Edit: I completely skipped everything having to do with the protests, racism, ableism, trans- and homophobia, continuing political issues, and the shooting of unarmed black men and women. It’s not an oversight; being a white person, I’d much rather you listen to better educated, more invested folks on these matters.
It’d be nice if I would consistently put my daily or weekly thoughts here, or in my journal, as opposed to carelessly dropping them on Twitter. After all, my own brain doesn’t really retain much in the way of the day to day (or really even memories in general). So each note I find from the past is a letter from the Ago.
This year sucked. There’s nothing newsworthy about that, we all know it. “We” being the collective of humanity. It started out well enough and then Covid hit, and then several countries (including the USA) had the opportunity to showcase their remarkable lack of humanitarianism, self-interest, education, and faith in the science that gave us cars and airplanes and flu vaccines. That made it very very bad.
On Covid
Future me: remember these things.
- Hiring our first employees, RIGHT before Covid was a thing.
- Being concerned enough about Covid to consider cancelling our first JoCo cruise. Going anyway, wearing masks the whole flight and through both airports.
- Coming back from the cruise just in time for the Great Toilet Paper Run of 2020, and an airport full of people wondering if they’d get home.
- Lockdowns that weren’t really lockdowns.
- A complete lack of lockdowns, real or otherwise.
- Climbing numbers in the summer, and again at the holidays.
- Shouting at family members (especially the elderly ones) that NO, it’s NOT okay to dine in restaurants or go on airplanes, I mean Jesus, you’re willing to risk DYING for a meal out???
- How the kids suffered from the stress, and the lack of outings and friend contact.
- How we did too.
- Zoom, oh so much Zoom.
- Losing our dog Emma to old age, and adopting a rescue – then stress-adopting a Great Dane puppy.
- Virtual events.
- Connecting online in all the ways we’ve done before, but now as a lifeline:
So, that’s Covid.
On Colorado
Oddly, the silver lining of this year was finally having the right set of circumstances to move out of Texas…something I’ve wanted to do since I first moved here as a kid.
The kids were already homeschooling. We were already working from home. Lisette didn’t want to move yet, but she’s able to live with a close family friend…really rather like second family. As long as nobody can go out and do things (like water parks), and nobody gets to visit friends, we may as well go. So, we moved.
Moving is HARD. We did hire folks to move the heavy stuff into the second Pod we rented – which was our last of three loads of stuff. (I’d really, really like to get that down to one load of stuff, if at all possible.)
But my god, this house we’re renting is sitting on a piece of paradise. The big southern facing windows show the mountains just to the west, neighbors’ houses and barns sitting in fields straight ahead, and trees and snow all around. We have fireplaces and lots of hot tea. I don’t know if the others love being here as much as I do, but everyone’s pretty damn content.
Internet Life
I work online. I keep up with friends and colleagues on Twitter & other platforms. I have an ongoing private chat with a couple close friends, and an ongoing text group with a few close (extended) family members.
I attend regular zoom “hangout” meetings organized by yet another friend. When we play D&D, it’s online. And the family keeps in touch via a private Discord server, where we post updates, questions, links, memes, etc.
When I was a kid, I was very lonely. A couple of moves left me without a neighborhood I was connected to, and my own weird self kept me a social outcast. When I had 1-2 friends, I felt very lucky. We did the obligatory bike rides to each others’ places, and long phone calls.
The internet today is everything that 10 and 12 and 14 year old me could have ever wanted – a way to make friends with similar interests and sense of humor, without the limitation of geography. A vast repository of information and data and entertainment. A place to talk and connect. “Reach out and touch someone”, the old commercials used to say. Today, you can reach out and touch a LOT of someones. I’m very, very grateful, for myself and especially for my kids.
2021
Last week people started talking about new year’s resolutions, and I joked that instead, we should all do new year’s predictions. I’m not good at predictions, but I also don’t mind being wrong, so…
- There’s going to be a LOT more working from home, even after the Covid problem is “solved”. It still won’t be universal, for a great many reasons, but it’ll no longer be the exception.
- Business is going to pick up. It kind of HAS to.
- People are going to have “vaccination parties”, to mark the occasion of their loved ones all getting the Covid vaccine. That’s going to be great, and probably pretty touching.
- We’ll invent real teleportation, what the hell.
- The big new stupid trend will come sometime in the summer, and it’ll be called “grapping”.
I told you, I’m really not great at predictions.
May 2021 be better even than your 2015. May you come out hale, healthy, and loved. May we all stand against the storm.