2020: Good-bye and Good Riddance
This time last year, I was so excited about it finally being 2020, mostly because of a Saturday morning cartoon I loved when I was a little kid, which was set in the year 2020. At that time the year 2020 seemed impossibly far away, so actually attaining it was as much a milestone (if not more so) than the year 2000 had been.
When 2020 started, we were preparing for home repairs, thanks to the damage our house had taken in the windstorm the day before Thanksgiving, 2019. I'd figured that we'd have a week or so of disruption as they reroofed the sunporch and replaced the broken window, and then life would be back to normal and we'd start preparing for the sales season.
Except the roofing job went horribly wrong, as we discovered early the following morning when I got up and heard plinking sounds. I started looking for the leak, and discovered the crack in the ceiling had re-opened, and was now dripping, thanks to the pouring-down rain that had moved into the area overnight. I immediately grabbed some buckets to get under the drip, moved vulnerable items away from the puddle, and called the contractor.
Suddenly what had seemed to be a simple job turned into a much larger one. The contractor's representative took one look at the roof and was absolutely furious that the previous day's guy had gone ahead and put on the new rubber roof membrane when the roof was visibly dipped in the middle. In the meantime, the emergency repair crew re-tarped the roof, but because of the severe dip, there was no way to get the water to stop coming through every time it rained, because it would settle in that dip and work its way through the tarp. So I ended up with the dehumidifier on the sunporch, trying to dry stuff out so the ceiling wouldn't collapse on us.
After much wrangling between contractor and insurance company, it was determined that they'd have to bring in a new subcontractor to completely reframe the roof. With an obvious structural problem, there was no way to get to it without having to bring the entire roof up to code -- which meant that a relatively unobtrusive repair became a major disruption. Everything had to come out of that room, which meant I had to pack up all my books and papers (since the sunporch is my office), then remove the computers and peripherals. Then we had some excitement when the old roof started to collapse while the guys were disassembling it and building the new roof. Fortunately it held together just enough that nobody fell through, and I didn't have anything fall onto my head while I was back there. A few days later, we had a new roof and a higher ceiling, which gives the room a much more spacious feel.
By the time that was done, COVID-19 was going from a distant cloud on the horizon to a looming threat. The first cases were appearing on the West Coast, and then across the country. The glass was replaced in the broken window the week the first restrictions started coming down, and by the time all the paperwork was done and we signed off on it, everything was closing and people were being told to stay at home as much as possible.
That was a really strange period. I spent a lot of time on the computer, constantly searching for any crumb of information about what was going to happen to our upcoming conventions and everything else we were doing, and as a result didn't get much of anything accomplished during that time. In fact, if it hadn't been for the various writing challenges I participated in, I probably wouldn't have gotten much writing done at all.
At the beginning of April, I decided I had to pull myself out of my funk, and after some housecleaning, I was able to get at least some work done. However, I was still struggling a lot to sustain focus on any sort of task.
In May I decided to put in a garden for the first time since 1984 (the last growing season we lived on the farm where I grew up). Two of my brothers were taking over the garden at our dad's place, so it seemed like a good idea to put in a garden of my own here. It was just a little one, since I didn't have a tiller or other power tools, but working it did get me outside and active when I normally would've spent the summer loading and unloading merchandise for various conventions.
By the time the first killing frosts came, we'd gotten a decent amount of food out of our little garden, even if it wasn't nearly enough to sustain us. But it was good to know that I could still raise a garden, and the work was theraputic in its own way, something I've been missing as fall gave way to winter and the election turned into insanity. I'm still struggling a lot to maintain attention and focus, which does not make it easy to get anything substantial done, but I am getting better.
Now I'm just hoping that things will start getting better. But last year I was so hoping that 2020 would be an improvement over 2019's struggle to recover from three months of untreated hypothyroidism, so I'm a little apprehensive about the possibility that 2021 is going to tell 2020 "hold my beer."
When 2020 started, we were preparing for home repairs, thanks to the damage our house had taken in the windstorm the day before Thanksgiving, 2019. I'd figured that we'd have a week or so of disruption as they reroofed the sunporch and replaced the broken window, and then life would be back to normal and we'd start preparing for the sales season.
Except the roofing job went horribly wrong, as we discovered early the following morning when I got up and heard plinking sounds. I started looking for the leak, and discovered the crack in the ceiling had re-opened, and was now dripping, thanks to the pouring-down rain that had moved into the area overnight. I immediately grabbed some buckets to get under the drip, moved vulnerable items away from the puddle, and called the contractor.
Suddenly what had seemed to be a simple job turned into a much larger one. The contractor's representative took one look at the roof and was absolutely furious that the previous day's guy had gone ahead and put on the new rubber roof membrane when the roof was visibly dipped in the middle. In the meantime, the emergency repair crew re-tarped the roof, but because of the severe dip, there was no way to get the water to stop coming through every time it rained, because it would settle in that dip and work its way through the tarp. So I ended up with the dehumidifier on the sunporch, trying to dry stuff out so the ceiling wouldn't collapse on us.
After much wrangling between contractor and insurance company, it was determined that they'd have to bring in a new subcontractor to completely reframe the roof. With an obvious structural problem, there was no way to get to it without having to bring the entire roof up to code -- which meant that a relatively unobtrusive repair became a major disruption. Everything had to come out of that room, which meant I had to pack up all my books and papers (since the sunporch is my office), then remove the computers and peripherals. Then we had some excitement when the old roof started to collapse while the guys were disassembling it and building the new roof. Fortunately it held together just enough that nobody fell through, and I didn't have anything fall onto my head while I was back there. A few days later, we had a new roof and a higher ceiling, which gives the room a much more spacious feel.
By the time that was done, COVID-19 was going from a distant cloud on the horizon to a looming threat. The first cases were appearing on the West Coast, and then across the country. The glass was replaced in the broken window the week the first restrictions started coming down, and by the time all the paperwork was done and we signed off on it, everything was closing and people were being told to stay at home as much as possible.
That was a really strange period. I spent a lot of time on the computer, constantly searching for any crumb of information about what was going to happen to our upcoming conventions and everything else we were doing, and as a result didn't get much of anything accomplished during that time. In fact, if it hadn't been for the various writing challenges I participated in, I probably wouldn't have gotten much writing done at all.
At the beginning of April, I decided I had to pull myself out of my funk, and after some housecleaning, I was able to get at least some work done. However, I was still struggling a lot to sustain focus on any sort of task.
In May I decided to put in a garden for the first time since 1984 (the last growing season we lived on the farm where I grew up). Two of my brothers were taking over the garden at our dad's place, so it seemed like a good idea to put in a garden of my own here. It was just a little one, since I didn't have a tiller or other power tools, but working it did get me outside and active when I normally would've spent the summer loading and unloading merchandise for various conventions.
By the time the first killing frosts came, we'd gotten a decent amount of food out of our little garden, even if it wasn't nearly enough to sustain us. But it was good to know that I could still raise a garden, and the work was theraputic in its own way, something I've been missing as fall gave way to winter and the election turned into insanity. I'm still struggling a lot to maintain attention and focus, which does not make it easy to get anything substantial done, but I am getting better.
Now I'm just hoping that things will start getting better. But last year I was so hoping that 2020 would be an improvement over 2019's struggle to recover from three months of untreated hypothyroidism, so I'm a little apprehensive about the possibility that 2021 is going to tell 2020 "hold my beer."