Things I Learned in 2022

It should be pretty obvious to my 0.3 readers that I haven’t gotten around to my Year In Review for 2022, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t collect the data. For now, here is a survey question I asked myself each night.

“What Did You Learn Today?”

For the record, on 53 nights, my answer was “Nothing.”

I learned that Betty White has been on TV forever.

We learned that Theodore really loves snow.

We learned that Theodore is willing to brazenly cheat to win a game.

 I learned that I’m going to have a hard time getting my peeps promoted.

I learned that I’m suddenly managing a big, high-profile project. 

I learned how to do bladder ablation. 

I learned that democracy remains doomed.

I learned that Disneyland is stupidly expensive.

I learned that it’s hard to find a stroller for a kid this big and heavy.

I learned that we’re actually gonna get started on our renovations.

I learned that the stonks just keep going down.

I learned that the kitty did a really bad thing.

I learned that there is such a thing as too cold for pizza Fridays.  But we did it anyway.

I learned that I could do a thing that i had always been hesitant to do.

I learned that Tucker Carlson was horny for M&Ms.

We learned that our neighbors are leaving us.

We learned that Theodore maybe isn’t cooperating that well at nap time.

We learned that we’re gonna get some snow.

We learned that my waterproof socks really work well.

We learned that cold hands plus hanger can really mess up the little man.

I learned that even late on a Monday night with the world covered in snow, someone is gonna be there to take your parking spot.

We learned just how many pipes and wires are behind our walls.

I learned that my dumb project has a written scope, but people are still kinda just making it all up.

I learned even more that my dumb project has a written scope, but people are still kinda just making it all up.

I learned that ice and sleet are enough to cancel school. 

We learned that having a hangry 3-year-old on a plane is a bad idea. 

We learned that the fun flying rotor toy draws blood every time it hits you.  

We learned that Theodore can legit swim by himself when he just goes and does it. 

We learned *again* that hanger can prompt spectacular meltdowns. 

We learned that Theodore is intimidated by large groups of homeschooled Tolkien nerds. 

We learned that Theodore talks really loudly with headphones on. 

We learned that Theodore really would steal a cookie from a 2-year-old on her birthday. 

We learned that Theodore really missed his BFF. 

We learned that I’m the only one that wasn’t excited about the 90’s rap super bowl halftime.

We learned that when you eat peas you get sparkly eyes.

I learned that it was too cold for Theodore to walk across the bridge.

  I learned that the guard on my beard trimmer slips sometimes. 

I learned that New York traffic is also not what it once was. 

I learned that restaurants here are doing a pretty good job of checking vaccinations, actually. 

I learned that Theodore is perfectly capable of intentional disobedience and that it’s no coincidence when he does the opposite of what I ask.

I learned that Theodore needs to be fed really urgently if he’s half-assed a couple meals. 

We learned that the Charlestown ferry is really easy and great. 

We learned that Putin means to start a war. 

I learned that my friends in Minsk are scared and want to leave. 

I learned that even when we’re not talking about the cloud, we should be talking about the cloud.  

We learned that none of Theodore’s friends really think of anyone else as friends. 

We learned that when he really gets into something he’s watching, that Theodore really engages with it. 

We learned that we lost like $60000 in kinda imaginary but also kinda real money. 

We learned that we do not need to find a new place for our stuff just yet. 

I learned that my bonus should still happen.  We learned that maybe we shouldn’t count on a night away.  

We learned that hubris is real. 

We learned that maybe Theodore is serious about being aware of his badness at sleeping. 

We learned that Theodore’s teachers have no real plan for naptime. 

We learned that the roof and deck over our alcove is a disaster. 

We learned that the alcove roof is even older and crappier than we thought. 

We learned that yet another family is eyeing the suburbs. 

We learned that we couldn’t sleep at home tonight. 

We learned that <redacted> our upstairs neighbor is a big baby. 

We learned that the car is leaking coolant. 

We learned that the plaster was still wet. 

We learned that sometimes Theodore doesn’t eat that much. 

I learned that it is possible to be reduced to crawling if you get hit in the balls hard enough. 

I learned that our lease at work is up in a few years, ominously. 

I learned that we can’t just leave the pizza boxes at the playground. 

I learned that he just gets to play baseball for free. Someone is paying for it, just not us. 

We learned that you really do just run into people everywhere now. 

I learned that my friend didn’t saw his leg off.  

I learned that fancy private schools are fancy. 

I learned that we totally made the right decision on the living room. 

We learned that we got into the Quincy school!

We learned that the kitty missed us. 

I learned that the curse of the crayon flag is real. 

I learned that Theodore really can’t resist picking up the soccer ball. 

I learned that cruise ships are a thing again this year. 

I learned that Theodore probably is napping. 

I learned that the client’s gonna blow up a lot of work. 

I learned that the client’s gonna blow up a lot of work, but for some good reasons, and at least it’s not my fault. 

I learned that maybe Theodore can play with other friends.  

I learned that Theodore can play soccer without using his hands. 

I learned to always check traffic before taking the Leverett Connector. 

I learned that maybe i will never get promoted. 

We learned that <redacted> went and got the ‘rona.  We learned that <redacted> went and got the ‘rona. 

We learned that the antiviral works. 

We learned that Theodore can’t function on 8 hours’ sleep.  I learned that the car’s transmission broke. 

I learned where the car got towed. 

I learned that the car had little more than a dead battery despite claiming something about the transmission. 

I learned that the client wants everything on the same timeline anyway. 

I learned that the client wants everything on the same timeline anyway, but only if they get a receipt. 

We learned that our new sink is broken. 

We learned that the bed we had in mind is probably a bad idea. 

I learned that the robot is making tiny errors almost entirely at random. 

I learned that the robot has static cling. 

We learned that the ominous certified mail from the law firm was just for the weed store. 

We learned that the stalls at Gillette Stadium are… not that bad?

We learned that it’s probable that Theodore knows that I don’t stay on the floor with him the whole night. 

We learned that those monsters are going to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

I learned that my hair can be cut in around 10 minutes, even with chit-chat. 

I learned that yet another long-timer quit. 

I learned that Theodore can play well for two hours and do a lot of stuff at the playground. 

I learned that there can be howling wind for one block and not so much the next.  

I learned we have a gas leak. 

I learned that the movers took our photos. 

I learned that <redacted> teacher tested positive. 

We learned how to use Genie +, I think. 

We learned that Theodore’s butt is the most jet-lagged. 

We learned that just because he starts the day a mess doesn’t mean it has to end that way. 

We learned that maybe he can get so tired that he just pees his pants. 

We learned that <redacted> has COVID. 

We learned that Aquarium Theodore also applies in submarines. 

We learned that Theodore can get a good nights sleep and still be exhausted 

We learned that it’s still a good idea to have some cash on you.  Also learned what haupia and guri-guri are. 

We learned that Theodore really hates it if big kids call him a “baby”.

We learned that Ocean View maybe might have an asterisk. 

learned that Theodore can pee his bed twice in one night. 

I learned that Theodore can rally even if he just rests rather than napping. 

We learned that Theodore can be a big boy about things that disappoint all of us. 

We learned that Theodore can make friends after all. 

We learned that Disney can get $15 for a sheet of stickers. 

We learned that Theodore can actually be chill for a 5.5hr plane flight. 

I learned that there’s no lead safe from Omar Gonzalez

I learned that restocking the house after you intentionally use up all your groceries is a lot of work. 

I learned that everything actually went…fine while I was gone?

I learned that my snoring has been bad lately. 

I learned that Theodore can actually go seek out kids to play with. 

I learned that Theodore might be into extreme sports. 

I learned that Theodore can play independently with his friends for a long time… and then what do I do?

We learned that Theodore can still throw down in the middle of the night for no good reason. 

We learned that Theodore’s new school is really big!

I learned that if he takes a two hour nap, he’s up until 10. 

I learned that there are consequences to using the wrong seltzer cup. 

I learned that Theodore can make friends with new kids. 

I learned that daycare wants to send home full cups of paint. 

I learned that a raccoon is not a primate. 

I learned that just because you’re in charge doesn’t mean you’re in charge. 

I learned that maybe static attraction is an intractable problem. 

I learned that maybe we fixed the problem anyway. 

I learned that maybe I will never get a good nights sleep again. 

I learned that maybe my favorite color is red now?

I learned that maybe the board design is going to be late(r). 

I learned that <redacted> is having a bad time. 

I learned that it’s possible to barf from drinking too much pool water. 

I learned that I can still have good footwork sometimes. 

I learned that Theodore is definitely stoked to have a dollhouse.  And a pirate ship. 

I learned that everybody’s quotes are higher than expected. A lot higher. 

I learned that pizza-less Fridays at the playground are weird. 

We learned that it’s really easy to spend $200 at the grocery store. 

I learned that Theodore knows the lyrics to a Taylor Swift song. 

I learned that Theodore maybe doesn’t like cold water as much as he should. 

We learned that having a different babysitter was tough for Theodore, but not impossible. 

We learned that Theodore is still 99th percentile for everything. 

We learned that Theodore is really excited for his bunk bed. 

I learned that Theodore really really likes that one song by The Weeknd. 

I learned that maybe some of the people who work for me are maybe a little too optimistic. 

I learned that the electronics work after all.  Probably. 

I learned that my office’s internet is worse than mine.  

I learned that my grandfather is sick.  Perhaps in a final way. 

I learned that Theodore likes science.  In the museum sense. 

I learned that Market Basket is still cheap. 

I learned that one of Theodore’s old classmates is a bigger kid now, but still kinda the same. 

I learned that the cat is stinky. 

I learned that Theodore doesn’t like to sleep. 

I learned that replacing the battery on my speaker was stupidly easy. 

We learned that it is possible for it to be too hot to go to the playground. 

We learned that there is such a thing as a reusable water balloon. 

I learned that there are still people i’ve gone three years without seeing. 

I learned that Theodore can get really crazy if he catnaps at the wrong time.  I learned that Theodore does not like to sleep. 

I learned that the bunny park is also the needle park. 

I learned that there was a beer garden that i hadn’t known about yet. 

I learned that I’m still good at drinking. 

I learned that Theodore gets very emotional when told not to do things on the way out of Gillette Stadium. 

I learned that you can bike/T to Hormel Stadium. 

I learned that the cat peed on Theodore’s trains. 

I learned that I probably did push-ups and sit-ups with a present-day colleague, 25 years ago in NROTC. 

I learned that sea salt chocolate makes really salty brownies. 

I learned that keeping Theodore home when he’s not really sick is exhausting. 

I learned that Theodore liked the movie theater okay. 

I learned that well-rested Theodore is kinda unstoppable. 

I learned that we’re firing someone and i didn’t not contribute to it. 

I learned that it’s much nicer when it’s not 90° out.  I

learned how to drive the robot. 

I learned that yes, we were just missing the fasteners for the sink. 

We learned that Theodore may just pass out if he’s tired. 

We learned that Theodore can handle his scooter in a skate park.  

We learned that I get a trickle of money more to work with. 

We learned that Joshua can really hurt Theodore.  And also bite him. 

I learned that Theodore doesn’t like me. 

I learned that I should work on my reading comprehension. 

We learned that Theodore loves river tubing. 

I learned that showing up a poor sport is even better than winning. 

We learned that Theodore wanted a dress so he could twirl around.   

We learned that Theodore does not have stage fright. 

We learned that my siblings’ bullshit transcends. 

We learned what a second cousin actually means.  We learned what it’s like to sit next to a bunch of fascists. 

I learned that maybe sometimes it’s not gastritis, it’s just food poisoning?

I learned that the Revs are not going to make the playoffs. 

I learned that Theodore has a new gear for nonsense. 

We learned that a tired Theodore is a chaotic Theodore. 

We learned that tired Theodore can still really put on a show. 

We learned that Theodore really loves bowling and is bad at it. And arcade games too. 

We learned that there is no such thing as getting Bob out of the house on time. 

We learned that even 3 hours short on sleep, Theodore is still a good boy, even if occasionally prone to chaos. 

We learned that Theodore can scoot for nearly a mile if he feels like it. 

We learned that Theodore can is very sad if one of his friends betray him. 

We learned that the only two 4-year-olds at a party are gonna find each other. 

We learned that you can offset your wall plugs over tile. 

We learned that maybe you have to ask 3-4 kids to actually figure out how the day went.  

We learned that no one actually got the camera integrated. 

We learned that America’s Hometown has a rush hour. 

We learned how to buy pot. 

We learned that Tree House in Sandwich is possibly too good to be true. 

We learned what varices are. 

I learned that our sought-after data result was an excel table with six cells. 

I learned that one of our primary client contacts is… gone. 

We learned that sometimes when he’s barking orders at me he just forgets to be nice about it. 

We learned that he’s pretty much always going to choose the T. 

We learned that he’s having some trouble making it to the bathroom successfully at school. 

I learned that there’s a lot of work left to do to calibrate the dumb machines. 

I learned that we are good to keep doing work. 

I learned that Reader Rabbit still exists. 

I learned that my boss is quitting after 24 years!

We learned that Theodore is completely nutsy at a baseball game. 

I learned that you can run a long way on the other side of the drydock. 

We learned that an extra-large pizza has extra-large slices. 

We learned that Theodore is not that afraid of the big silly puppy. 

We learned that Theodore loves trains, rides, junk food, pumpkins.  

I learned that safes are heavy. 

I learned that I can still get fast at SolidWorks even if my computer can’t.  

We learned that I can still carry tired Theodore home from Ringgold. 

We learned that we still love random days out in the city. 

We learned that Theodore thinks trees are annoying. 

I learned that play dates are actually kinda great for parents. 

I learned that the dumb vendor discontinued a thing we were building around and now the new version is bigger. 

I learned that getting drunk with parent friends on a school night is great fun. 

I learned that Annette still can’t get drunk. 

I learned that Theodore can party for six hours straight.  

I learned that the little boy likes sleeping in his tent. 

I learned that green waffles are a good meal for Mama and Dada, too. 

I learned that I missed my coworkers being together. 

We learned that maybe Theodore is crushing on his classmate. 

We learned that Theodore can get overwhelmed by parties. 

Theodore asked me why i can’t be normal.  

We learned that Theodore can get candy madness. 

We learned that it’s hard to find a lost <redacted>. 

We learned that Theodore’s BFF has a dark side. 

We learned that if you’re worried about him being actually hurt, Theodore is not the most reliable witness when tired. 

We learned that the kitty is doing just fine and should maybe have some Prozac. 

We learned that it’s possible to really jam up a playground if you sit on the slide and refuse to move.  

I learned that Theodore really likes his classmate and gets sad when she goes and plays with someone else.  

We learned that Theodore will tell <redacted> about his day. 

I learned that apparently I’m not allowed to touch Theodore now. 

We learned that Theodore can casually read complex words. 

We learned that there’s nothing like a new toy to turn a fragile man having a tough day into a happy one, playing great, independently. 

We learned that Theodore is really angling to not sleep in his own bed. 

We learned that Theodore and his friends are completely different with each other than at home. 

We learned that Theodore still naps sometimes at school, and that the consequences remain the same. 

I learned that traffic escalates fast. 

We learned that bars are still really busy in a Saturday night. 

I learned that carelessly getting a hangover is a dumb idea.  I

learned that playing two men down doesn’t go well. 

We learned that our heat is broken. 

We learned that our heat isn’t broken, but that 2/3 of us have covid. 

We learned that it’s very easy to slide right back into 2020 habits. 

I learned that Theodore still fits in my bicycle seat.  

I learned that it’s really hard to get the cat to eat her prozac. 

I learned that I’m legit afraid of sticking my finger it the cat’s mouth. 

I learned that if I don’t pay attention while sharing my screen, they’ll see me reading soccer websites. 

I learned that you could crash out of the World Cup due to too many yellow cards. 

I learned that Theodore can wake up with just the most random ideas in his head. 

I learned that hippies actually shoved flowers into the barrel of my dad’s drill rifles. 

We learned what happened to my dad’s kayak. 

We learned that watching videos in the car can make Theodore carsick. 

I learned that Jingle Jangle is very filling. 

I learned that the wiring for the Christmas Green Train is complex. 

We learned that Theodore is really excited to see Santa. 

We learned that Theodore is really excited to see snow. 

We learned that maybe it’s just swollen tonsils that are making him sick. 

We learned why our software help can’t help us yet. 

We learned that sometimes Theodore is just lazy and wants a stroller ride. 

We learned that Messi is the GOAT. 

I learned that running after dinner is still and always a recipe for failure. 

We learned that maybe Theodore is a kind little boy to everyone. 

We learned that sometimes Theodore’s friends make him sad. 

We learned that maybe having a little more space makes things like decorating cookies easier. 

We learned that Theodore is tall enough that Shelby can’t lick him. 

We learned that Theodore is really excited for Christmas. 

We learned that maybe it’s better to drive to Maine when Theodore is asleep. 

We learned that Theodore is pretty great at Uno. 

We learned what a dice parade is. 

We learned that Theodore can hold it together pretty well after an 0430 start to his day. 

A police state, but for cars

My wife believes that this started coincident with the rise to power of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and accelerated invisibly during the coronatime, but recently there are more people positing the theory that civil society as a whole is fraying in ways large and small but increasingly tangible.

In the city, this is perhaps most noticeable at the boundary between the world of cars and the world of humans. Mostly because cars are an outsized expression of the people driving them. A mechanized exoskeleton roaming the streets. So if the person driving the car is an asshole, as apparently so many more of us are now, then behind the wheel, they’re literally a giant asshole.

This chiefly affects people in the city, by which i mean humans outside of vehicles, either living there, working there, or visiting, but existing as vulnerable fleshy meat sacks. Obviously fleshy meat sacks mingling with cars on two wheels have grown accustomed to expressions ranging from non-benign neglect to hostility, but in this age of excess, it is a problem for every person. Every car that roars down small streets, squeezes a pass down a one-way street, parks or starts at random, blows through a crosswalk, accelerates through a red, or hurtles blithely through a right-on-red is a threat to every fleshy meat sack. My three-year-old knows this, and yet i stress about him not knowing it well enough.

It’s got to stop. Many years ago, i talked with a BPD officer who mentioned that something like 600 people (including cyclists) a year were struck by cars in the city. It doesn’t make headlines, mostly, so I guess lots of people survive this, but the escalating speed and escalating hood height on trucks are going to try and improve on that record.

In my extremely humble, biased opinion as a bike-commuting, kid-having, city homeowner (who still has a car that he street parks), it boils down to this:

Cars should act like guests in the city.

Guests in a home take their shoes off, behave with decorum, tread lightly, ask before doing things, and are appropriately mortified if they offend their hosts.

But of course, that’s not how cars see it. They are either coming from outside the city to do whatever, or are at work in the city and looking to do their work as efficiently as possible, without a lot of regard to that which isn’t their problem, as they see it. So this would have to be impressed upon them.

But how? In the before time, we talked about discouraging gridlock through institution of a congestion charge, which never got much momentum because our car-loving governor hated it, but also had real problems of being potentially pretty regressive in nature. In any event, post-coronatime, this is less of a priority for congestion’s sake alone, but i think the location-sensitivity of this is important. Simply put, just as exurban neighborhoods put up SLOW, KIDS AT PLAY signs that people by and large respect, that should be the case in basically the entirety of the city. But it hasn’t been implied, even, not that implication would be sufficient. No one would heed that sign here. So how can we turn my neighborhood’s streets, teeming with kids, dogs, and non-adorable pedestrians, into a place that drivers respect?

In short, enforcement, and enforcement on the scale that modern technology permits. Red light cameras, sure, but also cameras on crosswalks and stop signs and driveways. Speed guns to keep people from blazing down back streets. Noise sensors to catch the visiting nuisances with Harleys or fart pipes. Pressure plates to catch people driving in the bike lane. Beg buttons like at crosswalks, but for pedestrians to signal human operators to peek at some transgression that just happened (because my wife’s solution of carrying rotten eggs to throw at cars probably isn’t a good one).

And with this, i say, you fine the shit out of people. And i don’t mean giant, crippling fines. This can’t be regressive; people drive to make a living, too, but those people also must drive better. I’m talking about little ones, but a lot of them. And a lot more of them if you and your car are an asshole together. Your first red light running is $5. If a month later you speed down a small street or right-turn-on-red without stopping it’s another $5. If all is well, you cool down, but if this is a habit, it goes up. And if it’s more, more often, then it goes up fast and starts to get real. Ideally if you and your car are a consistent menace to people in the city, then it becomes prohibitively expensive for you to be caught driving in it. You’re not welcome here and you may not continue to terrorize the people that live here and visit here.

But doesn’t this basically create an Orwellian police state? Kinda. But also Americans conflate car-hood and person-hood. People have rights. Driving a car is a privilege too often taken for granted. A necessity, too, and a chief aim of this should be to drive infrastructure that makes it less of a necessity. We should take the funds generated from this enforcement and get people out of cars with every tool we have.

But isn’t it still regressive? Maybe. Maybe it imposes too heavy a penalty on gig delivery drivers who are pinched from all sides already. But those industries are a menace. Those drivers, i’m sure, are doing the best they can with the parameters they have, but they’re in a hurry, in a city, and constantly starting and stopping in unusual places. They need to do that safely, and ideally their employer pays for their mistakes and trains them well; after all, it’s their employer that aligns their incentives against the public good..

Wouldn’t new cameras and sensors and the like just induce different bad behavior? A common argument with red light cameras is people flying through them to escape them. In a city with lower overall traffic speeds than larger intersections and faster roads, and coupled with the comparatively low and slow-escalating fines, I’d expect this to be mitigated, and also expect that the speeding would also get flagged so you’d be escaping nothing.

Doesn’t it also foster a huge bureaucracy? And a huge human burden to implement and referee? Doesn’t it introduce a lot of ambiguity? There’s certainly going to be a lot of design to this, which is why i find it interesting, of course. I would liken the human element to VAR in soccer (you know, something universally well-loved), wherein ambiguous, appealed, or user-flagged incidents are reviewed selectively. Probably not a fun job, but the technology for this exists. Again, with the stakes for this reduced (i.e. the fines are mostly low unless you’re already an asshole), then the job is easier and the calls for it are reduced.

Wouldn’t this discourage people from visiting the city? Would employers move out? I picked up $60 worth of speeding tickets for slight infractions in France a few years ago and have still gone back. The next time, I drove the speed limit exactly, and not the customary American 10mph over. Again, honest mistakes happen. They should be deterred through the awareness of the tiny penalty, but honest people are not what this is about.

Wouldn’t traffic get worse? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe some traffic lights that are competitive would get a little locked up. This might be a different matter in pre-COVID times, too, but now, somewhat ironically, cars are more likely to be moving, at least on surface streets, and seemingly willing to do anything to continue moving. Ultimately I don’t care. For innumerable reasons, not least the rising seas, we need to get people out of their damn cars, and if this helps, let’s do it.

