2016 Ends, 2017 Begins
I have similar feelings about this New Year's post as I did about last year's. From a global perspective, I agree 2016 was a pretty craptastic year. For us personally, it was a decent year.
I realize a good portion of my social circle is varying degrees of angry, disgusted, and downright terrified by the Presidential campaign and its results. And with good reason; I know that circle includes public school teachers, Federal government workers and contractors (mostly with NASA and NIH), all my various LGBT+ friends, and all the many musicians and writers whose songs, albums, stories and books I enjoy. Right now there are a lot of people who afraid of losing their jobs, their health insurance, even their very rights, and I don't blame them in the least. Even we are worried about the Jewish stereotypes that were aired during the campaign, not to mention outright anti-Semitic statements and actions that were made or happened both during and after the election.
Then you add the celebrity deaths and the losses in our own filk community on top of that, and I can see why most of my social circle is bidding good riddance to 2016.
All that being said, there are silver linings in the cloud that was the past year. Our 2016 was spent watching our son start crawling, taking him to Canada for the first time, celebrating his first birthday, taking him to his first Worldcon (and first baseball game to boot), watching him start walking, and hearing him say his first words, among other happy milestones in his young life. We had one medical scare during the summer, thankfully brief and not that serious in the end. He's about where you would expect an 18-month old toddler to be and behaving about how you would expect an 18-month old toddler to behave. (Current favorite activity: throwing his toys down the stairs.)
For those curious, his first words include the usual "mama" and "dada", "cat" (though it sounds more like "dat" at the moment), "up" and "hello" (usually said while holding random objects up to his ear like they were a phone).
Meanwhile, I wrapped up the year by earning a promotion at work. My direct supervisor (who reports in turn to my department head) resigned in November to return to points West and go back to what he was doing before he joined us. So I applied for the open position and got it! And with opportune timing too; my travel schedule should be lighter this year than it was in 2016, and there are other reasons it's also a good time to make this move.
So here's to 2017! May it be a better year than we expect it to be.
I realize a good portion of my social circle is varying degrees of angry, disgusted, and downright terrified by the Presidential campaign and its results. And with good reason; I know that circle includes public school teachers, Federal government workers and contractors (mostly with NASA and NIH), all my various LGBT+ friends, and all the many musicians and writers whose songs, albums, stories and books I enjoy. Right now there are a lot of people who afraid of losing their jobs, their health insurance, even their very rights, and I don't blame them in the least. Even we are worried about the Jewish stereotypes that were aired during the campaign, not to mention outright anti-Semitic statements and actions that were made or happened both during and after the election.
Then you add the celebrity deaths and the losses in our own filk community on top of that, and I can see why most of my social circle is bidding good riddance to 2016.
All that being said, there are silver linings in the cloud that was the past year. Our 2016 was spent watching our son start crawling, taking him to Canada for the first time, celebrating his first birthday, taking him to his first Worldcon (and first baseball game to boot), watching him start walking, and hearing him say his first words, among other happy milestones in his young life. We had one medical scare during the summer, thankfully brief and not that serious in the end. He's about where you would expect an 18-month old toddler to be and behaving about how you would expect an 18-month old toddler to behave. (Current favorite activity: throwing his toys down the stairs.)
For those curious, his first words include the usual "mama" and "dada", "cat" (though it sounds more like "dat" at the moment), "up" and "hello" (usually said while holding random objects up to his ear like they were a phone).
Meanwhile, I wrapped up the year by earning a promotion at work. My direct supervisor (who reports in turn to my department head) resigned in November to return to points West and go back to what he was doing before he joined us. So I applied for the open position and got it! And with opportune timing too; my travel schedule should be lighter this year than it was in 2016, and there are other reasons it's also a good time to make this move.
So here's to 2017! May it be a better year than we expect it to be.