As many people have pointed out, January 1st won't see things suddenly be much better, but I am glad to see the back of 2020.

The election back in November was a huge relief, although I continue to be stunned that MIL truly and deeply believes the election was fraudulent and it's all a cunning ploy to lead the US into communism.

I'm excited about the vaccine news - I know it'll be a long time until I'm in a group that will get it, but it's the first glimmer of hope that I might get to come home sometime in 2021. I haven't seen my family for 18 months, now.

Because I'm homesick, we had a "British" Christmas dinner this year. A non-animal protein for me, chicken for Alex, then roasted carrots, parsnips, cabbage, roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings and gravy. Sticky-toffee pudding and custard for dessert.

Alex hadn't had Yorkshire pudding before? He put BUTTER on his like it was bread? He doesn't like gravy? You can marry a person, be stuck in a house with them 24/7 in a pandemic for a year, and still not really understand them.

We didn't do Christmas presents. We sort of stopped that in our second year. We do tend to buy for ourselves something frivilous that one doesn't really need, instead; I bought myself a Hayden duet concertina.

I can play London Bridge and the first part of Becalmed (from the Sea of Thieves game soundtrack). I'm mostly interested in dirges.

The most fun I've been having is still co-op online games with the Dusties. We recently started playing Red Dead Online, which is free if you have RDR2 (or $5 standalone), and although it's obviously meant to entice you to buy the "gold" for upgrades, we play the free content to the max.

The best bit, though, and the part that's had me laughing so hard my chest hurts is when we get bored of running missions and devolve into what we call "purge time", turn on friendly-fire and just go to town. "Dynamite only" rounds or knife-fights. If that was all the game was, I think we'd still enjoy it.

I hyped myself up for Cyberpunk 2077 and it was so incredibly disappointing. I got it for PC, and my gaming laptop is basically brand-new, so it looked fantastic. Unfornately, it's an incredibly shallow game, more akin to Deus Ex than Witcher 3 (the latter is what I had been expecting). I asked for a refund (I bought direct from GOG) but I'm still waiting.

I finished my GoodReads reading challenge, but sort of feel like I cheated by getting in quite a few short stories.

2020 Reading Challenge

Frances has completed their goal of reading 30 books in 2020!

hide

30 of 30 (100%)

view books

Our car broke, which means we couldn't go on an intended hike today - a very American problem - but also the reason I thought to sit down and do a week note.

• Skipped September's update because it could loosely just be summarised with "everything was on fire".
• It's one thing to be in shelter-in-place but still able to take pleasant walks, but it's a whole new hellscape when the air is full of particulate and the sun is literally being blocked by the clouds of ash that were once people's homes.
• It was a tough month.
• In more cheerful news, we did take a trip out of the house during a brief window of clear air for Alex's birthday. We stayed in an airbnb for 3 nights that just looked kinda cool from the listing, but turned out to be quite famous.
• While staying in the spaceship house, I took my HAM radio technician's license exam and passed that. Since then, I've acquired a decent radio and joined a couple of nets. Much of the experience so far is 100% the stereotype you're imagining. It's great!
• I finished the Udemy Japanese N5 course, hoping to take the exam this December, but unfortunately they've cancelled all outside-Japan exams until December 2021. Completely deflating. I don't know how to keep up progress on this without a fixed goal.
• Nearly finished a couple of oil paintings. I'm so slow.
• Buggered up my hip due to a combination of seasonal-change arthritis flare-up plus bursitis from a sudden spurt of activity after doing none. Having no routine that takes me outside is really affecting. Canes are cool though, right?
• Dana and I have picked back up a self-directed ikebana practice, since we still can't meet as a group and it's not looking like we will again until late next year. We arrange outside, which is going to be an issue once SF's rainy season starts.
• It occurs to me that if you think the USA has behaved like a screaming toddler during covid in the summer, just you wait until it's too cold to go outside.
• I got a flu jab.
• An email I just got from my dad, apropos of absolutely nothing:

  Turns out our "book" was very accurate.

