So in January 2020, like every other year, I bought myself a spanking new planner. A whole book of crisp, white pages just waiting to be filled in with the mundane and the exciting. Coffees and dinners and deadlines and trips! (We had a lot of travel planned for 2020). There were big birthdays and big reunions, big plans and big dreams.

Clearly 2020 had other plans for me, for us all. By mid-March, the only thing decorating my day planner were coffee rings.

It was a hamster wheel of a year–all that running in place to get absolutely nowhere.

A brief history of things I did:

Podcasting (5-6 minute audio stories about my life in early lockdown)
Still life painting                                     →
Located our wills and updated my financial information (March was scary y’all)
Marie Kondo’ed every drawer in the apartment
Organized my jewelry (Note to self: stop buying earrings)
Tried to figure out why there was a dead body in my foyer (seriously, listen to the podcast)
Slow cooked, fast cooked, Asian cooked, Bread cooked, Soup cooked…so much cooking

And still it was only April. It never seemed to get past April….

A follow up brief history of more things I did:

Sewed masks
Zoom happy hours, Zoom quizzes, Zoom coffees, Zoom-ed out
Organizing, Part II: The Cupboards Strike Back 
Organizing, Part III: Revenge of the Filing 
Put speech bubbles pertaining to lockdown on all the small toys in our house
Daily walks through the woods with my husband, like the old couple we’re becoming.
Discovered that our marriage will, indeed, survive retirement. 

By summer, things seemed on the track back to normal. We met up with (less than 10) friends for a June birthday drink, outside, and felt weird and slightly naughty, all of us sort of dancing around each other, tentatively tapping elbows, unsure if we were allowed to actually enjoy ourselves. We had already canceled all our travel and opted instead to explore Denmark, traveling to the top of the country and then back down.

****

Learned basic guitar chords until my fingers hurt and I stopped
Made a series of Corona “greeting cards”
Relearned how to cast on and cast off a knit stitch, only to abandon it as I have plenty of scarves and I didn’t have the attention span to make anything bigger
Made bread
Made more bread
Made bread with art on top of it

2020 was the year in which I did literally anything I could to keep my brain occupied and yet I feel like I learned…almost nothing. It was all filler. Junk food for my days. And lest it seem like there was a lot of crafting and culling, there was extraordinary amount of television watching in there as well. 

A brief history of things I didn’t do very much of: