Tag: 2020

Closing out the year with a sputter

This highly unusual year is finally coming to a close. And though there are parts of it I wish I could do differently, I’m not sorry to see the end of it.

2020: a confusing year.

I didn’t so much manage to keep posting regularly this month. I fell short of that goal, much like a lot of my other goals for the year. So, I suppose it’s a fitting end. I did manage to post every day in November, plus another 15 posts (16 if you count this one), so there’s that.

My 2020 posts were a little sparse.

I fell short on my reading goals. I planned to read at least 52 books. I finished 40. I barely read any physical books at all, and mostly listened to audio books. (I still count those.) The book group I was in sort of sputtered out after a few zoom meetings. I didn’t even try to follow the Read Harder Challenge list from Book Riot, after successfully completing it in 2019. I found I didn’t have the concentration to read books much of the year.

I walked the dog pretty much every day, and kept reasonably active, but I wouldn’t say I especially accomplished any fitness goals.

I accomplished a few professional goals, but fell short on some others.

I did a lot of volunteer work, but dropped the ball more than once.

I did a few creative projects, but never got off the ground on a few others.

I had one trip to California in February to see my mother, for which I am very grateful, but pretty much all subsequent travel plans were cancelled.

My family has stayed largely well, but we have had our grief, too. I have meant to write a post about a significant loss, but haven’t found the time or energy to do my feelings or the person justice.

I put a lot of time and energy into the US elections, and the results were mostly good, but we are still living in this weird reality where a bewilderingly sizable percentage of the population does not believe in the results. I feel like I still need to hold my breath until we are past the inauguration.

With two vaccines already being distributed in the US for the coronavirus, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I know a number of people, who all work in some healthcare profession, who have already gotten their first shots. But with the gross mismanagement at the federal level, only a tiny percentage of the population have started to get vaccinated. At current rates it will be many, many months before it becomes available to me or my family. The tunnel appears to be quite long. And cases are continuing to rise oh-so-alarmingly.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but it appears to be still quite a long, dark tunnel we’re in.

Today, we have broken with our tradition of taking the train into Boston to see the ice sculptures, eat at one of our favorite restaurants, and generally be tourists in the city. Instead, we’ll stay home, and stay warm and safe.

Seeing the ice sculptures in Boston: One of many traditions set aside this year.

In a year of big challenges and big stress, I have come out mostly okay. I feel like I was very busy all year, but didn’t get all that much done. The year took a lot of energy. In some ways, it was a huge accomplishment just to make it through, and have any products at all. My family has been mostly okay. We have jobs and a home. So I have much to be thankful for.

So now, I welcome the new year with some degree of hopefulness, but also with some wariness and weariness that come from the awareness that we are not yet out of the woods.

We did get to go for some walks in the woods this year.
Here is a more cheerful photo of woods, since I don’t like to end on such a melancholy note. I do actually really like the woods.

Wishing us all a safer, healthier, happier new year!

2020: the year of cancelled plans

I’m trying to get caught up with some work projects, but I’m also still committed to some community volunteer projects. For one of them, a program to encourage the adoption of clean energy in local homes and businesses, I’ve gotten involved with doing some of the social media. And in coming up with a post on the theme of home heating/cooling, I went on a bit of a flight of fancy, and I made a thing. It makes me laugh.

Here’s my caption: “Spending a lot of time at home this year? If your summer cooling wasn’t what you hoped, and/or your winter heating could use an upgrade, we can help with clean heating and cooling solutions that will save you money. Learn more at https://www.solarizemendonupton.com“

I had a couple of cancelled trips this year. Not quite the beach scene depicted in the image1 above, but trips I was looking forward to nevertheless. Sigh.

On the bright side, I have had a lot of quality time at home, where I can enjoy drinking tea from my new favorite mug. (Featured in the above photo.)

The “Things Could Be Worse” mug from Calamityware. There is no better motif for 2020.

1Beach/drink image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay. Picture of my laptop by me.

20 twenty things

The other day, when I was making my little jokes about 20/20 vision and losing my glasses (in a very 2020 way), I found myself pondering things about the number 20. And that pondering led to some enumerating, and that enumerating became a list. On this 20th day of the month, and in the tradition of my ThThTh lists (but breaking tradition since it’s not Thursday), I present a list of things around the theme of 20. And it seemed only right to have a list of 20 of them.

1) 20/20 vision: Normal vision. It is based on what row of an eye chart you can read from 20 feet. 

2) The 20-20-20 rule. To help with eyestrain. For every 20 minutes you find yourself staring at a screen, spend 20 seconds looking at something that is 20 feet away.

3) 20/20 hindsight. An expression meaning that things are clear in retrospect, typically after some misjudgment.