  Bunnies got to space before humans!

  "The next dogs to go into space were Belka ("Squirrel") and Strelka ("Little Arrow"), which took place on Aug. 19th, 1960, as part of the Sputnik-5 mission. The two dogs were accompanied by a grey rabbit, 42 mice, 2 rats, flies, and several plants and fungi, and all spent a day in orbit before returning safely to Earth."

  The More You Know.

It's extra appealing right now to want to log anything when it feels like I'm doing absoluely nothing.

• Once upon a time, I used to log movie reviews on Mike Stenhouse's oo5, but once he retired that I never replaced it with anything, but I've found that letterboxd is scratching that itch nicely. I miss going to Alamo Drafthouse (very strict no-talking, no-phone rules, table service snacks, no ads) in the middle of the day.
• I've had a Goodreads account for a long time, but my kindle reading has gone up significantly since I got the library card. Also, I discovered the goodreads native app has a book scanner, so I went to town in a fit of boredom with the bookshelves here and discovered a few paperbacks I haven't actually read yet languishing under a layer of dust.
• I've on and off complained about not being able to find a todo list that works with my brain, but Todoist seems to be the first one that's finally stuck. I've been filling it with really mundane things like "water the garden" or "launder the bedsheets", but it's been useful for feeling useful. I sync it up with my calendar to make my days look a bit less empty.

I think that's all the new logging I'm doing. I made two swarm checkins this month! A real busy one. What a whirlwind.

We've been very cautiously trying some socialising with Matt and Dana, who we consider our "bubble family" since we we've sort of been in each others' space since the pandemic started (literally since the shared airbnb in Kyoto in February) and we had them over for backyard lunch a couple weekends ago. I think they're the first people to be in the house since Jake stayed in January, well before lockdown.

I stopped drinking at the start of lockdown and have been getting into non-alcoholic IPAs. There's a trend right now, I think partially because nerds my age have realised their bodies can't keep up with craft beers anymore, of "good" breweries making low-to-no-alcohol beers that taste interesting! I've had some from Athletic Brewing Co., Mikkeler and Hairless Dog. All good fun.

Progress updates on end-of-the-world hobbies:

• I'm a week out from finishing the Udemy JLPT N5 course, then I'll be on revision until I can get the exam booked.
• I can successfully pick 2 and 3 pin locks!
• Read a very good guide on the HAM Technician license and am doing the hamstudy.org flashcards until I hit proficiency and then I should be good to take the exam.

I've also started oil painting again!

I moved to the USA nearly 7 years ago, but this is the first Independence Day I've actually spent in the US. Traditionally, due partially to Alex's work calendar, we spend this time of year back home or in France visiting my family.

Consequently, my homesickness has got a lot worse. Knowing that even if I did think it was a sound and reasonable idea to travel internationally (I don't) I'd have to spend 2 weeks in quarantine and/or I couldn't go to France (because the EU is very sensibly stopping US travellers), I'm generally just feeling a bit land-locked and sad.

I'm not experiencing the 4th of July as I think Americans are supposed to, with our local city fireworks cancelled (plenty of local illegal ones, mind you). I wonder if we'll even live here for next year's?

In between sulking...

