Awww… do we have to?
But, if you steer away from the looming threat of death 💀, the worry about the collapse of society 🔥 and how things might never go back to normal, 2020 wasn’t too bad for us.
But let’s not beat around the bush: when things started going sideways in March, things took a definite turn. When just going shopping is strange enough to warrant a post, you know we’re through the looking glass. In short order, we had to reconfigure our home to have two full-time workers at home and two full-time students. Our low-level love/hate relationship with our Wi-Fi had to be resolved to handle up to four different video conferences at once. Everybody reacted differently to the change. I think Ian had the hardest time, but we made efforts to have activities, like games and movie nights. In the summer, we even bought a tent for the kids. The success of that was highly dependent on the weather. Creating masks became a family activity and then Miranda took it farther. Ian got out a lot in the summer with Joey and Josh, which was a good thing despite breaking his arm. The pandemic certainly made for what might be our most unique anniversary photo ever.
School reopening in September was something that caused Tammy and I a lot of anxiety. On one hand, the COVID cases had been so low over the summer, it seemed the best option to have the kids go back to in-person classes. Miranda didn’t have an option, but Ian could have schooled from home. It didn’t take too long for the cases to rise and outbreaks to happen at each school. And then the schools closed again before Christmas. We’ll see what happens in the New Year.
Of course, there isn’t a lot of travel to post about… we started our year pretty normally, kicking it off with Miranda’s birthday trip to the Royal Tyrrell Museum and following up with some ski days before the hill shut down. I only managed two business trips to Edmonton before all travel for work came to a halt. The first indication that this coronavirus was going to impact things was was in the first week of March when my scheduled trip to the Esri Developer Summit in Palm Springs was cancelled. I also played a big role when the annual Esri Canada gathering in Ontario turned into virtual Tech Trek at work. But it really hit home in August when I was on vacation and we would have been in Victoria.
Everybody did their best to make sure that 2020 was not a “lost year”. See the Art Roundup and Cycling Roundup for evidence of that. Miranda was super artsy in this, her year of being 16. I think almost every post this year that was about Miranda was about her art. She even did a great job of a pandemic-friendly Halloween costume this year.
Ian turned 13 this year. Ian tried his hand at slacklining this year, a pretty good activity for a pandemic. It went pretty well for a while. I don’t know what killed his interest, if it was one too many painful falls off the line or of it was my complete inability to make an effective set of anchors in the back yard, but now the slackline is on the shelf in the garage. Or maybe it was that in the summertime, he learned how to go and play with Josh and Joey. He put a lot of miles on his bike and scooter.
Tammy’s biggest news for the year was getting a full-time, daytime teaching job at Columbia College. She’s had lots of different looks at getting her career restarted since moving to Calgary, but this one finally seems to fit the bill. She was instrumental to helping the school shift to online teaching in April, and it’s paying off. Her 48th birthday went down as our last night out before the pandemic hit. Anybody want to guess when we will next enjoy a Chinese buffet dinner? Mother’s Day was typical 2020: snow outside but we’re going to barbecue steak, dammit.
I turned 47 this year, well into the new reality and before the cycling club really got going. But the weather behaved for that and for Father’s Day as well. Beyond cycling, I got to exercise a few different interests this year. There were two astronomical event that we got to see: the comet NEOWISE in the summer and the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn this winter. I also have a 195 day streak going in Duolingo. I started it with Russian and then shifted to French. I really enjoy both, but French makes more sense. Maybe I’ll speak passable French before I retire. I also did some coding on a notes app, a new version of the FFF iOS app and the Advent of Code. With the pandemic, I was instructed to schedule training at work, and so I took the courses that let me take and pass the Azure Solution Architect exams.
I had a health thing this year. It was a mystery ache in my chest that seems to have gone away. The doctors think it was an inflammation in the ribcage, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have to do the blood tests, ECG and stress test to make sure my ticker was okay. Lost most of July’s cycling to that… Stephanie’s back to wearing glasses, and Dad’s eyes are working better thanks to cataract surgery.
There were posts about other birthdays, too! Thank you so much. There were:
Spending all that time at home, when there were things that needed to be seen to, there was no excuse. The biggest home improvement in terms of effort was finishing the deck. Everybody helped and the results speak for themselves. But the other biggie was replacing the furnace. Of course that happened while winter was still holding on. It was a little chilly in the house for a couple days. Miranda finally got some more shelves for her books. Our old barbecue gave up the ghost, so that was replaced, and the the same for the bathroom fan in the kids’ bathroom. But all that pales compared to what Steph and Tristan put together for their cats.
2020 also saw us paying back some of the technical debt, with long-overdue upgrades to Tammy’s MacBook, the family computer and my iPad. And the recent move of this site from one cloud virtual server to another…
So in the end, I think COVID definitely gave this year a direction that we couldn’t have predicted in January. It was not a bad year for us, although there still is a lot to be concerned about both globally and locally in 2021. Time to gird our loins and prepare for whatever will come.
So much done this year! Not much at this end. Cursed knee on my part but the only reason to celebrate big time was Zach being tumour free after a year! <3
Same old same old. Got my walker and a letter from the federal govt. saying I could now claim tax deduction for being handicapped. My diessy spells still happen every once in a while. Got my first Shingles vaccine, second shot on6th of January.