“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards”.
Steve Jobs
Yes – it’s that time of year again. Time to look back at the good intentions that I enumerated in the equivalent post last January – ahead of the first year of the new decade – and to determine just how well or how badly we did in our efforts to accomplish them.
Now – I hardly need to point out that 2020 did not turn out the way that it was expected to – for anyone… so, when I look down last year’s list I really don’t expect very much to appear in the ‘tick-done’ column.
The first point of business on last year’s list was actually a reference to the fact that we were – at that point – pleased to be playing host to a very long-time friend (particularly of The Girl’s – they having done some of their growing up together in Kamloops) who had been in urgent need of somewhere to live. It was truly a delight to have her with us, as she was until well into the summer. She is now working in Vancouver and we are delighted that she found considerably better fortune as the year progressed.
I mentioned that I was teaching a new course – an introduction to Computer Science – about which I had been quite nervous. As things turned out it went a lot better than I had expected and I found myself rather enjoying it – in spite of the fact that the shutdown with which we were inflicted in March resulted in my having to teach the last three weeks of the course online. I taught again in the autumn – this time entirely online – for upwards of thirty environmental science students whom I never met face to face. Strange times.
I also mentioned last January that we were going to run away for a week in February to Mexico. This we did – and had a lovely re-charging break there – though the COVID-19 lock-down undid a fair bit of the good work that had been done shortly afterwards.
The pandemic has disrupted so many lives – in some cases, of course, tragically – and The Girl and I feel particularly blessed in that we have been affected way less than have many others. We are very fortunate in that our property here on the peninsula affords us a very benign environment in which to be locked-down. I found teaching online to be less of a challenge than I expected, though it did take a fair bit of work in terms of preparation. The Girl works pretty much exclusively from home and that works reasonably well also. She thought at one point that her new business would have to go into hibernation whilst the pandemic lasted, but meeting clients in video-conferences has proved more effective than she expected it to – and she has found herself with rather more work than she anticipated.
I professed the hope, in last year’s missive, that I might get the opportunity to do some more music-making with The Chanteuse. As regular readers will be aware, things turned out to be considerably better than we feared might be the case – and we contrived to record a whole new album purely working online. I will post more news on that front in just a few days from now.
Naturally all travel plans (post-Mexico) went out of the window, something that we don’t expect to see changing anytime soon.
I rather suspect that the companion post to this one – in which I look forward to the year ahead – will be considerably harder to write and probably also considerably shorter, as it is very difficult to tell how things are going to pan out over the coming months.
I will, however, do the best that I can.
I have struggled for decades now with the fear of and resistance to change – mostly in the realms of technology, transportation, and the ways people choose to communicate. If I had a theme song, it would be that lovely song ‘I’m Old-Fashioned,’ as sung by Ella Fitzgerald. 
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