A - A favorite song (and its accompanying music video) from this year: All Together Now by OK GO. It reminds me of the beginning of the pandemic, when [it felt as though] everyone was on the same team. It was a terrifying time in a lot of ways, but it was so comforting back then to know that we were all going through the exact same thing, that our goals were the same, that we all trusted the leaders and we all trusted each other (aside from, you know, the whole toilet paper thing) and everyone was willing to make extreme sacrifices for the greater good. It felt possible that we might emerge from this thing a better society, if not entirely unscathed.
I think back on that time with a weird sense of nostalgia, now that everything has devolved into chaos and dissension and distrust and, in general, a disgusting amount of selfishness.
Wow. Just starting off on a REAL HIGH NOTE.
All that mattered then, all that matters now
All that matters after the world shuts down
All of it dissolved all together in the chrysalis
B - Baking. We did a lot of baking this year. Donuts, muffins, cookies, scones, cinnamon buns...etc. It was a very 'on trend' thing to become a fancy baker this year. (I did not, however, climb aboard the sourdough bus.)
C - Can't honestly think of any notable things from 2020 that start with the letter C, so I'm going to have to leave this one.
D - Drive-thrus and Drive-ins and Driving—it was a year of car outings. Taking the kids for drive-thru Happy Meals, attending a drive-thru art exhibit, a drive-in concert, a drive-in Christmas lights show. Waving at friends as we drove past their houses, sometimes just...driving around to kill time with a go-mug and some coloring books. Parking by the lake to sit in the back of the Rav and eat donuts.
E - Eleventh wedding anniversary! We celebrated by walking downtown, grabbing coffee and cinnamon buns and scones—to go—and eating them in Central Park (Regina's Central Park, not New York's).
F - Foreign rights. I'm not sure if I'm even allowed to say this out loud yet, but very few people read my blog these days so I'm just going to say it: I had my first foreign rights sales this year. This is one of my longest-running writer goals and I'm ecstatic about it. More details (and some cool new book covers) to come.
G - Grade One. Sully started the first grade! He's so happy to be back in school (with a lot more home days than usual and a lot of restrictions and regulations, but still. It's a limp toward normalcy.)
H - High hopes: Like many other people (and like many other years) I went into 2020 with the highest of hopes and expectations and plans and goals. I had three pages in my day planner dedicated to the launch party for SIMY. I had a fantastic publicist who was working her butt off writing emails and making calls to book stores to arrange a little Canadian book tour. I wrote that blog post about being brave and saying yes to terrifying things, and I had already begun to follow through. I was going to speak at a writer's conference and teach a workshop at the library. It all got cancelled, obviously. That's life though, isn't it? We plan and our plans come to ruin and we act surprised every time; it's very cute of us. I'm trying to decide if this means I should go into 2021 with low expectations, or if I should hope just as high but hold it all with a more open hand?
I - I got a Covid test (negative). Scarlett got one too (also negative). Uncomfortable!
J - Japan: I hadn't thought about this one in a while, but near the beginning of the year I was offered a job as a writer on the official Olympics podcast in Tokyo, which would've meant spending some time in Tokyo this past summer and which obviously and for various reasons didn't happen but was fun to daydream about. Anyway, I figure that in some alternate universe, a few variations from this one, I did that this year. So I thought it should be on the list.
K - Knewsletter. I started a newsletter. I sent exactly ONE out. If you're not on the mailing list, you can sign up here. Maybe someday, I will send ANOTHER ONE.
L - Live Music. Sigh. Obviously, had I known what was to come, I'd have gone to five million shows in January and February. As it was, I went to...one. I saw my friend Marissa Burwell perform at a comedy show in the Artestian. It was lovely, and wonderful, and I'd had savored it even harder if I'd known it would be my one live music experience of 2020. OH WAIT. Come to think of it, there was also that drive-in concert in August (Megan Nash). I also saw a man playing a clarinet under the Broad Street Bridge and a different man playing a saxophone under there another day and I heard someone playing their fiddle in their back yard from my bedroom window one afternoon and I'm counting all of those too.
M - Made myself a "real" website.
N - Nieces! I got two new nieces this year.
O - Obsessed with the workout app I found this fall (FitOn). Since I no longer have a social life, I now work out four evenings a week and it's a weird thing for me, specifically, to be excited about but I'm excited about it.
P - Preschool! Scarlett started preschool this year and is loving her life there. She has a tiny class and she loves her teacher.
Q - Quiet—if I had to pick a word for this year. But also: Loud, because I was home with two little kids for a lot of it. Which: I do know that this was a lot sometimes, and really hard a lot of the time. The kids missed their friends, I missed mine, we missed leaving the house when it felt too small and having things to look forward to. But it was also really fun and special to have such "protected" (we're going to call it that and not something negative, like "forced") time as a family and we figured out how to make the very best of it, which was, in and of itself, very rewarding. In hindsight it's already taking on a very rosy tint: picnics in the front yard, figuring out how to make homemade ice cream, building forts, playing hide and seek as a family (Barclay and I got very creative and competitive there), lots of walks in the summer and tobogganing in the winter...
R - Read 22 books! Many of them were written by friends, and I loved all of them so much. The friends and the books.
S - Sorry I Missed You came out in June.
T - Took each of the kids out for First Week of School Donut Dates.
U - Underrated Thing of the Year: Clean and Clear Watermelon Gel Moisturizer. This stuff smells like candy and I feel like a pre-teen for loving it so much.
V - Vacation: LOL. Went literally nowhere.
W - Worked on my third book. Got frustrated and shelved it. Worked on a different book. Realized that I was still basically working on the shelved book, just with a different title. Merged the two books. Did not finish; that'll have to be okay. Maybe in 2021.
X - XXXIII (I turned 33!)
Y - Yard. We built a big fence around our back yard and the kids have spent about 45% of the year out there. One day, I looked out and they had, with their tiny little hands and a crowbar they found in the garage, pried up every single brick from the walking path to the garage and used those bricks to build a little "house." It was incredibly impressive.
Z - Zoom. This is the first year it hasn't been hard to think of a word for the letter Z. I don't really even need to explain this one, I guess, but for future me: this was where Sullivan attended school for a few months, where we had Easter celebrations with the grandparents, where we had surprise birthday parties and Christmas parties and hangouts and where the kids played LEGO with their friends. Zoom book clubs, Zoom interviews, Zoom meetings, Zoom Mom's groups, Zoom author events, even a Zoom viewing party for That Thing You Do. Sometimes Zoom made me feel closer to people and emphasized how important those relationships were that we would suffer online communication over nothing at all, sometimes it made them feel really far away and emphasized how abnormal things were; it depended on my mood, on the internet connection. I love Zoom. I hate it. It's whatever.
And that's it! I wasn't even going to do one of these this year—we didn't go anywhere; we didn't do much, I thought. But I'm glad to have done it—like usual. A year in review is always much more satisfying and meaningful than one in progress.
Here's to 2021: WHO KNOWS WHAT WILL HAPPEN but may we all face it with courage, kindness, and...like, a lot of flexibility.
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