Category: life

life

Welcome, 2022

RJ

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First Day Hike at Breakheart Reservation 1 January 2022

I have spent most of this past week dealing with a nasty allergic reaction to… something, probably a soap. I don’t think that “itchy” is on anyone’s list of how they want to ring in the new year, but here we are. I wrapped up a few things over the last few 2021 days regardless. Knitted another hat, finished most of the books I have left lying around half-read for months now (total for the year: 43!), read the newsletters that have been languishing in my email, organized the kitchen cabinets, did not even for a moment think about staying up last night.

I also worked my way through the latest Unravel Your Year workbook, which has become a tradition for me over the past few years. My word for 2022 is “map.” I want to be a little more thoughtful this year about where I’m going–and where I’ve been–what travel instructions I can take and give. This choice may have been influenced by knowing that my first 2022 read will be Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. (Her writing was an amazing discovery for me in 2021.) In the first essay she references a quote from Meno:

How will you go about finding that thing, the nature of which is totally unknown to you?

A good question with which to begin the year, I think–a year haunted to some extent by the unfulfilled promises of the last one.

life, monthly updates, reading, writing

2021 Wrap-Up

RJ

I re-read my 2020 post before I started writing this one. If nothing else, I can say that 2021 was better than the year before it. Not as much better as we had hoped, of course, but better. There was that brief, heady period back in June when we were 4/5 vaccinated here, and it seemed like the end was in sight, and then… well. Not really surprising that I slid into a funk over the summer. That seems to be lifting, although we are now staring into the maw of an unnervingly warm winter.

So what did we do this year?

Finance: Savings are steady. We are moving our money out of Bank of America for climate reasons. Hello, credit union!

Home: We got a lot of stuff fixed and got rid of some stuff we aren’t using (I have rediscovered Freecycle). It’s far from a “room of one’s own,” but I do at least have a workspace now. House ownership seems as far away as ever, so I guess we should continue trying to make this place comfortable in the meantime. Got some new bookcases this month, that’s always fun. I experimented with a bunch of sustainable products this year, and enjoyed my little driveway garden.

Work: No-longer-new job is going fine. I have divested myself of two volunteer obligations. Hopefully the result will be a less frazzled me in ’22.

Writing: My goal this year was to treat writing like a serious thing, which I did pretty well until the summer pandemic spike and attendant mood crash. A lot of activity went on here, but not much got finished. Much of the year was spent in querying, editing, and preparing for self-publishing two projects next year; these things don’t happen entirely on my schedule. I did work on a couple of drafts for new books, but did not get as far as I had hoped with those. I have written dozens of letters, however, since I discovered Penapalooza.

Knitting: Very nearly the entire year was spent on one project, which is now done and gifted– yay! I also bought a shameful amount of yarn to power me through ’22.

Reading: As of this writing, I read 39 books in 2021. I might add one or two to the total still. 22 of those were new reads, most of the remainder a Terry Pratchett binge I went on this fall. 14 were non-fiction, two were epic poetry, one was whatever you call The Secret Commonwealth, and one a novella. My favorite non-fiction read was How to Do Nothing, which I still think about regularly as I walk around the neighborhood, and my favorite new-to-me fiction read was The Dispossessed. Nothing like catching up on books the same age as me!

Media: We still haven’t been back to a movie theater since Onward that last weekend before everything shut down. The eldest child and I watched a lot of TV this year, much of which I liked (Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts was my favorite) and some of which I did not care for (Centaurworld). We seem to be in a grand period for animated shows. This month we’ve been working our way through the Ghibli catalog, most of them old friends, but there were a few I either hadn’t seen at all or haven’t watched recently.

There was a bunch of other stuff, of course, but looking back on the year, much of my activity seems to have happened in fits and starts. I did yoga off and on, running off and on, languages on and then decidedly off for months now. We saw friends a handful of times before gathering started to seem like less than a good idea again (although at least the youngest is vaccinated now). There hasn’t been much continuity anywhere except for hiking. I am so happy to have found hiking this year! It’s gotten to the point where I am cranky all week when I don’t get out on the weekend.

Could have been a lot worse. Next up: 2022 planning.

life, monthly updates

March Wrap-Up

RJ

February was rough, no two ways about it. It usually is; the weather in New England tends to be at its coldest, and for some reason they give the kids a week off from school. We got through it, and then through the anniversary of Everything Changing. It’s definitely weighing on folks; after a year-plus, I think we’re all just exhausted. 

However. Here we are near the end of March, and things are looking up. Vaccination rates are getting better. The weather has improved, which means I can go running again. My goal for the month was to get back up to three miles at least a few times a week, which goal I passed handily. I’ve started planning this year’s container garden. Got outside a couple of times.

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Halibut Point

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life, monthly updates

The Inevitable 2020 Summary Post

RJ

I kind of want to ruminate on the glimpses of domesticity we see in Beowulf, but maybe I’ll leave that cozy topic for the year’s final post.

On the one hand, what even can be said about 2020. On the other, I feel like we all deserve a badge, a “we did it!” symbol to commemorate having gotten through the deluge. Natural disasters, pandemic, politics, omnipresent and graphic illustrations of the fragility of our social systems–the ones that aren’t demonstrably broken–if you made it through, then well done.

Last January looks utterly unreal in its distance from the present day. More than once it felt like this year was never going to end at all. (I suppose that publishing this two weeks in advance is taking a certain risk.) Compared to a lot of people, we’ve been incredibly lucky this year, and even so, having gotten anything at all done feels like an astonishing accomplishment.

In Significant Life Events, two of my grandparents passed away early this year, although one I hadn’t seen since I was tiny, and the other wasn’t much of a surprise after years of steadily worse health. Looking at this now mostly occasions a sense of “that was THIS YEAR?” wonderment.

In the plus column, I got a new job. This has reduced my stress levels by a substantial amount, making everything else that little bit more bearable. It means that for at least the next year or so, I don’t need to put “re-skill for immanent career change” at the top of my priority list.

Writing-wise, I finally finished a project that had been sitting half-done for what, eight years?–and got it to the point of querying with a feeling of genuine satisfaction with the story (no results yet). And then I did NaNoWriMo again. I postponed another project to next year, and while I hated to do it, I think that was a good decision given this year’s emotional demands. I’m looking forward to working on it again with real anticipation and energy.

I spent a fair amount of time this year reflecting, crystallizing goals, coming up with my three-year plan, and starting to turn those goals into tasks. If I’m successful with that, you’ll be seeing a lot of action here in 2021.

And then there’s all of the other stuff, irregularly chronicled here–knitting, running, professional group organizing, community work, gardening, reading, learning, family life–all under the penumbra of pandemic this year, home and school and work and hobbies hopelessly smushed into one another.

It’s going to be a rough winter; the news this past week has made that painfully clear. The vaccine is less “the end is in sight” than “there are seabirds, so there’s gotta be land in that direction.” Let’s look out for one another, and prepare a better 2021.