Four years ago

This popped up on my Facebook feed today. It’s worth it to pause and remember how afraid we were, and then how much worse everything got than we were able to imagine then. How Truth disappeared.  And how hard it was to sustain our energy (at least it was for me). How insidious and wearing were the constant assaults. We’ve got a moment now to breathe, but it is just a moment.

January 22, 2017

So here's the thing:  Can we try to focus our attention and outrage on things that matter?  Can we make sure we devote bandwidth (posts, column inches, minutes on broadcast media) to those things that affect the most number of people? 

Yes, there was a Big Lie about inauguration crowds. The fact there was an unrepentant lie is important. Note that fact in plain language, link to the spreadsheet, and move on.  What has happened lately in terms of executive orders about health care? Focus, people.  Let's focus on areas where people's lives are affected.  I don't care where the president's family lives, not much, not enough to spend bandwidth on it.  I care about foreign policy, health care, and the environment.  And other things. But we have to prioritize and choose where to expend our energy.

This isn't a moment, it's the movement.  Rise UP!

2021: Nice

Isn't this nice?

For the past two years, I've selected a one-word motto for the year. While I haven't written here about the topic after announcing the selection, I do actually think about the topic during the year. For 2019, the word was "Move". For last year, it was "Engage". 

This year, the word is "Nice". 

Underwhelmed? Stay with me here.

The point of selecting just a single word is it allows for ambiguity and multiple interpretations. So "nice" is an exclamation, a synonym for "cool". It also means how we treat each other, and we could all stand for a little more niceness in our interactions. And, inspired by Alice, I'm wanting to add a little style to my life: flowers on the table, color in my hair, food arranged artfully on the plate. So if I achieve "nice" this year, it will be enough.

Travel

I have a huge advantage over most people in the travel logging department, for two reasons. First, my family twice spent a sabbatical year in London, when I was two and when I was twelve. And also because in my thirties I was childless and worked for United Airlines. My job required me to travel, especially internationally at the end- if I had earned frequent flyer miles I would have been top tier my last two years. Plus, I was able to fly for fun for free (actually really cheap but not exactly free) and my work friends could fly free too, so I had companions.

For domestic travel, before I went to work for the airline I had never been west of the Mississippi. Now, the only two states I haven’t been to are North Dakota and Idaho. A flip side to the great flying benefits was that vacation time for junior employees really sucked, so most of my personal travel during that time was in the U.S., where I literally went to San Francisco to have dinner with a friend one Saturday night and home on the red-eye.  Another day trip was to the San Diego zoo, again returning on the redeye. (I lived in the central staging spot of Chicago, also the biggest hub so the most non-stops.) I’m glad to say I did not squander my opportunities. So to wrap up domestic, I’ve been to the US Virgin Islands, but never Puerto Rico. And not Guam or American Samoa.

As I noted at the top, I got a head start on the international thing, starting when I was two years old. So by continent, here are the places I've been, with notes.

In this hemisphere, in order of visits, I've been to:

Canada
Bahamas
Cuba
Mexico
British Virgin Islands

So South America is totally missing. 

In Europe, where there are so many small countries jammed together, in no particular order I've been to:

England
Scotland

Wales
France
Belgium
Netherlands
Germany
Switzerland
Spain
Italy
Monaco
Iceland*
Norway
Sweden
Denmark
Estonia
Russia **
*In Iceland, I was on a ferry flight taking delivery of a new airplane from Paris to Chicago. The Airbus 320 couldn't make it across the Atlantic, so we made a fuel stop in Iceland. I never left the airport, but I did spend a few hours there. And I had the most spectacular views ever, as we were below normal cruising level, and I was in the cockpit for the landing and takeoff.
**I spent 10 hours in St. Petersburg, off a cruise ship, on a guided tour. It seems hardly fair to color in the whole huge country based on that experience!

In Africa, I've been to:

    Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo
    Kenya
    Tanzania
    Egypt
    Tunisia

In Asia and the Pacific Rim, I've been to (all for work):

Japan
Singapore
Malaysia
Hong Kong

Australia
New Zealand
Fiji

So where haven't I been that I really really want to go? Almost anywhere I haven't been. And, for that matter, there is no place I've been that I wouldn't mind going to again. The only trip on the books right now is one from Norway to Iceland via the Shetlands in a small cruise ship at the end of June. This is much less adventurous than the sailing trip I had planned to Iceland last year, but it's with friends and will cover much more territory. We're all buying trip insurance and the consensus just before Christmas was about a 40% probability we would go. Way too soon to tell!

