2021

 I should have written a 2021 retrospective post at the beginning of January. I did in fact mean to do it, but forgot. How unusual. 

 

2021. Year two of a vicious pandemic that had killed over 150,000 of my fellow citizens in total by the end of the year, and yet some of my fellow citizens are still engaging in magical thinking and refusing to entertain the concept that there is something lethal out there that could get them, yes, them, too. Some of them are occasionally on the same bus as me. :-/ 

 

I've been vaccinated and boostered. I didn't get symptoms, and avoided getting pinged by the app until nearly the end of the year, and then got pinged twice within about a month, but did my daily testing for a week and tested negative all the way through. I presume I haven't had it yet. I hope not. One of my colleagues has long Covid, and it was obvious to me that there was something wrong even before he told me what it was, because I've known him a long time and I know from personal experience what it feels like to be exhausted and in pain all the time.

 

I achieved not going to A&E all year, which is a pleasant change. My chronic migraine has slowly improved to the point where I can often go all week without anything more than being a bit tired and the occasional brief dysphasia blip as long as I'm careful about managing triggers and remember to take my meds. Still not up to writing on top of a full time job, but given how little money there is in it if you can't make it a full time job, I'm not missing out on any secondary income stream. I just feel guilty about not completing the short story sequence I'd partly written for NineStar Press when my brain shut down.

 

The ancient and venerable database at work was finally replaced with its New!Exciting!Modern! replacement that's been coming next autumn for the last three years. Replacement is sucky in interestingly different ways. It is compatible with Windows 10/Office 365, unlike A&V which after the change to Win10 had to be nurse-maided and kept crashing with data loss. However, there is no way to collapse a record display into a summary that is easy to scan down and find and open just the bit you want. You have to read though all the many, many bits of information to try to find the one you want, and it's very easy to lose track. It doesn't lose data when it crashes, and it doesn't so much crash as refuse to talk to the outside world occasionally, but that is about all that can be said in its favour when compared to A&V.

 

I had some things happen that I could have done without happening, most of which are in locked posts, and most of which are more or less fixable. The one that wasn't was the sudden death of Pol, a friend I've known from Pratchett fandom for over twenty years. I'm still having the occasional "not going to do in-person Eastercon this year, won't get to see my friends for another year...oh" moment.

 

So not a great year, all in all, but there were a few better things than 2020, which is not saying a lot.