Holiday greetings for 2021

 

It was the best of times, it was the most repetitive of times.  

It was the age of home cooking experimentation, it was the age of movie marathons. 

It was the epoch of home organization, it was the epoch of Zoom.  And it was, frankly, kind of a long year. 

We’re still both working from home, getting two months to the gallon on our commute, 

and thanks to Andy’s new label-maker and some free-time on my end, our pantry is cleaned,

 organized, labeled, and borders on “a-serial-killer-might-live-here.”  The linen closet is cleaned,

 yard work was almost kept up with, and there are several new craft projects completed.  I finally

 gave my notice at my job in June after 14 months of exhausting hours and seeing problems not

 addressed, and any qualms I might have had were resolved when my replacement quit on her third

 day.  I left without having another job lined up because I was just too exhausted to be able to

 approach a new position with any energy, and it took weeks to even be able to sleep without drugs

 and probably a full month before I stopped being seized by anxiety on Sunday nights.  I took the

 summer off and started my new position as Marketing Manager with a start-up company on

 November 1.  

Andy continues at his company and was promoted this year to development manager. We are

 thankful that his company has such an employee-centric policy as Andy was able to spend much of

 the year in California with his parents.  His father, Lowell, lost his battle with pancreatic cancer

 this year, and having the flexibility to work from anywhere allowed Andy to build some last 

memories and help his mother transition, and for that we will always be grateful.

We continue to be staff to four cats who may never recover if we were to return to office work. 

 Charlie continues her love of chaos and rarely misses an interview or a chance to walk across

 unattended keyboards. She can open Google chat, but hasn’t yet sent an email or purchased 

anything.  She’s been better about  the Christmas tree, but cannot yet be trusted with the

 knitted ornaments.

Since we spent more time on our hobbies this year, our big project was to add heat to the garage

 and air-conditioning to the sewing room, so now we can both enjoy our hobbies year-round.  Andy’s

 work is trying 4-day workweeks, and now that I only work 40-hours a week, there’s some extra 

hobby-time to be enjoyed, though often dominated by those fatal words, “how hard could it be?” 

 The answer is often unprintable.

This year we have learned:

• If you make it through the first year of a pandemic without an airfryer, there’s always year two.

• Real love is not holding a grudge when you are completely flattened by vaccines that don’t affect your spouse at all

• If your neighbors don’t think you’re strange enough, start taking your cat for walks in a backpack.

• In year two of telecommuting, we’ve learned to have a decoy laptop for Charlie

• After working for more than a year at a kitchen table, one can be absurdly excited about a desk with drawers

• It turns out that failing to practice musical instruments or keep up on the weeding wasn’t dependent

   on having more time at home

• Never underestimate the power of a freshly-organized pantry

• There’s nothing like two years at home to inspire massive decluttering. 

• If your supervisor can look at your schedule and see that you’re doing a trade show that runs Thursday through 

  Sunday without the coordinator you were promised or any help and some of those days are 14 hours, and can think that 

  you requesting two comp days is so unreasonable that she makes it a policy that, regardless of number of hours worked, 

  that you have to work two weekend days to earn a single comp day, run as far and as fast as you can.

• After 3 years of various deer repellent crystals and sprays, I have given up on tulips and have switched to daffodils. 

  Look for skinnier deer in our neighborhood next spring. 

• There is no cat toy you can buy that will excite your cats as much as the box the cat toy came in

• If you’ve worked in a siloed environment where management can never be questioned and the messenger is regularly shot, 

  it can be very difficult to transition to a collaborative environment.  I have to keep a post-it note on my computer to

   remind myself it’s okay to contribute. 

• It’s a smart idea to purchase festive Christmas sweaters after Christmas when they’re on sale.  

  It would have been a brilliant idea to remember where one stashed them.

• We’ve both received our two-dose COVID-19 vaccines and our booster shots, but are still waiting for cool 

  magnetic powers or the ability to pick up FM radio.  

• Beware a company that talks badly about former employees.  Your time will come.

• When cleaning a closet, it’s best not to question why one has sheets that don’t fit any of the beds or the 

  astounding number of random pillowcases.  Save questions for the items neither of you can even identify.  

• For a spectacular mess in the kitchen, it’s hard to top a too-wet dough through a specialty pasta attachment.

• Inflatable ball chairs probably weren’t invented for homes full of cats.

   

  Wishing you and yours a very merry holiday season!!!