end of year musings

As the final days of 2021 draw near, and we look forward (?!) to 2022, let’s reflect on the year that was. And it was a year.

Unlike previous posts, I’m mixing everything together–personal victories, political nonsense, the state of the world and so on. Let’s call it Earth Blend, available for $11.99 at your local Starbucks.

The Good

• I left a job I had come to actively not enjoy (hate is too strong a word)
• I did three and a half months of drawing prompts to start the year
• I did an Inktober prompt. Yes, one. Hey, it’s better than nothing!
• Summer forest fires, while bad in general, only led to a few smoky days in Metro Vancouver, down considerably from previous years
• I ran a lot more than in 2020, even with a late start of August
• I got a mirrorless camera (Canon EOS M50) and have had oodles of fun taking photos with the telephoto lens (nothing pervy, just naked birds)
• Dodged getting sick for another year
• I kept blogging. Funny cats, hooray!
• Contributed art and a trailer to an actual video game that will be for sale on Steam soon™
• Trump is no longer president
• The world did not blow up

The Bad

• Will no one rid me of this meddlesome pandemic?
• The COVID twins of Delta (“more people will get infected”) and Omicron (“everyone you know will get infected”)
• My weight is basically unchanged. It should be down. I blame myself and salty/sweet snacks.
• The heat dome (seriously, I never expected it to be hotter locally than the times I travelled through the Mojave Desert in the summer). 42 °C is pretty warm.
• The frozen dome. Yeah, that’s what I’m calling it. -14 °C is actually probably easier to manage than 42 °C, but it’s still, you know, rather chilly for these parts. We shattered temperature records at both ends of the thermometer in 2021. 2022 will reveal if this was a fluke or the start of a fun new climate trend.
• My fiction writing was, uh, moribund-though I did one writing prompt, so that’s a start!
• I didn’t read as much, since I no longer have a commute. This is both good and bad.
• I got a DisplayLink adapter, so I could fudge using my MacBook Air with dual displays, and have yet to get it working. A minor thing but still technically bad.
• I’m ending the year with sinus issues, possibly related to the cold weather, but likely not related to COVID-19
• U.S. democracy is looking a little beat-up after four years of Trump, the January 6th riots, and 40+ years of Republicans pushing for one-party rule

The Rest

• I still haven’t seen a movie in a theater since watching Onward in the first week of March 2020 and can’t say I miss the experience. I love being able to pause and go pee. It’s especially handy now that the average movie is ten hours long. To clarify, I go pee in the bathroom, as civilization expects.
• Justin Trudeau smelled a majority government within reach and instantly doomed any chance of it by calling an unnecessary election. The result was a Parliament virtually unchanged from before the election, proving the whole thing a waste of time. You’d think Trudeau might learn a lesson from this, but…we’ll see.
• Discovering a prominent anti-vaxxer was living in my building and later died of COVID-19 was a little weird
• I still like lists

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times…

Here’s a brief overview of 2008 in handy list form. I love lists. I bought something like 50 of those Book of Lists books.

Personal

• I was told in April I was pre-diabetic and had to lose weight, exercise more and change my diet
• I bought a bike in July and ride it to work every day  (when it isn’t snowing all the damn time)
• I stopped eating junk food and fast food; in June I weighed 187.5 pounds. I now weight 151 pounds.
• I wrote and completed more fiction than I have in many years (five complete short stories plus assorted fragments)
• I got new glasses. Hooray for no more scratched lenses!

The World

• Stephen Harper decided we needed yet another election and he needed one of them fancy majority governments. We got the election, he did not get his majority. He then turned around and gave the opposition parties a big “screw you!”, prompting them to form a coalition that the Bloc said it would support for 18 months. Harper then went to the governor-general and said, “Hey, I’d really like to stay in power. Can I suspend Parliament for two months, even though we are in the middle of the worst economic situation the world has faced in 80 years?” The governor-general gave him the OK, so we are awaiting the budget on January 27th with the proverbial bated breath.
• Stephane Dion resigned early as Liberal leader, becoming the only Liberal leader to never go on to be Prime Minster. He was replaced in a quick ‘n dirty leadership “review” by a unibrow named Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff has spent most of the last 20 years living outside of Canada. This surprisingly may work to his benefit.
• Two byelections in BC result in two NDP wins. No surprise, the governing party almost always loses. The BC Liberals install their carbon tax and everyone pretty much agrees they hate it. Gordon Campbell looks more and more like a cranky old high school teacher.
• In the U.S. John McCain goes off the rails and incessantly negative in his campaign for president, choosing an airhead governor as his running mate. Sarah Palin proves to be a gold mine (or perhaps more appropriately, a gushing oil well) for comedians as she keeps saying the darndest things. Barack Obama runs a very slick, well-organized campaign and cruises to a fairly easy win, becoming America’s first black president.
• The year ends with Bush getting shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist. So much for boquets of flowers. Bush nimbly ducks the shoes, earning respect in a way no one could have predicted.
• Ice shelves continue to collapse. Global warming, a new ice age — clearly Mother Nature has something up her sleeve and I have a feeling we ain’t gonna like it
• No space shuttles blew up
• Vancouver gets about 10 feet of snow, I roughly estimate

Entertainment

• I score 1 out of 10 on an MSNBC entertainment quiz. I guess I’m a bit out of the loop now.
• Heath Ledger is really good as The Joker in The Dark Knight. For once the hype matches the reality. Shame about his accidental overdose.
• iTunes is going DRM-free which is great. Most new songs will now be $1.29 instead of 99 cents. This is not so great. Catalogue songs will be as low as 69 cents, though, so in the end I declare all of this Good.
• I can’t think of anything else noteworthy. I’m actually blanking on what movie won Best Picture this year.
• My 27″ Sony Wega is officially obsolete. This gigantic CRT is like a huge paperweight I can’t get rid of. I never watch TV.

Sports

• The Canucks roar out of the gate until Luongo pulls his groin. Nearly two months later, they have played a little under .500 hockey, but have 98-year old Mats Sundin in the line-up now to shore up offense. Things should improve when Luongo returns. Whenever that is.

I’ll add more as I reflect back on the momentous year that was 2008. Maybe!