It’s not saying a lot to say that 2020 was an odd year.  There was a lot going on, and I certainly had a lot in my life that wasn’t planned for.  Still, I’m still here, still healthy and doing well.  As usual, this is the first part of my end-of-year blog posts and I’ll talk through the year through the lens of how it went, where I’ll save how I did on my resolutions for the next post.

The more things change…

On the one hand, a lot has changed this last year; listing all the things that are different would be largely pointless, so I won’t belabor it here.  However, those changes have made me do a lot of things differently this year.

First and foremost, since I haven’t been going to work, I haven’t had that low-friction environment to read and write.  While there was definitely opportunity to make time to do it, these activities instead fell off my regular routine.  As a result, the blog certainly suffered, and my reading list this year was pitifully short.  Instead, I found that I was using that time to spend a bit more time with my family, spend a bit more time resting (either in the mornings or the evenings), or doing the things I would normally write about.  All-and-all, it was time that I used differently, but I can’t explicitly say it was better or worse.

On that note, working from home pretty radically changed how I structure my work time, as I found that I suddenly had many more meetings, and no expectation that I would have to walk between them.  There have always been times when I had a lot of meetings (it is part of my job, after all), but this fall was…  …draining.  Part of it was that getting full-band communication over zoom just didn’t quite cut it for making meetings as productive as they could have been, combined with all the other stuff that was on my “things to do” was just very wearying.

On the home front, there’s a new dog in the house (nicknamed Destructotron-3000) which makes it a lot harder to do models on the floor in the main room, so I’ve gotten less assembled overall this year.  When it comes to games, I’ve been playing with a completely different group of people than expected – there’s a couple of Brady’s friends that play Betrayal Legacy with us every once in a while, and I’ve been playing online games with Cam more often than almost anyone else (the almost being John – thanks for being so reliable!)

…The more they stay the same

On the other hand, a lot remained the same this year.  On the whole, I’m still working at the NSIDC and still loving my job.  I’m still sharing my home with my lovely fiancé and her brother, and still edging in any chance I get to play some games whenever possible.

As I mentioned above, I still get to play online games with John almost every Saturday morning, which is a wonderful bit of routine that I really like.  Brooke has also been a reliable gaming partner, and we take the opportunity to throw-down some Warmahordes, when the itch comes, as well as working through our campaign games whenever possible.

Also, though I haven’t been going to work these days, I never really did get out of the house much on the evenings and weekends, so that hasn’t really changed.  I still do get out for a walk every evening though, both for my own exercise and for Mishka’s (though sometimes I don’t think she enjoys it as much as I do).

As a result of not too much changing, I did okay on my resolutions this year, but that bit’s for another blog…