• I've enjoyed these podcasts:
  • Winds of Change. Did the CIA write The Scorpians' hit.
  • Rabbit Hole. How the internet has radicilised many people.
  • Forgotten: Women of Juarez. Missing women in Mexico, the cover-ups and who might be responsible.
  • Borrasca. QCode's latest fiction piece. Creepy town conspiracy thing.
• Played all of The Last of Us Part 2. I liked Tom's notes on it and totally get where he's coming from on feeling the crunch of the makers in the beauty of the game. It's so lavish and honestly I sort of plowed through it because I wanted to see the story play out ASAP, but I feel bad that I didn't stop and look at the details for longer. There's just so much going on in the background.
• In trying to remain spoiler-less, I did not dislike the ending but I also felt a little empty is all I'll say. There's so much violence through-out the game that you can't avoid (even if you stealth as much as you can) that it sort of undermines the final note for me.
• I'll be honest and say that I did use the very good accessibility options to get through a particular boss fight that I just couldn't do (rat king), and if it were not for those options I would have abandoned the game entirely after throwing my controller through the TV, so kudos for designing ways to make the full story accessible to as many people as possible, whether they want to become experts in combat for a game they'll likely only play through once or not.
• Swimming in Animal Crossing! Cute!
• I used to walk a lot - if a trip would take less than an hour on foot, I'd always prefer that method - but now I've got nowhere to be or go I don't do any. Dave has been quite inspirational in that since lockdown he's taken up just going for a walk to nowhere and logging them in Strava, clocking a good 10 or 15 miles a day. I've taken it up too, not as frequently, but the thing that finally convinced me (other than Dave saying "Just make your tea and go") was him showing me City Strides.
• When I first moved to SF, as part of my not-particualrly-helpful patter about how crap SF was, I had a plan to walk all the streets in SF (It's only 7 miles across! It'll take no time!) but I didn't have a good method to record said streets. That's what City Strides logs.
• I'm continuing to improve my RPG character sheet by studying for my Japanese N5 exam and HAM radio exams. I can't take either right now because neither has figured out how to do them in lockdown, but I intend to be ready when they do.
• I think I'll learn to lockpick, too, for +1 dex.
• The local Canadian nerds and I got our FRS radio licences and it is insanely exciting to be able to tune into extremely mundane things (like a local security guard in a supermarket or a construction site) that are just being transmitted plain, in the air, for anyone to hear! What magic!
• Got a COVID-19 antibody test via One Medical a couple weeks ago, because I had been near persons with suspected cases in February and I had been sick with a cough earlier in the year.
• It came back negative.

That's it. Still staying home.

I mean, just when you think things couldn't be more miserable, eh?

The last week has been particularly intense, with the news cycle being what it is. On an extremely personal and selfish level, the worst part for me is that my normally-only-mildly right-wing mother-in-law shows up to be extra mean and unsympathetic to the needs of people in this country. It's mentally very exhausting and it feels like this week has been a sampler for how it'sgoing to be from now until the November election here.

Alex apologised to me about that factor of our lives, but I said it's important to know and see first hand what people outside of our bubble think and how they react to the awful things happening in the US right now, and know how they actually live and react and speak. It's somewhat easier to empathise with their standpoint, even though I could never agree with it.

The rest of this year is going to be even more brutal, though.

I closed down my instagram this week. It's the second time I've done so - the first being when facebook first bought them (when I still had my phae handle) - but when I moved abroad I really missed being able to see folks' lives back home, so I gave in and opened a new account. The lines were drawn a long time ago, but certain companies have started to step onto the sides they wish to align with, and Facebook have made the choice extremely simple for me.

Anyway.

Since my last update, I haven't done a lot of new things. Let's see...

• I did a fireside chat with Harper Reed at JAMStack conf virtual last week. That was pretty fun, although very early in the morning for me. It is the first time I've spoke live wearing 50% pyjamas, though.
• I've taken up doing YouTube fitness videos. I do low-weight ones. I've decided I'm coming out of this pandemic fitter than when I went in, and beat saber isn't full-body enough.
• I've been doing a lot of recruitment work for the project I'm on at the State right now, so I'm living on zoom. I could do with a bit less of that, but it's also the only way I'm speaking to people I don't already know, so it's probably good practice.
• We ordered an air conditioner.
• Alex kindly migrated me off wordpress, and this is the first post I've added since we made the change, so I have no idea if we messed up the RSS or not. Fingers crossed. Also, with the migration, I've lost comments, so... you know. I'm not on facebook or insta anymore, but I do still have email and we can talk.