2020: I had so many plans
This year, y'all.
I had so many plans. I think we all did. The things we were going to do, places we were going to go, theater to see, books to read, everything. And even after it all changed, for a while I was doing so well at saving money by never going anywhere that I had all these other plans for classes I was going to take, and things to save for, and then it all changed again.
It's so strange to think of all the things that were different last December 31. We'd all heard of some weird new cold virus; I knew my mom had dementia but not how bad things really were; I still worked in an office; I hadn't written a word in 4 years.
My mom - in January I found out she hadn't paid any bills in six months. In February, she lost her job. In June, she stopped driving and started doing things like taking buses and not being able to find her way home. The paranoia just kept getting worse. In September, the calls started. Literally a hundred calls a day, over and over and over. At the end of September, I packed her stuff and drove a moving van 400 miles and she moved into a senior place on the other side of town from me. Mostly she is doing okay. She's settled in. And I am paying for it, because it is expensive, and she has no savings, so I'm back to living like I did in the old days when I was broke. (But thankfully I *can* pay for it.) The icing on the financial cake for 2020 is that two days ago some fraudster tried to clean out my bank account with a fake check. Nothing like a $0 balance when rent is due on TWO places.
Work - in March, when we were all going on lockdown, we all said "see you in two weeks" to our coworkers. And I have seen maybe two of them since then. Long about June, my company decided to close down our office for good. They'd sold the building a couple of years ago. So now we are all permanent work from home. I don't mind it so much. It has a lot of good things, or useful things, about it. I can do my cleaning and stuff on breaks instead of on the weekends and after work. On Friday afternoons I listen to music as an end of the week treat. I started taking walks again and they are kind of what I live for. And I still have a job.
Writing - I fell back into fandom and fanfic hard, as a coping strategy, because I have never in my life needed an escape as badly as I did this year. My word count spreadsheet says I wrote 355,027 words this year. I wrote two novel length fanfics. AO3 says my word count is 223,840, and I'd only posted 3 small Yuletide fics before this year. If you think I posted a lot of fic, there's a lot that never saw the light of day.
The rest:
Theater - I saw two shows in the theater, An American in Paris and Frozen. Theater has to come back some day because I don't want Frozen to be the last show I ever saw. I had tickets to see Henry VI this summer, which I desperately need to see to complete my life goal of seeing all of Shakespeare's plays performed on stage, but of course that was cancelled.
TV/movies - I didn't do a lot of rewatching or new watching like most people did. (We won't talk about how many times my Lost DVDs have cycled through the DVD player, okay?) I did watch the series Colony, the ending of which totally broke my heart, and Hamilton and some Disney movies on Disney+, and the new Bill & Ted movie.
Languages - I finished the Welsh language tree on DuoLingo. It took me 606 days. I started on Japanese after that, but Japanese is really hard and back in September when I was so stressed out I couldn't eat or sleep I stopped doing the lessons. I need to start again, but it's going to be even harder to go back to. Duo sent me a year end summary that said I learned 2000 words this year.
Books - I didn't read as much as usual, because the library has been closed since March. They did start up delivery service, which I am so, so grateful for, but I also read a lot of books from Dollar Tree. Here's the what I liked/loved list. Starred are my very favorites.
*Wanderers by Chuck Wendig
Beach Read by Emily Henry
Ship It by Britta Lundin
*Love Saves the Day by Gwen Cooper
*Not Like the Movies by Kerry Winfrey
Well Met by Jen DeLuca
School for Psychics by KC Archer
I had so many plans. I think we all did. The things we were going to do, places we were going to go, theater to see, books to read, everything. And even after it all changed, for a while I was doing so well at saving money by never going anywhere that I had all these other plans for classes I was going to take, and things to save for, and then it all changed again.
It's so strange to think of all the things that were different last December 31. We'd all heard of some weird new cold virus; I knew my mom had dementia but not how bad things really were; I still worked in an office; I hadn't written a word in 4 years.
My mom - in January I found out she hadn't paid any bills in six months. In February, she lost her job. In June, she stopped driving and started doing things like taking buses and not being able to find her way home. The paranoia just kept getting worse. In September, the calls started. Literally a hundred calls a day, over and over and over. At the end of September, I packed her stuff and drove a moving van 400 miles and she moved into a senior place on the other side of town from me. Mostly she is doing okay. She's settled in. And I am paying for it, because it is expensive, and she has no savings, so I'm back to living like I did in the old days when I was broke. (But thankfully I *can* pay for it.) The icing on the financial cake for 2020 is that two days ago some fraudster tried to clean out my bank account with a fake check. Nothing like a $0 balance when rent is due on TWO places.
Work - in March, when we were all going on lockdown, we all said "see you in two weeks" to our coworkers. And I have seen maybe two of them since then. Long about June, my company decided to close down our office for good. They'd sold the building a couple of years ago. So now we are all permanent work from home. I don't mind it so much. It has a lot of good things, or useful things, about it. I can do my cleaning and stuff on breaks instead of on the weekends and after work. On Friday afternoons I listen to music as an end of the week treat. I started taking walks again and they are kind of what I live for. And I still have a job.
Writing - I fell back into fandom and fanfic hard, as a coping strategy, because I have never in my life needed an escape as badly as I did this year. My word count spreadsheet says I wrote 355,027 words this year. I wrote two novel length fanfics. AO3 says my word count is 223,840, and I'd only posted 3 small Yuletide fics before this year. If you think I posted a lot of fic, there's a lot that never saw the light of day.
The rest:
Theater - I saw two shows in the theater, An American in Paris and Frozen. Theater has to come back some day because I don't want Frozen to be the last show I ever saw. I had tickets to see Henry VI this summer, which I desperately need to see to complete my life goal of seeing all of Shakespeare's plays performed on stage, but of course that was cancelled.
TV/movies - I didn't do a lot of rewatching or new watching like most people did. (We won't talk about how many times my Lost DVDs have cycled through the DVD player, okay?) I did watch the series Colony, the ending of which totally broke my heart, and Hamilton and some Disney movies on Disney+, and the new Bill & Ted movie.
Languages - I finished the Welsh language tree on DuoLingo. It took me 606 days. I started on Japanese after that, but Japanese is really hard and back in September when I was so stressed out I couldn't eat or sleep I stopped doing the lessons. I need to start again, but it's going to be even harder to go back to. Duo sent me a year end summary that said I learned 2000 words this year.
Books - I didn't read as much as usual, because the library has been closed since March. They did start up delivery service, which I am so, so grateful for, but I also read a lot of books from Dollar Tree. Here's the what I liked/loved list. Starred are my very favorites.
*Wanderers by Chuck Wendig
Beach Read by Emily Henry
Ship It by Britta Lundin
*Love Saves the Day by Gwen Cooper
*Not Like the Movies by Kerry Winfrey
Well Met by Jen DeLuca
School for Psychics by KC Archer