2020 Report Card and Final Wrap-Up

 Herewith is my final report card for the year. After this, 2020 begone! I'm only looking forward!

 

First up: Activity. This past year was not great for my moving. Kim's friend Chris would be sad for me. I expended fewer calories overall, had fewer high activity days, fewer steps, more days very sedentary, and what I'm saddest about, many fewer days working out with weights. I got the bike out once, and tried running once. Only in "intentional miles" walking am I up slightly - and I think that is because I was more assiduous in tracking those miles. (In order to be logged, a "walk" needs to be at least 1 1/2 miles - no counting the incidental miles in the course of living my life.)

I have reasons and excuses, of course. The main one is I felt bad much of the time. Joint and muscle pain, headaches, upset stomach, all the things that are elusive and not subject to definitive diagnosis or fixing. But I'm extremely optimistic that I've now got a firm grasp on the mind-body approach to this, and this next year will be much better. 

 Next, my weight. I didn't achieve any big goals here, but I guess in the quarantine context I'm doing ok. I weigh slightly less than last year at this time, and (not shown) slightly more than I did in November, my lowest point of the year. Not coincidentally, I'm planning and tracking food much more often. I'm also really tuning into my hunger and satiation signals. I think I'm on the right track here, and again, I'm optimistic things will be even better next year.

 

On mind-body, it's a mixed picture. Not shown or tracked, I started serious therapy this year for the first time ever. First, in January, for twelve weeks I was in a structured (zoom) group, and following that, I started individual therapy over facetime. What I'm doing is geared towards somatic issues, specifically to address those with chronic pain of the types I have. On those things I do track, I'm meditating, less than last year (huh, if I didn't track it, I would have guessed different). My migraines are up for the year, but there were NONE in December and I think this is an effect of the emotional work I'm doing to re-train my brain. I am generally a champion sleeper, I certainly have plenty of time. My resting heart rate, which generally shows an overall fitness level, is slightly better than last year.

On the category I might term "self-actualization", if you are a regular reader, you know for sure I was a reading fool this year. I blogged more than last year, less than I would have liked. I started tracking "trips downtown" last year after I retired - generally trips last year were social, catching up with former work friends. Most of this year's trips were solitary dawn walks, reminding myself the city even exists. It feels like I sailed a lot this year, but seeing that it's less than last year, it must feel like more because it stands out so clearly in such a mass of otherwise undifferentiated days. Other accomplishments include a tap dancing class at the local community college (surprisingly effective over zoom) and several seminars and on-line short courses. I also got into sewing masks, and really engaged on the design and engineering creativity side while doing it.

I think I'm going to add movies watched to this list for next year - I would like to see a movie a week. This seems so very do-able, and I find setting a quantitative goal and reporting it here would be helpful. I want to do even more classes and short courses, tap class again, and sit down at my piano sometimes. I don't know I'll be tracking quantitatively here, though tracking can be part of the reward system that encourages me to keep going. I aspire to travel, but you know...

On the money front, I've spent some time working on the budget. My goals for this year were to get a handle on where the money goes, and specifically to reduce costs on food and clothes. Missions accomplished! This is the one area where the quarantine really helped. I cut food spending by 25%, mostly because I'm not eating out. Clothing was down by more than a third. (There was really no reason for me to buy any clothes at all this year, but I get bored and just want something new.) 

As another couple of money accomplishments, I did a final distribution to my family of the money from my mother's estate, and cut down on the number of different bank accounts I have. My mother's probate estate was something of a nightmare to deal with, and the IRS combined forces with the US Postal Service to screw some things up that created a great deal of angst for me. So when I close the estate's last bank account next week, I'm going to do a happy dance.

I tend to be analytic and want to be intentional about how I live my life. My current focus is trying to engineer my days to build good routines. When do I do what kind of exercise or other work? I've learned about habit formation so I'm thinking about this as another design challenge. What is my trigger to make me go work out? What might be the barriers? How can I make it easier to start? I know I hate going outside on days like today (grey and drizzling) so what can I do to get over the hurdle? Or is there something I can do indoors instead? Stay tuned!

2020 Wrap-up: Travel

OK, so not much. In February, I went on my one big trip, on an airplane, to Utah via Las Vegas. That was immediately followed by the Bloggers Bash, Brooklyn Style. Aside from that, to paraphrase my father's inaccurate Henry Thoreau quote, I traveled extensively around my block.