It’s safe to say there are all kinds of details i have paid insufficient attention to, and any number of personal biases that i’ve paid too much to.

But my main bias is having to be crossing with a walk light and then have to pick up my little boy and his scooter and run us out of the intersection because some car can’t be bothered to share a tiny, busy, dangerous space with us properly. I say, simply, punish that driver. Lightly, then heavily. Use the money to make the city better.

2021 Year In Review

2021 was a weird year, both differently-weird and the-same-weird as the one which preceded it, and the transitions between the weirdness showed themselves in some of the things i observed about things i did in the course of the year. It was also three years in one; the tail end of a bad time, the promise of a normal time, and the dread and looming threat of another bad time, and to some extent that shows up here.

About This Year:

• In addition to my usual self-reporting of things i do in the course of a standard year of being me, i used the Reporter app to periodically ask me certain questions about what was happening. Typically the average responses per day was about 6, including one at wakeup and one at bedtime. It was a lot of work to get an incomplete reflection of the reality of my year—it was interesting, but i won’t be doing it that way again.
• Since recording this is an intentional act, it necessarily biases these numbers away from some situations where i was too busy actually doing stuff to write down that i was doing stuff. At downtimes (read: while my son was stalling going to sleep), sometimes i would correct for this, but imperectly.
• What that means is that many of these graphs are unitless, and reflect only the number of incidences in a report, and that they’re best thought of as relative measurements of one thing versus another.
• Not all of the things i recorded wound up being all that interesting, insofar as any of this is interesting to anyone other than me. I omitted stuff that didn’t really show anything worthwhile.

Stuff We Did:

Number of incidences of reporting including this activity, grouped roughly by type. Here, they are all scaled to the highest quantity, which was playing with the man, but that doesn’t mean i shouldn’t have spent more time drinking cocktails.

In many cases, “Watching TV” meant nothing more than that the little guy had demanded the TV to be on, in order for it to make annoying background noise while i was “Playing with the man”

Reasonably proud of that “drinking a beer” total, but it’s skewed by the fact that it corresponded well with leisure time that let me record the beer for posterity.

Yes, of course i filled out “driving” and “Looking for parking” after the fact. Didn’t even bother to do so often enough after bicycling. As always, these are imperfect statistics.

This is heavily influenced by the fact that the end of the Bad Project in the first half of the year still had me doing way more management and talking than engineering.

Places We Went:

Mostly a count of individual visits to places, with the exception of the first one: home/work/daycare, which is a count of reports in a place.

These are independently scaled.

Obviously i made more stops at daycare than this, but didn’t necessarily record them, as I was typically moving on toward work.

Two things to note here: One is that we didn’t go out that much this year despite a summer where we at least made an attempt to get our patio dining in. By my count, we ate inside in seven places. The second is that we have an absolutely hellacious breakfast habit owing to the fact that we’re surrounded by absolutely top-notch bakeries. Somehow there are no references to Blackbird or Kane’s donuts though.

The quantities here are not quite right, but are in general indicative of what our favorite playgrounds were. The “Train Playground” was probably underrepresented a little as he was very fond of it late in the year. He’s mostly too big for the play equipment, but well, that’s not why we’re there anyway, is it?

This is a disappointing result, mostly because i know we went more places with a more varied frequency than this. This is a good example of where what we did differs from what i recorded because i was too busy doing it rather than writing it down. Fine with that, obviously.

It’s worth noting that in the second half of the year, the little man and i would commute to school via train once a week: Commuter Rail from Back Bay to South Station, Red Line to Broadway, then a walk to school that was still longer than if we’d just walked from home.

No visits to Dilboy Stadium or McDonald Stadium this year. Winchester Community Park is new, and has both indoor and outdoor fields. In January and February, i did not play any indoor in Bedford.

Other Status Reports

How did i sleep?
Mostly not as badly as it sometimes felt like, but there remains a roughly 1-in-4 chance that something or, ahem, someone, is going to deprive me of a good night’s sleep for reasons.

Napping:
Did he or didn’t he? Around 2PM, this is the question we start refreshing the daycare app to figure out. The difference is, as the year went on, we stopped rooting for a nap, and started rooting against it. As he grows up, most of the time he doesn’t need one, and can have a productive and good-natured day from start to finish without one. So on days where he takes a nap at school, we now look at this as kinda bad news, because he’s never going to sleep at a reasonable hour, which messes him up the next day and the next day and…

How clean is the house?
Or how clean isn’t it? A general status of the house’s degree of destruction, mostly focused on the living room’s level of scattered toys, but also to a lesser extent, recency of vacuuming, dishes in the sink, etc. Very subjective, and i’m not going to pretend that even the “clean” state would withstand any sort of objective scrutiny.

Shoes:
In the first half of the year, when I typically was not going so far from home, not getting on my bike as often, and going in and out on a more occasional basis, usually i’d slip on my loosely-tied Sambas quickly. As the year went on, i went to work more often and resumed preferring my Chuck Taylors on those days. There were ten days wherein i did not put shoes on at all.

Pants:
In the middle of a global pandemic, why bother with them? My son, i mean. In the winter, especially following our lockdown December of 2020, he spent a lot of time without them. This was the downside of toilet training in that, at home, he saw it as an excuse to ditch his pants. If we never left the house, then he saw no need for pants. This was as high as 22% early in the year.

Cat Status:
Is the cat bad? What do i mean by bad? A recent incidence of: bringing a mouse inside, swatting me, walking on my head in the middle of the night, scratching furniture, walking on the kitchen counter, menacing my dinner, interfering with my getting the man down to sleep…

Fitnessing:

The goal this year was to improve upon last year, and this we did, somewhat.

You might have thought that bicycling would be a straightforward place to improve upon last year, but as it turns out, that’s not so simple. 2020, after all, did start with 2 1/2 normal commuting months. In October of this year i nearly got back over 100 miles in a month for the first time since January 2020. But as it ended up, I was only two whole miles ahead of 2020. Two whole miles. The furthest from home I rode this year was Huron Village, and the most miles in one day was 20, the same day. This year i’d like to find more days to take the scenic route to work and add bonus mileage, but as always, the main goal is to not get run over. Toward the end of 2021, traffic got serious again. I biked in 3 towns other than Boston: Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline.

Running was a big win over last year. 37 more miles than the previous year, despite the fact that December utterly got away from me at work and at home. Should have been a lot better. 225 miles was pretty good for last year, though. A lot of my runs were built around going and finding new places to shoot train videos for my fellow filmmaker. Longest run was 4 miles, twice, in August and October. I would like to get to 300 total next year and do that with some longer runs. Beyond that, my pace was complete crap all year, for some reason, even in March and April, and i refuse to accept that somehow i’m suddenly a year too old to be in the low 9s as i’ve basically always been.

In 2021, i did play 11 more soccer games than in 2020. It was very routine from March onward, and for a lot of the year, i was really happy with how i played. As a team we played well in general, and I don’t think we lost more than a couple games by multiple goals all year. In general, i got up and down the field more and more effectively and picked my head up and slowed down the game while on the ball vastly better than in previous years. In the middle part of the year i was connecting passes really well. In October and November, for some reason, i couldn’t put the ball where i wanted to save my life. This year: regain some quickness, continue to get my defensive footwork back, improve my movement in the attacking half of the field. Maybe score a goal, but i’d be happier with more assists, probably. Mostly, the last two years make me thankful that i can still play, still stay on the field with people half my age, and appreciate that there may come a day where i can’t.

Statistics: 1 goal, 1 assist, 16 shots on goal.
30 goals allowed in 28 games
1 own goal, 2 fouls

Travel and Exploring:

We drove considerably more this year than the year prior, well over twice as many miles (8,547), for two main reasons. One was that we could go further from our house than the limit of our bladders, and two was that we had people to safely visit more or less whenever we wanted; her parents in the area all summer, and my parents 250 miles away in Maine (in January, May, July, November, and December, as you might guess). We don’t car commute at all, so all of this driving is leisure. Other contributors are trips to Foxboro to watch the Revolution (12 times, but i also got vaccinated there) and my own weekly games.

