter and bigger for an afternoon. Sometimes that’s enough.

If you’ve ever had a piece of clothing turn into a season—something you reach for when the light gets thin—then you know exactly what I mean.

Golden Boys Day

The day felt bright in the easy way travel sometimes does—no big plan, just a shared direction.

In Kyoto, the gold pavilion sat across the pond like something carefully placed in the world and then left alone to be itself. The water held it without trying. Pines leaned in at the edges, and the hills behind everything looked soft and patient, the way old places can.

We stood at the shoreline long enough for the scene to settle into us. Then we did what we always end up doing when we’re happy: turned the camera back toward our own faces and tried to fit the feeling into a frame.

It’s a small thing, a photo. Two sunlit smiles, a couple hats, round glasses. But I keep thinking about how moments like this don’t shout. They just hum. They say: you’re here, you made it to this particular day, and you get to carry it home.

“Golden Boys Day” isn’t really about the gold at all, even though the pavilion shines like a promise. It’s about walking side by side through a place layered with time, and realizing that the best souvenirs are the quiet ones—light on the water, warmth on your skin, and someone next to you who makes the world feel a little wider.

Dyson is just as good as Hachiko

Dyson is just as good as Hachiko, or at least that’s what it felt like standing there in the bright Shibuya light—one world pressing up against another.

The Hachiko statue has a gravity to it. People orbit, pause, smile, move on. Bronze made warm by hands and time, set against the everyday rush of Tokyo. It’s easy to arrive expecting a simple photo spot and leave with something quieter: a reminder that loyalty can become a landmark, and that a city can hold tenderness in plain sight.

Dyson, meanwhile, is not cast in metal. He’s living and impatient and funny in the way a dog can be—present tense all the time. The comparison is unfair, and still it makes sense. Hachiko is the story we carry around; Dyson is the small, real version of it that waits at home (or in your mind) and makes the idea feel possible.

I like places that do this—where the mundane and the meaningful overlap without announcing themselves. A statue in a pocket of shade. A person posing beside it, trying to be lighthearted. A memory taking shape while traffic moves and the city keeps humming.

If you’re in Tokyo, go say hello to Hachiko. Stay a minute longer than you planned. Listen to the noise and see what it leaves behind.

Happy Birthday Angel

There’s a particular kind of warmth that settles over a table when a birthday is the reason everyone showed up. It’s not loud, not staged. It’s in the small things: the shine of glassware catching low light, the quiet order of plates and folded napkins, the way people lean in toward one another as if the evening is a room you can step into and close the door behind you.

Happy Birthday Angel. A simple line, but it carries a whole soft history—shared meals, familiar jokes, the comfort of being known. At dinner, that feeling becomes tangible. You can see it in the relaxed shoulders, in the easy smiles, in the way the table feels lived-in before the first course even arrives.

Restaurants can be anonymous places, but nights like this give them a pulse. The wood grain under candlelight, the clink of forks, the paused moment before everyone starts talking at once—little ordinary details turning quietly meaningful.

Birthdays aren’t only about marking time. They’re about gathering it. Collecting a handful of people and making one evening feel like it belongs on a shelf in your mind, ready to be taken down later when you need something steady.

Here’s to Angel—celebrated well, surrounded by friends, and held for a moment in the gentle ceremony of dinner.

Robe in Hotel Bed

A robe left on a hotel bed always feels like an invitation and a warning at the same time.

The room is quiet in that careful way conference hotels are quiet: carpet swallowing footsteps, air conditioning breathing in measured sighs, the hallway’s life kept at a distance. Inside, it’s just the bed—white sheets pulled tight—and the simple weight of fabric waiting where a person should be.

Travel does that. It compresses you. Days become lanyards and schedules, small talk and bad coffee, a loop of elevators and meeting rooms. Then you come back to the room and everything you carried in your head finally sets down. The robe is there like a placeholder for rest, a soft uniform for the hour when you’re no longer presenting anything.

I think that’s what I notice most in places like this: how the ordinary becomes briefly strange. A bed that isn’t yours. A mirror that doesn’t know you. A silence that feels rented.