The light spots on the map are where I went.

2020 Wrapup: Books

 I've been challenged to name my best book of 2020. I had already been working on this post, recapping what I read, and so I'm going to work it in here. But you have to read to the bottom.

It was a very wordy year! I read in the neighborhood of 171 books - that is an awful lot. Or a wonderful lot, I guess. The library was an incredible lifeline to me. A rough count shows about 80% of these I got from the library. It is so easy, when I see something I want, to just click over and check if the library has it. Then a couple more clicks, and it's either borrowed or on hold. As I have a tendency to really like to read a whole series by an author, this works well. In my experience, the library is likely to have either everything or nothing from a given series. And the kindle is my preferred format for books that are primarily text. I only prefer hard copies when they are gorgeous big books, like gardening or cooking books.

Also, about a third of my books this year were listened to. I have had an Audible subscription for years, and had settled on mostly non-fiction, or literary or challenging fiction, as my preferred listening books. I read about three times faster than a typical read-out-loud pace, and I found certain types of books actually benefit from my having to slow down and take in every single word. Until this year, I never sat still to listen - I'd put on the headset for a walk or to do chores, inside or out. And a problem with listening to more exciting easy fiction is that typically, you stop listening when time for the chore or walk has run out. That's not always convenient of our hero is left hanging on a cliff. But this year, I learned sometimes the recorded form of popular books was much more available from the library than the ebook version. So I started listening to mystery and science fiction books and sometimes, in the evening with all but bedtime chores done, I would even sit down in the living room to listen, in preference to TV or visually reading. I couldn't just sit there, however, so I do some idle easy games on the ipad, or color in ipad coloring books (using the apple pencil), or, I just started this week, do jigsaw puzzles on the ipad, while listening through a speaker in the living room. Something occupying a corner of my brain while I also follow the story.

Because I log my books in Goodreads, I was able to export them into a spreadsheet, which allowed me to summarize and categorize them. The list isn't perfect, but me being me, I had to make a chart! So here is a visual summary, by genre:

The blue books are non-fiction - I only read 13 of those. They were gardening and natural history, and civics (my term for items of topical or political or social import) and history. Self-improvement and sailing each popped up with just a couple.

The brown ones are fiction, and you can see the big enchiladas labeled clearly. I went big time for escapism, and many of these were series. The smaller slices represent (in descending order) plain novels (no other category), romance ( a new escapist genre for me), young adult novels, historical novels, and spy novels. 

So, what were the best books?  So hard to pick, and January seems so very long ago! I found as I became voracious, I also became a harsher critic. It takes something special to earn four stars from me, and only the very very best get five (unless it's written by a friend of mine, in which case it automatically gets the five to boost it).

One individual novel stuck with me, read back in January: When We Were Vikings, by Andrew MacDonald. I think it was a debut. It's narrator is a damaged young woman, born with fetal alcohol syndrome, and further abused, and living a precarious and dangerous life. But it's uplifting! She chooses to live her life like a Viking, and it's wonderful.

The best non-fiction book I read was How to be an Anti-Racist, by Ibram X. Kendi. I listened to it, because it falls into the type that needs slowing down. Kendi reads it himself, and it changed my thinking almost from the first page. Well worth it.

Far and away the best series is Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series, beginning with Still Life. He is head of homicide for the Surete de Quebec and the characters, the plots, and the settings are all terrific. I listened to them all, the whole sixteen of them. Some I liked better than others, but the worst was still good. After a while, the characters seem like friends, the same way you can feel when binge-watching a TV series. It would be good to read in order, as people evolve and change. (I went with what I could get quickly from the library, and sometimes found myself saying "oh that's why he is like that".)

And, for those who stuck with me this far, a bit of fluff and sugar for you: One to Watch, by Kate Stayman-London. A feminist plus-sized contestant on a Bachelor-type show. Goes down easy!

2020 Wrap-up: Movies

 My primary form of entertainment has always been books, but of course I like movies. I've associated with film buffs over the years, and so my viewing history is broader than it would be if left on my own. I have, however, formed opinions on which genres I like and don't like, and it takes some urging to get me to see one out of my wonderbread comfort zone. Horror movies, not so much, though actually reading a spoiler-laden synopsis before seeing is helpful.