It’s easy to see here that the amount of commuting noticeably increased as the year went on. Toward the end of the year, I was in the office a minimum of three days a week, even when i didn’t need to be. Why? Because we arranged our lives in the city because we love the city, but also because getting to work easily still has value for us and hopefully always will. And part of it means that the assumption that you have a good place to work at home is simply not true for us. i missed my desk, i missed the shop, and yes, i missed the free diet mountain dew.

One of the benefits of living with one of the world’s foremost fans of public transit is that you go ride the train a lot. As mentioned above, we commuted to school on the T a lot in the second half of the year, meaning that there was a lot of Commuter Rail and Red Line in addition to the usual Orange Line trips.

Even as the year ended with us feeling locked in and shut down yet again, bracing for a seemingly unavoidable rendezvous with the ‘rona, we can’t pretend that 2021 wasn’t a huge improvement on the year prior, based on all the things we got to do this year, especially in the spring and summer:

• As discussed here previously, we went to Disneyworld. My better half looks back at it half-jokingly as a bit of a lavish overreaction to a year of lockdown, and while we were there, our tired man had more to protest than one might have thought, but ever since then, he’s watched our home videos from that trip dozens of times, so i think maybe he liked it. This was our only plane trip; 2 flights in total for the year, 2 airports visited, 1 airline flown.
• We went to 3 of Disneyworld’s parks, and also to Canobie Lake Park. The little dude likes rides, and he likes ’em all-you-can-eat even more. By my semi-accurate count, we got on 68 rides this year, also counting assorted carousels around home.
• This year i spent 29 nights away from home. 21 of them were in Maine.
• Other than Massachusetts, we visited New Hampshire, Maine, New York, Rhode Island, and Florida.
• We went to 0 Red Sox games this year. Our feelings about modern baseball are complex, and we mean to go this coming year, but needless to say, our three-year-old will not have the attention span for it right now.
• We visited the zoo 3 times, and the aquarium once. We did not set foot in the Childrens’ Museum despite having a membership all year.
• We went to the beach 3 times, and went swimming in a pool 16 times including his swim lessons. Dude loves the pool so, so much. We also went splashing in assorted fountains and splash pads 8 times.
• We went hiking twice.

Food and Drink:

Seems like it’s pretty easy to tell which half of the year was still kinda locked down and which half of the year we were eating healthy, and which half of the year we stopped giving a damn. January and July are notable in that i was hanging out with my siblings, and well, that pretty much always results in more beer drinking, including my top score of 8 in one day.

However, we are trying to broaden our horizons this year, so we also should mention:
• 18 nights of drinking wine, almost entirely excluding the summer
• 17 nights of drinking cocktails, almost entirely during the summer where we were eating outside. Go figure.

Helped by steady attendance of Revolution home matches and multiple road trips up to Maine, as well as my son’s pretty healthy love of Happy Meals (mostly due to their coming with chocolate milk), our McDonald’s performance was pretty good this year. You can see also here that during the summer, we did a lot of patio dining, and in the winter, we subscribed to a weekly takeout+wine service from a local wine shop which was frequently awesome. As mentioned elsewhere, our pastry habit is significant.

Stupid Internet Things:

Hmm… i wonder what happened in January? Other than that, i don’t tweet as much as i used to, which is probably for the best. A lot of them are about him, too. Or about the cat. Or slandering cars. Or porg-related retweets. Or not-so-insightful analysis of #nerevs. Or celebrations of Yankee Elimination, one hopes.

The blue bars are photos in my iCloud normalized to a per-day count over each month so that it fits on the same graph as the Instagrams in pink. Is that good data visualization? Is any of this? Is anyone still reading? Unsurprisingly, we took a lot of photos at Disneyworld, and a lot again at Xmas time. But even during quiet, locked-down months, i still take a ridiculous number of photos, mostly of that guy.

• We made four train videos to share with other train-loving kids out there. Somehow we have 7 subscribers and over 500 views amongst them. Our selling point is that we have a lot less incessant ding-ing than other MBTA Commuter Rail videos. Ask me how I know this.
• So far, not for external consumption, i’ve put together seven roughly 45-minute supercuts of assorted videos we take over the course of the year. My son is a narcissist, so he doesn’t get to watch these as often as he’d like, but he still always wants more. There will probably be 9 of these total for 2021.

To Do This Year:

• Get that guy vaccinated.
• Get on a plane more than once.
• Actually take the little man to a new state.
• Take the ferry to Eastie or Charlestown and explore. And have tacos, probably.
• Do more squats and burpees.
• Use the $10 commuter rail weekend fare to go explore.
• Eat more ice cream.
• Write more than 3 times a year.
• See a movie in a theater?
• Meet friends at beer gardens more.
• Go on a short trip to a nearby city, maybe, without worrying about whether trains, museums, restaurants are safe.
• Do more hiking with the man. Maybe even camping.
• Spend more time lounging on our patio.
• Probably not leave the country unless it’s to Canada.
• Do something inside, right? Probably?
• Spend less time on this next year? Who knows? Work is slow right now and this was fun for me. If you read all this i question your sanity.

Past Years:

• Year in Review, 2020
• Year in Review, 2019
• Year In Review, 2018
• 2017 Year In Review
• 2016? Where is it?
• Year In Review, 2015
• Year in Review, 2014
• 2013 Year In Review
• 2012, The Year In Review

Xmas 2021 by the numbers

• Number of new trains and cars: 44 in total (3 MBTA Commuter Rail, 6 Red Line, 5 Orange Line, 4 Green Line, 5 Acela, 3 Amtrak, 3 red subway cars, 4 mine cars, 2 freight cars, 1 electric smart train, 3 paint-your-own, 5 Thomas the Tank Engine)
• Number of COVID tests: 10 amongst all three of of us. Or, if you prefer, around $115 worth.
• Number of days without daycare: 16. And it was a good thing, since we got close-contact emails from school for 12/20 and 12/21, which would have meant we’d have again been relegated to parking lot rendezvous.
• Relatives visited on both sides: 12
• Miles driven: 789, probably 50 of which were in service of eliciting desperately needed naps from somebody.
• Cookies: We didn’t count. Nor should i take all that much credit for them. But let’s say there were 150 of them.
• Playgrounds: 7, one of which was a new discovery.
• Nights where we got a good night’s sleep: 3, maybe? Dude was out of his rhythm for sure.
• Big, significant presents he hasn’t even gotten around to opening yet and are going to be seriously welcome when we get quarantined next month: 4

Not as exhausting as last years, where we were stuck together for 31 days and had even fewer places to go, and barely any way to see anyone, and were well and truly tired of each other, but I’m still confident he’s going to be glad to see his friends soon. And by the end of the week he’ll be glad to spend the day with us again. And his endless supply of trains.

Hey buddy, i got you something…

It is a truly ancient cliche, the idea that we should be constantly thinking about the world we leave behind, doubly so for those of us with the temerity/good fortune to bring kids into this world. We’ve heard things like this for all of my life, as some kind of motivator to make the world a better place, and i’d be lying if i said i don’t think about it. A lot, in these days where even good news days would horrify someone from twenty years ago.

The problem is, now i think about it as a not some idealistic rallying cry, a nebulous goal where incremental improvement accumulates pretty naturally over a lifetime as it did for generations before ours, but a series of problems to work. And in reducing it to that, there is both a focus and a drive to go back to the first principle of making sure his world is a good one, but also a need to see reality clear-eyed and maybe think about the possibility that we need to prepare for failure of plan A.