And still, there’s comfort. The room doesn’t ask for your history. It doesn’t creak with the ghosts of old years or hold the familiar scuffs of a life lived. It just offers clean edges, a lamp glow, and the chance to be anonymous for a night.

Somewhere outside the window, the city keeps going. In here, the robe waits. So do I.

Weekend Vaca with Boo in NOFO

The weekend in NOFO felt like the kind of pause you don’t plan, you just fall into.

The sky was a wide, soft gray—nothing dramatic, just a ceiling of cloud that made the water look steadier and more honest. We stood close at the edge of it all, shoulder to shoulder, letting the wind do what it wanted with our shirts and our hair, letting the moment be unposed even as the camera caught it.

There’s a comfort in getting away with someone you love and realizing you don’t have to fill every second. A short drive turns into a different rhythm: slower meals, longer looks, quiet jokes that only make sense to the two of you. NOFO has that effect. It doesn’t demand a checklist. It just gives you room.

I keep thinking about how places can hold feelings the way old houses hold heat—subtle, stored up, and easy to miss until you step back inside your own life. This trip wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It was the simple relief of salt air, an arm around a shoulder, and the ocean stretching out like a reset button.

If you want the little details and reactions, the Instagram comments tell the rest of the story.

The two most beautiful thing this weekend in one photo

There are weekends that feel too big to hold in your hands, so you try to press them flat into something simple—one frame, one breath, one small proof that you were there.

In this photo, the red rocks sit under a heavy sky, muted by cloud and distance, the way landmarks do when you’re not trying to conquer them—only notice them. Below, rows of clay-colored roofs and soft green trees make their own quiet pattern, a lived-in grid at the edge of the wild.

And then there’s the other beautiful thing: the small human moment in front of all that ancient stone. Someone leaning in with a phone, framing the same view, saving it the way we all do now. Not to replace the memory, but to give it a place to live when the weekend is over.

I like how the scene holds two kinds of scale at once—the patient, unmoving rock and the quick, fleeting act of photographing it. The world pushes up against itself: wilderness and neighborhood, weather and weekend, permanence and a thumb tapping a screen.

Maybe that’s what makes the best trips feel settled instead of crowded. You don’t take the landscape home. You just let it follow you a little, like color on your sleeves.

Family bonding time

The photo catches a quiet kind of closeness—two dads stretched out together, the world narrowed to a couch, a soft black-and-white filter, and a puppy tucked in like a warm punctuation mark at the bottom of the frame.

There’s something about moments like this that feels bigger than it looks. No big plans, no perfect lighting, no reason to perform. Just the small weight of an animal settling in, the familiar angles of someone you love beside you, the unspoken agreement to stay still for a while.

Bonding can sound like an activity, like something you schedule or work at, but more often it’s these ordinary minutes that do the stitching. A shared look at the camera. An arm draped where it always ends up. A dog’s sleepy eyes, half-trusting and half-curious, as if it’s learning the shape of this home in real time.

Family bonding time doesn’t need much space. It just needs a little quiet, and the willingness to be there—together—until the day feels settled.

Two dads cuddling with puppy, framed in a simple snapshot, says what a lot of words can’t: this is what “home” looks like when it’s alive.

Great Dinner in PA with my cutie

Dinner in Pennsylvania always seems to arrive the way weather does—quietly at first, then all at once. We stepped out into the evening with that small, earned kind of happiness: full plates behind us, a little warmth in our cheeks, and the sense that the night didn’t need to be anything more than what it already was.

I keep thinking about the way places hold you. A restaurant table, a familiar street, the soft clink of silverware and glass—ordinary things that still feel like a marker in time. It’s the same comfort I find in old houses: not perfect, not staged, just lived-in. You can almost hear the room breathing around you.

After dinner we paused for a photo, standing close like we always do when we’re not trying to make a moment out of it. Two patterned shirts, an easy smile, the dark shutters framing us like a memory you can step back into. The window behind us caught a little glow, as if the inside of the building was still holding onto the evening.

I don’t remember every bite, but I remember the steadiness of it—how good it feels to share a meal with someone who makes the world feel a bit brighter and a bit bigger.

Great Dinner in PA with my cutie, tucked away like a small keepsake.