At the end of every year I write a post summarizing the year’s highlights. I gather most of those highlights from blog posts and Facebook updates I’ve written. Unfortunately in 2020, I wrote the least amount of blog posts in a year since I started blogging almost two decades ago. And, unsurprisingly, roughly half of the posts featured the word “COVID.”
In January of 2020, Kobe Bryant died. I remember thinking when it happened that it might be the biggest celebrity death of the year, and possibly the biggest sports-related story of the year. Little did I know what 2020 had in store for me. For all of us.
I might as well tackle the elephant in the room first. I wrote my first COVID-related blog post in March, a few days after the kids’ schools let them out of school a day before spring break was scheduled to begin. It seemed like an over-reaction, to send kids home from school for a day. We had no idea at that time that a day would turn into weeks, and eventually months. In April, we had a socially-distanced graduation party for Mason on our back porch; in May, Susan, Mason, a couple of his friends and I gathered around the television to watch a virtual graduation stream. The school did eventually hold an outdoor graduation ceremony, a few months later. In the fall, Mason moved into the dorms at OU. What we had hoped would be the beginning of a great adventure turned out to be a lonely and depressing one. All of Mason’s classes were converted to online streams and he spent the majority of his time hunched over a desk underneath his loft bed, attending classes from his claustrophobic dorm room. By Thanksgiving, the college had been essentially evacuated and Mason finished his first semester of college virtually from our home.
At that same time, Morgan finished ninth grade from home, and attended a month or two of ten grade in person before the schools were again shut down. Morgan spent a large portion of 2020 at home in her bedroom.
In 2020, we had to adapt the way we celebrated things. There was no cookout for Easter. We had small (or no) gatherings for birthdays. We did next to nothing for the Fourth of July. Halloween was a bust, we didn’t get together for Thanksgiving, and we cancelled our annual Christmas party. Perhaps worst of all, our cruise to Alaska to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary was also canceled. 2020 was the year of making small, intimate gatherings count. I don’t know that we were always successful but we tried, especially for the kids.
2020 wasn’t a complete disaster. In April, four months after the original completion date had passed, construction on my workshop was finally finished. I had a great time this year decorating the movie room half of the building (“South Barbados”), and organizing and utilizing the workshop space in the front half (“North Barbados”). Throughout the pandemic, the movie room has given the kids and a few of their friends a place to hang out without going anywhere. I didn’t get to use the movie room as much as I had hoped partially because it was such a popular hot spot for the kids, but I’d be lying if I were to say I wasn’t glad they were home rather than hanging out at the mall or in a crowded movie theater. I hope the kids have great memories of watching movies and hanging out in the room. The completion of the workshop also led to many dominos falling, which had been waiting since we moved — I was able to move things from our storage unit, the garage, and our bonus room into the building, which allowed me to move my home office into the bonus room, which allowed Susan to move her home office out of the corner of our bedroom and into the fourth bedroom.
After our cruise was cancelled, Susan booked all of us a night in a cave. Sleeping inside a living cave with your head just a few feet from stalactites is an experience I will never forget.
Being stuck at home for months on end helped me rekindle my enjoyment of podcasts, both listening to them and recording them. In June of 2020 I brought back my two most popular podcasts, Sprite Castle and You Don’t Know Flack. In the last six months of 2020, I recorded and released 12 episodes of each show. I also began video streaming for the first time. Being “live” in front of thousands (okay, a dozen) people is a lot of fun. My interest in podcasting, especially about the C64, also led me to purchasing new hardware this year. I bought a THEC64, assembled a BMC64 build, and finally put together the Ultimate 64 I purchased back in 2018. I also assembled my 60-in-1 arcade cabinet, only to have the power supply immediately die. I’ve acquired a replacement, but haven’t had time to put it in yet. That’ll give me something to do in 2021.
I was looking forward to killing time at home by watching sports this year, but they too were a train wreck. The professional sports I follow, football and basketball, were forced to adapt to the new world of playing in front of empty stadiums. The NBA Playoffs, which normally consist of the greatest games of the year, felt like watching scrimmages in the gym. Football was slightly better, and both sports experimented with adding virtual crowd members while piping in simulated crowd noises. Again all I can say is that it was a weird year. To make matters worse, after trading Paul George and Russell Westbrook in 2019, the OKC Thunder blew up the remaining core by trading Chris Paul, Dennis Schroder, and fan favorite Steven Adams, along with coach Billy Donovan. The Thunder’s 2021 starting lineup is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Luguentz Dort, Trevor Ariza, Darius Bazley, Al Horford, five players I’ve literally never heard of.
Winter came early this year in the form of an October ice storm that devastated the local power grid. We spent four frigid days in October without power, and we were lucky — some of our friends were without power for a week or more. For the record, sleeping without a CPAP for four days after relying on one for years is absolutely brutal. The outage ultimately led us to purchase a generator, which I’m not looking forward to needed, but am glad to own.
In early November, we walked out of an ice storm and into the fiery hell that was the 2020 presidential election. It was the most divisive, uncomfortable, and conflict-riddled election of my lifetime. As the official results of the election dragged on, my nightly sleep dwindled to just a couple of hours of rest per night. I saw and heard so much hateful speech from friends and online acquaintances that I unfollowed, muted, and unfriended more accounts than I care to admit. It’s still not over, and I’m not sure it’ll ever be over, but things are better. The only thing I hate talking about more than COVID is politics, and politically-charged conversations about COVID make me want to get up and walk away. I purposefully avoid political topics both on my blog and in real life, and if I never hear them brought up again I’d be a-okay with that.
Due to COVID, 2020 had more than its share of celebrity deaths. Some of the actors we lost in 2020 include Wilford Brimley, Sean Connery, Bryan Dennehy, Kirk Douglas, David “Squiggy” Lander, John Saxon, Jerry Stiller, Max Von Sydow, and Fred Willard. Basketball losses this year included legend Kobe Bryant, executive David Stern, and Harlem Globetrotter Fred “Curly” Neal. Other celebrities we lost in 2020 include legendary TV host Regis Philbin, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Roy Horn (of Siegfried and Roy), Mythbuster Grant Imahara, Python alumni Terry Jones, Helen Reddy, directors Carl Reiner and Joel Schumacher, Kenny Rogers, American hero Chuck Yeager, host of Jeopardy Alex Trebek, and legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen. We lost two actors from the original Star Wars trilogy, Jeremy “Boba Fett” Bulloch and David “Darth Vader” Prowse. And finally, although she was not a nationally known celebrity, we lost a long time friend of our family, Pat Deckard, who was like a celebrity to many of us.
I hope that in 2021, through vaccines and other methods, that we can get COVID under control and get back to life as it was. I am looking forward to getting out of the state, getting out of the city… and getting out of this house. Here’s to 2021!