It doesn’t speak very well of me or our present moment that i’m so frequently tempted to think this way. To be thinking about, if not giving up (because that isn’t true), at least planning for what failure looks like. What’s it look like if the 1000 year storm takes our sea-level home in the seventh year we own it, maybe right after we put a lot of savings into renovating it? Where do you draw the line and recognize you’re governed by a despot, and how long do you stick around after that? What decisions do you make now under the assumption that no institution will look out for your career, your health, or your savings? And how do you prepare for all those things without breaking faith with the large number of people less fortunate than yourself?

Yet the tendency to look out for what’s immediately around you is real, because at least that you have control over. We can shout all we want at national politicians, but if the system is set up so that West Virginians have an outsized say about things that matter to me, maybe i start to care more about local decisions. Make Massachusetts the best it can be. If Massachusetts’ dismally mediocre governor won’t for instance, tell people to mask back up, then at least i can be glad that Boston will. If our governments can’t do enough for the less fortunate than at least i can point money at organizations that will. The circle gets smaller and smaller until you can start to see cause and effect again. Which has kinda always been the case, but my parents didn’t have the same kind of existential threats to their well-being that i’m leaving my son with.

Which is where that small thinking fails so utterly, of course. If a criminal wannabe tyrant gets reelected (or re-‘elected’, worse yet), if the people i already campaigned for and supported want to stop that but can’t, what’s left to do? Hope that your state somehow shields you from the worst of it? Maybe that works for a while there, but when he and his kind turn the whole country into an oversized coal-rolling pickup, nobody’s going to protect us from the sea. Nobody’s going to protect my retirement savings from cratering. Nobody’s going to keep my health insurance from retreating from the most minimal standard of provision of care.

It feels like the moment is now and it’s an impossibly fast train to catch. And it’s all but certain we miss it. And there won’t be another. i don’t know what happens next in this metaphor, but it feels to me like i have to build my own train.

The Happiest Place On Earth In The Middle Of A Global Pandemic

It was like the old bad commercials. We got our vaccines, and my wife is like, “We’re going to Disneyworld.” I thought she was joking when she texted me this. At the time i was still 50% sure that whatever loophole had gotten me the shot before availability opened up to even people my parents’ age was going to prove to be wrong (and maybe should have been, except that at the time, shots and appointments were going begging, thanks to Governor Business).

But she was serious, and as soon as i got my dose (and got my sweet sweet 12-hour knockout flu-like-symptoms), she went and booked it. Some kind of deal that was too good to pass up with accommodations we wouldn’t normally splurge on, and a few nights for her parents to join us on the off chance they could babysit. She pointed out, rightly as always, that she’d been at work, in her office, for the whole damn pandemic, and that she wanted a damn vacation. Something that approximated a normal enough experience, something that was open, and something that was low-effort. And about the only thing that really qualified at this point was the Mouse himself.

• Flying during the Coronatime
• There was, in April, a huge difference between flying out of Logan, and flying into MCO. In one state, a small number of people are flying for business or necessity, a small number for leisure, and the airport is quiet, orderly, and very corona-normal. A lot of things remained closed. MCO looked basically like MCO but with masks on, grudgingly because Florida’s gonna Florida. Crowded, chaotic, 0% business, 100% vacation.
• While JetBlue and the flight we were aboard was well-behaved about wearing masks and enforcing the same, it was not so rigid as to be unworkable in real life. Toddlers and under aren’t going to be perfect about it, and fortunately no one was expecting them to.
• Baby man had never used an airline toilet before, and this was a “fun” new experience for him. And for me cramming into the bathroom with him. We brought his Elmo toilet seat with us (everywhere) and that helped some, but he did not enjoy the loud flushing noise in the least.
• Our flight down was roasting. I was sweaty and unfresh, but the little guy who deals with heat about as well as i used to was displeased until we got him to nap.

• The flight back from Disneyworld, stereotypically enough, became at some points a symphony of crying children. Mine included for some of it, mostly because we got him up too early and he didn’t want to nap.
• With the documented studies showing that planes are actually well set up to prevent spread, it is plausible to me that flying was not the worst thing you could do, if airports behaved mostly like BOS.
• That being said, at MCO, the security line ran clear across the building, without even being adequately distanced if at all. It was shocking to be crammed together like that, but vaccinated as we were, i didn’t really care.

• Disneyworld, Pandemic Style
• Similar to many other hotel chains, Disneyworld’s hotels would like you to check in using their smartphone app and not line up at a desk to do so. Unlike some hotel apps, this actually worked well. At no point however is several taps on your phone (not to mention unlocking it with your mask on (this was before your watch could help you with that)) preferable to an actual key.
• For weeks before the trip, we’d escalated our (admittedly negligent, on account of him having already had COVID) mask acclimation for baby man. A lot of our gratuitous T rides and visits to stores or whatever were aimed at getting him used to the idea that if you wore a mask you got to do fun things. And this mostly worked. We did not have any knock down drag out battles about wearing a mask. Everything we read before the trip made it sound extremely strict, that you could only ditch the mask while eating or in designated areas, but in retrospect i think these were written from the bizarre perspective of the Adult Disney Superfan™. Importantly, the unwritten rule in the parks seemed to be that if you were in a stroller, it didn’t really matter if you wore one. This was crucial; he needed a break, he needed to cool off, and we needed that not to be a big deal. This way, it still worked for us that he could put it on in order to go do something fun. Of course, explaining the nuance that you could pull it back down for photos was another thing, but he doesn’t always like smiling for pictures anyway.

• There was indeed a feeling of stuff being missing, though. Mostly food things; a lot of places to get stuff to eat or drink were closed and while it’s not like the food there is any good, this was a cheat week for the girl and i on our diet campaign, and anything that stood in the way of us living it up was a problem, okay?
• As a result you sort of found yourself adopting a ‘regular’ if you went somewhere more than once. If it worked and wasn’t a debacle (many things can be with a toddler, of course), then you’d probably do it again. At the hotel we stayed at, the little cafe with online ordering was actually pretty decent food, but we’d traversed the menu fully by midweek. The online ordering worked okay, but the situations where they shooed you away in person to go have you punch it in your phone seemed avoidable. Even in Massachusetts we have perfectly good ways of carrying out this transaction in person at a distance. One imagines that a lot of this online ordering will be there to stay. The detail of placing your order then telling them “I’m here, go and make my order” needed to be better communicated.
• It’s not surprising that a place as complex as Disneyworld (and of course, the engineer and design professional that i am has all manner of fascination with the details) requires a complex, many-featured app. It’s complex, and like most feature-packed and evolving apps from gargantuan corporations serving any number of hundreds of stakeholders, it should probably be thrown the fuck out and redesigned from the ground up. Also i think if they made friends with Apple they could do half of it from the watch.
• It was stupidly hot for early April, right around 90º so the fact that there were fewer air-conditioned or at least shaded indoor shows to go take the edge off was a little bit of a bummer. At least baby man got to see Lightning McQueen in person, though.

• Baby man has a complex relationship with rides, as he is at a complicated age. He’s old enough to have a little bit of his dad’s adrenaline craving, but simultaneously old enough to be afraid of quite a few things without entirely mitigating it by realizing they’re pretend. He realizes it, but it’s not enough in the moment. This results in him sometimes burying his head in your side in the middle of a ride, but also wanting the next one, or even the same one again.

• Rides he likes:
• Anything that flies and spins, Dumbo, the dinosaur one, the Tomorrowland one, the flying carpets. They’re all good in his book. We probably rode some combination of these a dozen times.

• Most anything that spins. Impressively, he’s done a total 180˚ on his opinion of carousels, which he’s hated since a very young age (see below for contrast) and now loves it. He didn’t love the teacups the way i did, but he had just eaten quite a lot. My eldest niece remains on notice for a teacups competition someday. He liked the alien spinny ride in Toy Story Land which i also wanted more of (but we got distracted, see further below). But maybe he doesn’t quite match up to his dada’s appetite for disorientation.

