It’s hard to not be moved by a sense of pride in this great country when our democratic system is permitted to function as it was intended. I shed a few emotional tears watching the ceremonies today, but I look forward to our future with optimistic and hopeful anticipation.
I need to go back and re-watch or read Biden’s speech, but the words that keep returning to my head are when he referred to ‘leading not by the example of our strength but by the strength of our example. Amen to that.
From Peter Turnley on Instagram:
Edouard Boubat to Peter Turnley: “Peter, let me tell you a secret-if you always keep your head up, and your eyes and heart open-there is a gift waiting for you at the corner of every street”.
Like many people, I am astonished and embarrassed by the behavior of my fellow humans, especially over the last 24 hours but indeed over the last what? 24-48-60+ months? The extent to which people can be deceived, incited and provoked to extremes is frightening.
It’s very popular right now to talk of impeachment, imprisonment and removal from office those who have corrupted and vandalized our democracy. Whether it happens or not remains to be seen, and I don’t necessarily disagree with that approach. In fact, in many ways I welcome it as a lesson to those responsible and as a deterrence against continuing such behavior. What I ultimately hope, however, is that once all the angry words settle down and people go back to their lives, cooler heads can take a look at the problems in our country today and try to come up with meaningful solutions.
The question I keep coming back to is this: How desperate are the people who are attracted to false hope, lies, deceit and corruption that they so fervently believe in it to the extent that they can be moved to such atrocious actions? This is more than racial, religious, ideological or political difference. This more than an undercurrent. It is a raging river.
Whether by chance or by choice we as a society tend to be attracted to turmoil like moths to a flame. Thankfully, I spend most of my time doing things that I find calming and rewarding, and don’t get myself too riled up over all of the negativity that has swirled around us for far too long. I don’t ignore the media, in my opinion that would be irresponsible. But I have managed to insulate myself and – for the most part my opinions and attitudes – from most of the mayhem so that I’m not living with the anger and angst that many people feel and that I might otherwise be dealing with. Not everyone is able to do that and I feel fortunate that I can.
I don’t have the answers. I can only hope that the changes coming over the next few weeks, the next few months and the next few years, can head us in a more positive direction. One where we can disagree peacefully, work together for the common good to find equitable solutions to problems and to live in peace within our own country and in our world. Let’s hope for that, and where we personally are able, live that.
When I was growing up, my family would regularly attend stock car races at a couple of local race tracks. A few times a year the tracks would have events called Demolition Derbies, where a bunch of stripped-down cars would start out running around the track and purposely wreck each other, with the last car running declared the winner. I’m recalling this through 50+ years of possibly (likely!) faulty memory, but as I recall, somewhere near the end when there were only 2 or 3 cars running, the announcer providing the blow-by-blow commentary would say something like “CAR 83 IS SMOKING BADLY, HAS A COUPLE OF FLAT TIRES BUT IT’S STIIIIIILLLLL RUNNING.” I have to say that after the demolition derby that was 2020, we’re badly damaged but STILL RUNNING. And hopefully running well enough to hang on through 2021.
Somewhat counter to the rest of society (contrarians? us?) and despite the various impacts of the virus, Kathy & I look back on 2020 as overall a very good year. We made some important changes that we possibly would/should have made anyway, but the arrival of Covid made them imperative. It worked out, and WE”RE STILL RUNNING! Believe me though, I am quite sensitive to the fact that not everyone can say the same about 2020. For way too many folks, 2020 was a very ugly year. A disastrous year. A demolition derby with not everyone escaping unscathed. From where I sit, however, life has been pretty darned good and I am thankful for that.
But we traveled. We traveled a bit differently than in past years, with a little more attention paid to places and conditions, avoiding the famous places with big crowds, carrying more of our food and water than we might have taken otherwise, but the country was open and we went. In fact, we traveled more in 2020 than we ever have. We spent 90+ days away from home, crossed off 5 new states and visited friends and family in locations far & wide. Despite only driving 426 miles in March, April & May, we’ve put over 18,000 miles on the Subie since 12/31/19, mostly in the second half of the year and including our 8,000-mile road trip to the Oregon coast and back in September. And we did it safely, staying away from popular places like National Parks and sticking mostly to sparsely-visited National Monuments, National Historic Parks, State Parks and Wildlife Refuges. A number of places were not open so we made do by seeing just the outside. Yes, we traveled!
With exceptional (in hindsight) timing we took three cruises in January-February before the virus hit but have stuck to car travel since then. Staying off airplanes and cruise ships has saved us a bunch of money and allowed us to see parts of the country we might have put off if we had continued to fly places. It looks like that trend will continue in 2021, since the question of when we might expect to receive a vaccine remains a bit of a mystery. That assumes that the vaccines are actually effective, that we can eventually actually get one and that the virus begins to subside. Cruises and air travel will likely need to wait until 2022 for us, but there is still a lot of this country to see and we’re ready to go.
