Annual Hart Family Brand Relationship Post

You can see the top 100 brands here: BrandZ. 

Since many of the brands are American icons, I figure it is appropriate to post this on the 4th of July as part of my celebration of America. Instead of a list, I tell the story of our year in brands.

One year ago today, we got caught in a crazy rain storm on our final day at Disney (18) World. We spent about 30 minutes hiding under the faux rocks near the Animal Kingdom entrance before deciding to just run for it. We got drenched and five minutes later, the rain stopped. Life, right?

Disney World to us is more like a competition than a vacation. We gained considerable advantage this year with Katie's new iPhone (2). We knew all the wait times and scheduled our fast passes through the phone. And we totally owned Disney World.

We had a devil of a time getting to Manila last summer, with visa complications and flight confusion. And of course, as vanity demands, we posted it all to Facebook (5). I got to take a crazy same-day round trip from Boston to New York via Amtrak to resolve our visa fiasco. It was during the return trip that I discovered Stranger Things on Netflix (92). We are big fans. A few days later I got to fly to Manila without Katie because of the "how pregnant are you" disaster with Cathay Pacific. Loved that so much.

The kids attended The International School of Manila (ISM), which uses Google (1) as its primary teaching platform. Caleb especially took to the Google user interface and became the first member of the family to question our loyalty to Apple's walled garden. As the year progressed, Caleb's gaming interest picked up. And now he talks of owning a device with a Microsoft (3) OS. I mean, he is a Broncos fan, but Microsoft?

We added Manila (several locations), Tagaytay, Subic, and Tokyo to our impressive list of cities in which we have eaten McDonalds (10). Amazon (4) and Walmart (31) provided steady shipments of comfort food--and Pampers (42)--from home. Yes, Pampers. I almost forgot that we had another child this year. Katie sometimes says to me, "Tim, can you take this?" as she hands Michael to me. As far as I can recall, he is the first child to be regularly referred to as "this."

I fully embraced LinkedIn (79) for the first time this year with the happy result of a new job in my hometown. So I guess I like LinkedIn.

With such bad traffic in Manila, our outside time decreased. Thus, this was the year of YouTube (65). I could live without ever hearing DanTDM's voice again. It got to the point that I was begging my kids to actually play a video game instead of watching YouTube videos of other people playing video games. I think I actually said out loud at one point, "You should do something real, like play a video game."