Category Archives: memories

light the corners of my mind

pandemic, year in review Leave a comment

Year In Review: 2020

We’ve all spent the past year living through a global pandemic that’s destined to be at least a footnote in the history books. It’s upended everyone’s sense of normalcy, changed social interactions, wreaked havoc on some sectors of the economy, and cost many their jobs or their lives.

My family has been lucky: our jobs are stable, we’re all healthy, and COVID-19 mainly just means an upheaval to our routines. I’ve been working from home, Connor finished out second grade from home and started third grade with a hybrid of remote and in-person learning, and Aaron spent most of the year working longer hours and adjusting to having us at home during the week.

Even though 2020 was a Very Different Year Indeed, I still kept track of most of the things I usually do, and I certainly couldn’t leave this bizarre year undocumented.

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2019 Year In Review

I’m not sure what it was about 2019 that got me away from writing and photography, but I’m finding that I failed to document a lot of the highlights of the year as they happened. On one hand, I suppose that means I was living life instead of recording it. On the other hand, it means that a lot of notable details got shuffled around under other stuff in my brain.

Mei and Me

So, the year in summary (aka the tl;dr version): I did a lot of sewing. A LOT. My evenings were mostly taken up by sewing and by taking Connor to karate class twice a week. My evenings got even more full once I joined the adult class at the karate school (the teens and adults learn Krav Maga rather than American Freestyle Karate). 

The other major memorable thing about 2019 was my ADHD diagnosis. Getting diagnosed and starting medication was A Big Deal for me, and will likely be something I look back on as a major turning point in my mental health.

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2018 Year In Review

One of these years, I’ll get my annual Year In Review polished up and ready to publish before the last week of January. This is not that year.

This year, I had initially planned a slight departure from my normal, categorical method of cataloging the past year and wanted to try a My Life In Weeks style retrospective. Alas, after I typed in everything I’d cataloged weekly in my bullet journal, I discovered that it was long and unengaging — even for me.

So, I’ll include the weekly breakdown at the end of this post, replete with hyperlinks, but I’ll summarize as per usual.

Speaking of summaries… this year was the year I got medicated for my depression and started sewing (and no, I don’t think one was necessarily due to the other). Also, this was the year we went on our first family vacation (which, at the time of this writing, is only partially finally documented online via photos, but not reviews).

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Remembering the Music of the Night

I hadn’t really been into the Winter Olympics this olympiad — I’m still not, really, although I watched the Men’s Snowboarding on a whim and was surprised to see that Shaun White was still competing, since that’s a name I actually know, and I haven’t followed extreme sports for some ten years.

Then I stumbled upon a fascinating article about Olympian Adam Rippon, and upon reading of the author’s love for watching figure skating as a youth, I myself was transported back to high school.

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