• Anything that’s a train: This includes roller coasters, which he is variably fucking psyched for/scared of. He loves watching them. For a long time, roller coaster POV videos were part of our standard YouTube diet. They’re fun, even if the narrators are insufferable. But he rode the tiny Barnstormer last year, as we were pleasantly surprised that he was tall enough. We figured it’d be over quickly if he hated it, but instead he wanted more.
  
  This year, he was tall enough for Big Thunder Mountain among others. We got on fast, which was too bad because he enjoyed the hell out of the queue maze as well. With the tunnels (he loves tunnels, normally) and loud noises, it wasn’t long until he was clutching me and half-burying his head in my side, but he was still picking his head up when we went over hills. The real review was that he wanted more so we got right back on again.
  
  The funniest example of this, though, was in Toy Story Land, after we did the indoor shooting gallery ride, he was giving the Slinky Dog roller coaster (we called it “The Dog Train”) the side-eye. “I don’t want to go on the dog train.” So i assured him we didn’t have to. We ate dinner, and he kept watching it. We waited for the spinning ride and he kept watching it. We went to go on the spinning ride again and… “I want to go on the dog train.” And of course he fucking loved it. It’s a nice little ride, but there’s no dark parts or anything not to love. We rode it three times.
  

• So what doesn’t he like?
• The dark. Tunnels, one of his oldest friends, constantly betray him. He hates the Winnie-the-Pooh and Peter Pan type rides because there’s always a scary part. He didn’t like the ‘Runaway Railway’—even though it was a train, it was dark and scary in parts, and super loud. He liked ‘Pirates of the Carribean’ okay, but not the darkest, scariest parts. This was consistent with his opinion last year, too. We started with those ostensibly kid-friendly rides and they were an abject failure. Maybe some other year, but no big loss for a lot of them. Except the Seven Dwarves roller coaster, which is awesome, and he’s wrong. It’s a train, but it’s too dark and loud for him. But like i said, it’s awesome and he’s wrong.
• The noise. He hates loud noises. Ironic, considering we once thought that maybe he’d have poor hearing that runs in the family. But he hates it when the Revolution score a goal, he hates it when there’s construction equipment, he even hates it when the engines of his beloved MBTA commuter rail trains pass by with roaring diesels. So dark tunnels with booming sound effects = buried head in mama’s lap.

• Was there anything good about doing this in the coronatime? At times, it felt distinctly less crowded. At other times, it seemed entirely normal, throngs of people, nowhere to sit, no shade, too hot, and lengthy lines for meh rides. But there were certainly more times where we were able to walk right back onto rides repeatedly. And one time where they just said, if you want to stay on, stay on. The distanced lines were also kind of a good thing, especially with the toddler—you could spend more time walking than standing, for one. But you could also spend a lot of the wait time out of an enclosed queue and then have the rest of your party join you last-minute.
  
  But while in no sense did i feel like we didn’t get good value for our little escape from reality, there’s also no way that normal’s not better.
  
  Not being someone who imbibes a lot of the kool-aid, i’m not going to lament there being some lack of fucking magic or anything that ridiculous, but sure, there’s something off. The need for their employees to now police health and safety seemed to be wearing on some of them, And no one in their right mind is going to choose masks, face shields, skipped seats, and empty cars, and temperature checks. It’s not because they’re reality intruding on your fantasy or anything stupid like that, it’s just that they’re not fun and you’re there to go do fun things.

• Was it, you know, a vacation? I mean, kinda. Is that even possible with a toddler? No, of course not. He’s still gotta be wrestled into his clothes and convinced to eat even his favorite things half the time. And then there are complicated new rules to play by, and all sorts of upsets to a man whom the larger world has forced considerably more routine upon than we’d have chosen. So of course none of that’s relaxing. But for the first time in a year there was no cleaning, dishes, recycling, grocery shopping, cooking. For the first time in over a year, i told the bad project to fuck off. There was a hotel bed (technically i had already been out of town once or thrice this year and in a hotel bed, but we’re not gonna talk about why that happened). There was a pool and beers to drink outside. There was even a sit-down meal at a restaurant. A birthday party for mama with family. Dessert in place of respectable meals for a whole goddamn week. Sure that’s a vacation.

• And of course, we’re fortunate people to not just be vaccinated early, but to have the means to go spend a buttload of money on a vacation that many people save for years for, and to do so at a time when it’s not even going to turn out perfectly. But everyone’s hard has been hard, and ours was too. So we made it be over for a week. Kinda.

On things coming to an end

It’s like moving apartments, or changing cities, or switching jobs, or some other big life change. Two of them at once. One we saw coming, the other a surprise.

It’s surprising how easy the end of the coronatime has been. Or maybe not; considering that each passing day brings a lapse of something that nobody liked, a relief from restrictions and from fear, and a lessening of risk that some days felt very far away, and other days felt like it was going to get you any second.

Getting vaccinated was a surprise, and not really something i sought out, considering that, having had COVID in December, i already considered myself rather well protected from having it again. But considering that my better half works with vaccines, and works with the virus itself, there was a back door for her, and for significant others, and I got one at Gillette Stadium on a relentlessly snowy day in February.

Two weeks later, any article would have said i was pretty much impervious, but it didn’t really feel different for me. Masks on inside, masks on outside, and no real concerns about actually getting it from anybody. Few people in a huge space at work, or everyone at daycare had also already had it. Not much of a change.

But the wife had had enough of the coronatime, what with having been at work for most days of it, and, justly confident in the vaccine, booked us a damn vacation to Disneyworld as soon as she knew we’d have our shots. More on that in another post.

Before that, though, we’d started to broaden our horizons a little bit. Like we’d go for a ride on the T just because baby man loves trains more than everything. We’d still be masked up, we’d still keep distant from people, but at the same time, there was just… nothing. No worry whatsoever about huffing the exhalations of any dozen other people on the Orange Line. It was normal, and unremarkable, and there was a feeling of proximity that was a little new, but at the same time, the extent to which i’d internalized the fact that It Was Okay was nearly total.

At Easter, my wife and i got to hug our siblings. And hang out inside if it rained. Or just if we wanted to.

Weeks later, we’d repeat the same in an airport, on a plane, in a theme park. In fucking Florida.

Like i said, discussed elsewhere. But it was fine. We breathed other peoples’ air. So much of it. Some of them were probably filthy with the ‘rona. It was fine.

Cases plummeted, in the weeks after we returned. We met friends at beer gardens.

We invited them over to our house like it was no big deal. The government made it very clear that things were working, and as the weather got better, suddenly the air outside felt like something the masks were denying us, cool spring freshness that we couldn’t wait to partake of.

And while much is still being made about the etiquette of wearing one, not wearing one, and whether or not one should judge those who continue to, here were are, walking around without them. And running without them.

And sure, new systems are emerging, a mask in every pocket for when you go inside, and the instinct to still give everyone a wide berth on the sidewalk remains. But next, we hope cases continue to plummet, and next the switch is truly flipped and there are no restrictions anywhere except for those we choose. Let’s hope we’ve indeed done enough to earn it.

We didn’t forget how to be normal at all, it turns out.

Unfortunately i can’t be sure i can say the same about my job.

The way things look right now, in a month or so, a project i’ve worked on for close to three years, or, roughly baby man’s age, is going to come to a crashing halt. It’s probably never going to ship. This happens in my industry, and nobody likes it (because we like to fucking brag about our work, obviously), but it’s a risk of doing business. In this case, though, this unmentionable thing has been in development for nearly a decade and has had tens of millions of dollars invested in it, so it’s gonna sting for more than just me.