In January and February I saw some movies in theaters with friends. According to my credit cards, I paid for movies out four times in those months, but I'm fuzzy on what I saw (and what I may have seen in December of last year). As always, I made an effort to watch Oscar-nominated movies early on. When the lockdown started, I decided to focus on movies I always wanted to see, not necessarily the most current. And since I pay for many streaming services, I watched a lot that didn't require extra payment - skewing towards movies at least a couple of years old. Partway through the year, I googled "goodreads for movies" and came up with the app Letterboxd, which allows the keeping of a watchlist and also recording and rating movies you have seen. There is a social component to it, but no-one I know IRL is using the app that I'm aware of, so right now it's just a private record.

So here is at least a partial record of movies I saw this year, with a couple notes along the way.

• Parasite - good to have seen it once to understand
  
• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - I'm a fan
  
• Jojo Rabbit - I liked it, folks I know hated it
  
• 1917 - a nice war story, with the predictable only female person a madonna figure in the rubble
  
• Red Tails - good story, if predictable by following a classic war movie line,  about the famed (to me) black fighter pilots in Italy during WWII. If you don't know the story, it may be less predictable, and it's an important story to get out there.
  
• Little Women - wonderful
  
• Ford v Ferrari - liked it better than I expected
  
• Marriage Story - really sweet
  
• Emma - I had noted this as one to watch in the theater. It was one of the first scheduled theatrical releases sent to the the small screen after the lockdown. I even re-read the actual book (which I owned) before renting it. It was very well done.
  
• His Girl Friday - a club I belong to was watching this before a zoom discussion. It is a classic screwball comedy with snappy dialogue. It does not hold up - the casual sexism, racism, and mean spirits overshadowed any remaining screwball charm and romance.
• C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America - An alternate history, done as a BBC documentary of the repressive and reclusive CSA in modern times. Scary and impactful, also funny at points.
• Hamilton - "how does a ...."  Gives me goosebumps. Maybe I'll watch it again soon.
  
• A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood - Restorative to the spirits.
• Battle of the Sexes - It provided more social and historical context than I expected. I liked it a lot.
• Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga - Part of my Iceland phase. It's amusing.
• Star Wars - I rewatched the original six, since I had Disney. I'll probably watch the last three again. There are more minor threads that re-occur and even pop up on the Mandalorian. 
• Radioactive - Marie Curie. Really interesting, worth it.
• The Princess Diaries - Sometimes you just need an easy to chew fantasy, kind of like oatmeal with cream and sugar
  
• How to Train Your Dragon - See "Princess Diaries".
• Maleficient and Mistress of Evil - catching up on my little nieces' crush.
• Coco - perfect for Halloween
• Little - a re-take on Big, pleasant fluff
  
• Enola Holmes - I was insulted at its poor quality. Apparently there are a series of children's books that are very amusing, but not having read them I found the movie boring, predictable, and not even slightly plausible. Think taking a bite expecting cream and sugar, and getting skim milk with splenda.
  
• Contagion - told by friends it was worth it, I finally watched in September. So we knew everything we needed to know, if only we had paid attention.
• Under the Tuscan Sun - comfort food.
• The Trial of the Chicago 7 - with Aaron Sorkin of West Wing fame on board, very enjoyable and very understandable. 
• Ocean's Eleven - I do like a good caper movie. I will watch more (I saw the "female" one (Ocean's Eight) first).
• The Glorias - Gloria Steinem is having a moment. This is a bit weird but good.
• The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! - possibly the best movie of all time, I watched it while hiding in my bunker on election night. It holds up nicely.
• On the Basis of Sex - had to see it - so good!
  
• Captain America - thinking I might want to see this set of superheroes, I haven't seen any of them before
• The Hustle - a disappointing caper movie. It's a remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which starred Steve Martin and Michael Caine, and was infinitely better.
• Bombshell - I liked it, but was struck by how the "I'm not a feminist" thing was such a thing. Also, just to keep us from getting too sympathetic with the erstwhile victims, we heard them in the studio discussing emphatically how Santa had to be white because Jesus was white. Huh.
• Happiest Season - this year's LGBTQ breakthrough holiday movie. Fun.
• 7500 - a German-made hijacking movie starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Not earth-shattering, but 80 minutes of non-stop adrenaline in a 90 minute movie.
• Wonder Woman - we re-watched on Christmas with a plan to see the new one on New Years.
  

What's up next for me? I've found I like having the lights and noise coming into my house on gloomy days or early evenings, and I've marked 65 more movies on my watchlist, so there is a lot to see!