It’s the last day of 2020. IT’S THE LAST DAY OF 2020!
Who knows what 2021 will bring? Really, that’s a straight-ahead question, so if you know, call me. In all seriousness, no one knows what’s coming next, and 2021 could be a bigger shit show than 2020, which was terrible but by no means the worst year in history. But I’m an optimistic person, and I am hopeful. I’m always hopeful.
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2020 wasn’t 100 percent bad. I read more books than usual, and I will as always publish a full list with brief comments. I’d hoped to finish the one I’m reading now before the end of the year but I’m only halfway through and it’s unlikely that I’ll get through it today. It will be my overlap book.
Yesterday, my son and I spent the afternoon in Annapolis, the charming, historic, waterfront capital of Maryland. It was a sunny, though cold day, and Main Street and the waterfront were crowded with holiday strollers, families and friends in winter coats and scarves and--of course--face masks. Anne Arundel County is a little more open than Montgomery County and the many restaurants and pubs were open for sit-down dining, mostly outdoors, and my son and I ate lunch on the porch of an over 200-year-old tavern, shivering in the wind, but warmed by the nearby propane heater. It was a short but lovely moment of freedom, a lockdown jailbreak.
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Friday, January 1, 2021. It's 2021! Whatever it is, it’s no longer 2020, and that’s good enough for me right now. It’s been a rather nice half-vacation and thanks to the holiday falling on a Friday, we have a weekend between New Year’s Day and the post-holiday re-entry. 2020 taketh away, but it also giveth a little.
For example, my kitchen cabinets and drawers are cleaner and more organized than they have been in years. This is not a project I would normally have undertaken during Christmas vacation, but with museums and movie theaters closed and hockey on hold until January, I had time to deal with the messy cabinets. I’m a very neat person and the mess in the cabinets, though hidden from view, had been bothering me for some time. And now they’re clean and neat and the tiny space in my head that had been occupied by worry about the state of the cabinets is now free for other obsessive-compulsive ridiculousness. See? There’s always a bright side.
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Saturday, January 2. Christmas vacation is almost over, which means that I’ll be returning to work, commuting from the bedroom to my corner window office in the living room. Or maybe the commute is from the kitchen? I can’t do any more of the home-as-everything metaphors. That shit is so 2020.
You know, I didn’t even take a whole week off. I worked a bit on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. And I did my timesheet on Thursday, which is really the worst part of my job. But I did have a four-day weekend last week and another almost four-day weekend this week, and I feel as though I’ve been away for weeks. I haven’t looked at the news all week. I know that the House voted to override Trump’s DCAA veto and I know that another judge threw out yet another attempt to overturn the election result and I know that a bunch of suckers paid a lot of money to party with the President at Mar a Lago and they had to settle for Giuliani and Trump Jr. instead (ha ha ha ha ha!) but I really have no idea what else is going on in the world. I’ll find out soon enough. Ignorance is bliss, for now. Happy New Year!
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