4) venti: size at Starbucks. It’s 20 ounces, and it means twenty in Italian. It’s sort of the “large” size, though there is also grande (which means “large” in Italian), but is smaller than the venti.

A 20-sided die. (image credit)

5) icosagon or 20-gon is a twenty-sided polygon

6) icosahedron: a polyhedron with 20 sides. The shape of a 20-sided die.

7) Twenty questions: a guessing game whereby one person thinks of a thing, and the second person tries to guess what it is by way of asking yes-no questions. The guesser wins if they name the correct thing before reaching the twentieth questions. (Experienced players know that it’s a good idea to narrow down the categories early on, rather than guessing one item in the universe of millions of things, i.e: Is it pants? This is the game for which “Is it bigger than a breadbox” and “is it smaller than a house” are frequent size-establishing questions.)

Mayan base 20 number system. (Credit: Bryan Derksen source)

8) Vigesimal: base 20 number system

9) a score: a term meaning the number twenty. Fairly infrequent, excepting in quotations of the Gettysburg Address. (“Four score and seven years ago…”)

10) XX: The Roman numeral for 20

11) 20th anniversary gift: china/porcelain

12) a dart board has 20 sections

Photo by icon0.com on Pexels.com
US 20 dollar bills. Photo by Shane on Pexels.com

13) The (current) US twenty dollar bill. A frequent denomination distributed in ATMs in the U.S. Currently bears the face of Andrew Jackson.

For those who can’t wait for the new bills to be minted, stamps are sold to make the adjustment manually. (source)

14) Harriet Tubman 20 dollar bill. 2020 was supposed to be the year when abolitionist and historical bad-ass Harriet Tubman was supposed to replace Jackson on the 20 dollar bill. This has been put off, but many have taken the transformation into their own hands and used a stamp. (See image above.)

15) 20 is the smallest primitive abundant number.

20: The atomic number for calcium. (Image source.)

16) 20 is the atomic number of calcium.

17) 20/20: a new-oriented US TV program.18) Twenty (2015): a South Korea film.

19) Twenty (2017-2018) a webseries.

20) The Roaring 20s. A nickname for the decade of 1920 to 1929. Now that we are in another decade of the 20s, we can only guess what it will be nicknamed.

Some ’20s fashion illustrations. (Source)

 

2020 vision revision

As of November 6th, there is a new mandate in Massachusetts requiring that masks be worn whenever people are out in public, even outdoors and when social distancing is possible. Previously, the state didn’t require masks for outdoor spaces where it was possible to keep 6 feet or more of distance. Up until the new requirement, whereas I wore a mask for any shopping or outdoor group events, I wasn’t wearing a mask while walking the dog. (I live in a pretty uncrowded area.)

In any case, with the new requirement, I’ve started wearing a mask while walking the dog. I have collected a few different styles of cloth masks, of varying degrees of comfort. The one I wore this morning is one that I like, style-wise, but I couldn’t get the nose-wire adjusted well enough. My glasses kept fogging up in the frosty morning air. After a number of unsuccessful adjustments as I headed down my street, I decided to just take off my glasses, and deal with a bit of blur. I put my glasses in my coat pocket, and we continued on our way. With my perfect 2020 hindsight, I realize now that this was a Bad Idea.

I didn’t really have too much trouble seeing. (It’s not like I need to read any road signs while walking the dog). However, further along in our walk, I saw another person and dog in the distance. I couldn’t make out who it was, so I decided to put my glasses back on. This was when I discovered that my glasses were not in my pocket.

Much to my dog’s disappointment, I turned us around to head back, so that we could retrace our steps, all the while hoping that I hadn’t dropped them in the busy street we’d crossed. I looked carefully on the ground as we walked, hoping to find them somewhere, uncrushed.

There were two major challenges to this endeavor. 1) Much of the ground looked like this:

And 2) I was not wearing my glasses, so I couldn’t see the ground very clearly.

I rushed us back home to get an old pair of glasses so that I could better stand a chance of seeing my glasses. And then we walked again, retracing our steps once more. And then all the way home again. And I saw a lot, I mean A LOT, of leaves.

What I did not see was my glasses.

On the bright side, my glasses were over a year old, and it was time to replace them. And I have some old glasses that are close enough to my current prescription. However I still didn’t like losing them. And I knew it was going to bug me endlessly. I was almost at the point of hoping to find them crushed somewhere, just to have the resolution of it.

When the time came for the dog’s afternoon walk, I bundled up again, put on an older pair of glasses, and a mask that doesn’t tend to causes fogginess. And we went back once again, retracing the path of the morning walk again. And on our way back home, I carefully stepped along the side of the road, pushing through the leaves with my feet. (And shuddering at the crunch any time I stepped on an acorn.) But then amazingly, miraculously, I saw an unexpected vision: my glasses peeking out from the leaves. They were remarkably unmarked from their ordeal.