Staying out of restaurants has been very good for our waistlines and for our budget. Kathy & I have never been and will never be skinny, but there is a lot less of each of us to haul around these days. We’ve been making regular donations of too-large clothes to our local Goodwill. Even now when restaurants have mostly re-opened, we’re finding that we like our own cooking just fine and we continue to lose weight at a reasonable and sustainable pace without “dieting.” Interestingly, our reaction to a lot of restaurant food now is that it is over-seasoned, over-portioned, overly meat-centric and over-priced. We’ve got a great source for fresh fish, a nice selection of our own wine, and find that we can dine in for a fraction of the cost of a fancy meal out. We love our restaurant people and have many friends in the business, but it is an estranged relationship these days. We weaned ourselves off of junk food years ago and didn’t succumb to the temptation of “comfort food” during the pandemic.
I took nearly 17,000 photos this year. Not as many as 2019 when I took over 21,000, but still a lot! Why so many? I take a lot of our grandson Edison, and he moves so fast most of them are blurry! The number of photos that are actually worth keeping will be far less but remains to be seen as I’m still working on them. I did get a new camera this year, which was fun, and I have enjoyed working with it and the constantly updated software to process the files.
We have a lot to be thankful for from 2020 despite all of the negative happenings, and we have plenty of reason to look forward to 2021. I don’t know how it will all shake out, but the best we can hope for is to get to 12/31/21 in at least as good a shape as we got to the finish line of 12/31/20. My primary goal is to keep a positive outlook, to find the silver lining in every situation and seek out the positive wherever I need to go to find it!
The photos here are just a selection from the friends and family we were able to visit with this past year and who we look forward to seeing again this coming year!
Kathy & I gave up covering our house with lights years ago, but still enjoy driving around nearby neighborhoods to check out other peoples’ efforts. Some people really get carried away!
Most neighborhoods we go through have few places to park or walk safely, but this particular spot in Huntersville has two houses next to each other, spectacularly decorated and with reasonable parking, at least when we visited. We were able to get out and walk on the sidewalks without worrying too much about distracted light peepers.
The forecast is calling for some interesting weather here for tonight and Christmas Day, but I don’t think we’ll see any snow. It sounds like a good day to stay snuggled up with coffee and a warm fire. Later in the day we’ll open the bourbon and wine!
We hope everyone has a good holiday this year despite all the mayhem. We are looking forward to lots of positive direction in 2021.
I was originally planning to title this post “There Is No Vaccine.” But I decided that would be uncharacteristically (and unnecessarily) pessimistic. Why was I thinking that way?
Remember when we used to be able to go to concerts? We would get in line at 6am or earlier for tickets to see Elvis, Springsteen or Taylor Swift (not me!) that went on sale at 10am, only to find out at 10:01 that they sold out online? I’m afraid the vaccine is going to be something like that. Oh, we’ll probably be able to get it eventually, but in the meantime, we can listen to our favorite music on Spotify. In other words, it’s going to be a long wait.
The New York Times has a tool on their website that allows us to estimate when we might have a chance to get the vaccine. Based on my age, location and lack of underlying conditions, my estimated place in line is 268.7 million out of 331 million in the country, 8.5 million out of 10.5 million in the state, and 885,900 out of 1,127,080 in the county.
There are plenty of people out there that need it more than me, and I’m happy for them to have priority. Truthfully, I don’t like to be an “early adopter” on anything for pretty obvious reasons. It’s just frustrating that it is going to be such a slow process for everyone.
I don’t have a lot of faith in our ability to distribute a vaccine efficiently anyway, and since the Powers That Be apparently forfeited a chance to order enough for everyone in the first installment, it sounds like it’s gonna be a while. Since each person has to get 2 doses the initial 100 million doses will only vaccinate 50 million people. Out of 330 million! At this point the Pfizer vaccine is the only hope, and while the Moderna vaccine is evidently in the approval pipeline, no one seems to be saying when that will be approved. The downside of having a surplus of vaccine is what? We get to give it to countries that need it?
While we’re all waiting anxiously to be “saved” by a vaccine, for now I’m just telling myself that there isn’t one. That way, when we finally do get one we can be pleasantly surprised.
“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.” -John F. Kennedy
Things are a lot different for many of us this year, but Kathy & I wish everyone the best for this day and always. We have much to be thankful for.
I thought we retired….
In the last few weeks, we’ve taken advantage of a “break in the action” to meet up with a few of our key professional people – medical, legal and financial stuff that we need to address on occasion. On top of that we’ve been working on a few home improvement projects. As a result, the calendar has been “full” of stuff. An appointment on Monday, an in-person meeting yesterday, conference call today, more stuff next week. Aye-yi-yi…feels like we’ve gone back to work! 😉 I realize that it’s nothing compared to the schedules we kept when we were actually working for a living, but it feels….busy! 😉
But once we get through next week we’re hopefully pretty much clear sailing through the holidays. Should be more time for important stuff like processing photographs and making blog posts. 🙂
We’ve had a little bit of rain here at Casa Dills over the last day or so. This is about 24 hours’ worth, and it’s still coming down.
Kathy and I often refer to important events as “BFDs.”. But since this is a family-friendly blog we’ll use the term RBD instead.
We’re in Asheville, NC this weekend celebrating our 40th anniversary. That’s a BFD. And all 40 years to the same person! 😉 And as much in love now as we were then, just with a few added aches and pains. 🙁
This photo is from the archives. Photos (and stories) from Asheville once we get back home in a few days.