2020 was a rough year as we all learned how to deal with a pandemic, and a world full of people who couldn’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. But 2021 would tell us that time doesn’t fix stupid and the problems we saw start in 2020 only got worse in 2021. And I spent altogether too much time in the basement.
But on a brighter side, I started my return to blogging.
- Did our first New Years Tea at home, making our own sandwiches and desserts
- Capitulated to Alex’s demands and started hunting for a new home
- Renovated the stairwell to replace the carpet and clean up the walls
- Repainted quite a lot of the house
- Bought our new home, a much larger 4-level split
- Went to Bellevue for the weekend, a gift from our realtor Robyn, as she put our home of 14 years up for sale
- Took our last family photos at our old home
- Packed. Oh god, the packing.
- Moved. Oh god, how I hate, loathe, and despise moving.
- Bade farewell to our old home. I miss it dearly.
- Went camping at Chain Lakes Provincial Park with the girls, mostly in the rain
- Went camping at Glenwood for the fifth (sixth?) year in a row
- Spent an amazing day on the Belly River, in the glorious heat
- Sweat profusely in our new home, even with ceiling fans, because the house had no breeze to suck the heat out from the day
- Started doing regular walks around the neighbourhood to combat months of bread-making (and eating)
- Realized that our new home wasn’t as well planned as our old home, and gave ourselves much more credit for the renovations we’d done
- Bought a new electric car, a VW e-Golf
- Sold VANessa
- Visited Monkey at her first job, flagging races at Wild Rose Motocross Association
- Went to Kelowna
- Stayed at a B&B farm, with goats and pigs and chickens and horses and two dogs and a cat
- Nearly choked on all the forest fire smoke
- Went to Summerland
- Rode the Kettle Valley Railway for the first time
- Went to the Kangaroo Creek Farm, and petted a capybara
- Swam in the Joe Rich Creek
- Drove to Ruskin a week later
- Went to the Othello Tunnels (way too many people, made me uncomfortable)
- Went to Heritage Park and saw the reopened coal mine exhibit
- Saw a lot of really nice sunrises from our new house (well, neighbourhood, that is)
- Saw a few good sunsets, though only from reflecting off the buildings in downtown to the east
- Spent far too much time working in the basement. Again.
- Shut down my Flickr account, which I’d had since 2006; I lost a few images along the way that, for some reason, were not in my home library
- Took the girls to see Black Widow in the theatre
- Accepted a position with Venture Park, working for Arlene Dickinson and her company
- A couple hundred loaves later, have nearly mastered a loaf of bread, including a really good sourdough
- Went back to working in an office for the first time in 20 months, realizing how much I’d missed being around other people
- Got an Apple Watch to track my health, which has suffered in the last two years
- Started blogging again after six years of near-silence
- Went to my first (adults-only) office holiday party in a decade
- Cut down our tallest Christmas tree to date, as our new house has a higher ceiling
- Went to Sparkle Sparkle at Telus Spark
- Had another quiet Christmas
As you can see, a quiet year. This is a result of trying to do our best to remain physically distant from everyone else. We mastered video conferencing. We watched a lot streaming video content. I ate way too much bread. And I lost a lot of hope in humanity as I saw the worst come out in ways I couldn’t have imagined, not just in people’s disregard for others, but the blatant and rampant ignorance that has in many ways spread even worse than the COVID19 virus and its variants.
And then Betty White died. Eat a bag of dicks, 2021.