And in my case, it changed everything about my work. Instead of being a cleanup hitter of a mechanical engineer, suddenly i was a project manager who barely touched CAD, but had over a dozen engineers in three countries to push. Instead of being a problem solver, i became a problem dealer, filling up other peoples’ inboxes with shit that was just time-consuming enough that i couldn’t do it alone. I wasn’t a doer, i was a talker. Making decisions and faking authority until i got drunk with it because there was no time to equivocate. Meetings all morning, inboxes filling up before i woke up, and cleaning them out and processing them, and swatting them back out to colleagues, vendors, clients, until i went to bed.

My work-life balance was upset in ways that are hard to even remember coping with. I woke up with the baby man before 6, for some of that time, and answered emails and other messages so Europe could act on them.

Every workday i looked at the clock because it was going too fast, not because it was too slow.

When i realized in retrospect that i’d worked, but not on the most urgent thing, i was furious at myself. At night, when i sent my wife to bed, i was secretly thrilled at the prospect of how much i’d get done in the 3-4 hours before i’d make myself go to bed. For some of that time, i would go to bed at the exact time that baby man would wake up in the middle of the night and begin howling to get out of the crib. I’d kneel on the floor next to it, put my head down on the rail and console him. Sometimes i’d pass out there. Sometimes i’d realize i was talking to him about work, half asleep. I ate horrendously, and for a few fun months i gave up trimming my beard and getting my hair cut.

It’s a joke to say that you shed sweat, blood, and tears over a project, but usually only two of the three are literal. It made me cry, it made me throw things, it made me an asshole.

Things got done, other things got ‘done’, a much larger number of other things just never went away and were black holes into which effort disappeared without effect. A bureaucracy grew and flourished, nourished by the large number of people whose energies it could sap. Good technical work occurred, a thing that didn’t exist was brought to life and we built a bunch of them and they all fucking worked. It was a goddamn miracle, sure, but the expenditure of effort on all the things that had precious little to do with that kinda just left me dead inside, professionally.

The mad pace continued with few meaningful breaks from July 2019 to October 2020. Only for a few of those months did i get to do what i really thought of as my job.

And that’s just it, now that it’s over, i know i miss what my old job used to be, but i don’t know if it’s still there, nor do i know if i know how to do it anymore.

So there we are. Two bad things are going away. We hope.

Fuck off forever, COVID.
Fuck off forever, Bad Project.

Year in Review, 2020

No political commentary or any of that here, just the (limited) data and context. It was a weird year in numbers, too.

Running: 188.5 miles.
It was an uneven year for running. As you might expect, the lockdown months made it difficult to get out a lot. In March, i made an effort to go run after being relieved of watching the baby man. In April and May, as the quarantine dragged on, i did less well at this. Working from home, I needed to do more than I did, but work was unrelenting. In December i got COVID so i didn’t do much running, being sick/contagious.

Bicycling: 746 miles.
It’s difficult to make up for 18-24 days a month of 5-6 miles a day, lost for ten months of the year. After May, it was possible to go into the office, so there were a handful of days a month where i went into the office, still. Beyond that, there were periodic bicycle tours of tunnels and construction sites.

Soccer: 17 games.
6 wins, 9 losses, 2 draws.
3 shots on goal, 1 assist.
27 goals allowed, 1 own goal.
Soccer was shut down for four months. For a further two months, it should have been shut down, but I stopped playing to avoid getting the ‘rona, which I did anyway, so how smart am i? Anyway, with an 80 team league reduced to 10-12, only the hardcore good teams kept playing. And us. Honestly, i’m proud of a lot of those losses.

Commuting:
Big surprise, it barely happened for the last 3/4 of the year! The usual mix of walk to daycare, bike or run the rest disappeared in favor of sparse bicycle trips, occasional runs home. All told, there were 75 bicycle commutes, still.

Travel:
We slept in two places that weren’t home for a total of 7 days. Upon reflection, this is surely the least i’ve been away from home possibly ever, but defiintely going back to the 1980s.
We visited two other states. Florida and New Hampshire. I know, right? We flew home from the one trip we took the week before everything shut down.
We put 3,247 miles on the car the whole year. Fewer soccer games played, only one trip to Foxboro, and a serious disincentive to be more than an hour from your own bathroom. The maximum was 557 miles in July.

Entertainment:
I saw the Revs play their home opener, which they drew, disappointingly. I saw one movie in the theater, which was The Rise of Skywalker, which was also mostly disappointing, upon reflection. The upside of the baby man taking upwards of an hour to go down at night is that i get to read under his crib. When i run out of twitter, i read books. I read four new books this year. Some people who read this will find this pathetic. We got 6 Lego sets this year and built 4. 8 Duplo sets and built 7. Some we are saving. We have approximately 35 linear feet of wooden train tracks.

Twitter: 1,986 tweets.
You’d think that in an election year, never mind the unrelenting clusterfuck of 2020, that i’d tweet more than my usual pace of 150-200 a month, but it’s not true. There’s not much of a pattern here. My guess is that the most noteworthy thing i posted this year was a joke about a tribble.

The Internet:
72 Instagram posts, plus 141 days of instastories.

The Cat:
The cat has been battling something like a UTI lately. She peed outside her litter box dozens of times. Some of them were while i had COVID so i can’t count. We partially solved this by moving her litterbox into my isolation zone in the bedroom. Because what the hell, i can’t smell anything. Now, though, i have nevertheless smelled plenty of cat piss. She also puked 35 times this year, and drew my blood 8 times.

Drinking:
This year i drank 147 beers, which is really not impressive, but i have an excuse. First, is that i lost half a month to COVID. And while i did institute a policy of a work-from-home lunch beer for the heady first two weeks of lockdown, i don’t think that made up for the lack of general festivity, friends, or social occasion.

Anyway, my other excuse is that this year we tried to improve our cocktail and wine consumption. We did well at this, and will count them next year.

Food:
I ate at McDonald’s 10 times. Could be better, but it wasn’t bad. We ate 8 burritos, and got ice cream 9 times. Pathetic. Especially the last one. Completely unacceptable performance. As far as coffee is concerned, we don’t go out for it much, but it’s a 3:1 Dunks – Starbucks ratio.

Other shit:
Daycare: We went a period of 108 days without daycare starting in March. We went a further 33 days without it in December.
COVID: I got 5 tests. The last one was positive. Annette got 5, but they were all boring and negative. Baby man got only one test, which was negative, but we’re all pretty sure he has it. I isolated for 9 days in the bedroom, and the first day in the outside hallway. I caused my office to get shut down for 3 days.
Population: We started the year with three people in the house, now we have four. Somehow, she’s a grad student.
Home Renovation: 1 room painted. 1 room wallpapered. 2 light fixtures. 3 shelves. 2 miscellaneous wooden thingys. 1 piece of Ikea. 1 miniature playground. 1 rug. 5 other pieces of furniture.

Next year: It will be different, with any luck.

Last year: Ha, you caught me. Never posted it. It’s coming. Update: It’s here.
Previous years: 2018, 2017, 2016.

Because Good Is Dumb

Starting with The Empire Strikes Back and continuing to the grimdark Nolan Batman movies, the idea that ‘darker’, downbeat stories are what people want, are what are real got so pervasive that it became a joke. The end of Se7en, or Spider-Man blowing away as dust at the end of Infinity War. That shit was real, the good guys lost, and that’s how you know it’s serious.

But in real life, the good guys losing sucks. In real life, the bad guys suffering no comeuppance sucks. In real life, the consequences are not dramatic and moving and limited to costumed superheroes, they’re mundane and shitty and are disproportionately heaped on people who can’t afford them.

On a lot of days in this dismal fucking year, it sure feels like the falling action of one of those middle movies, the build to the cliffhanger that gets you amped up for the years-away denouement of the trilogy by imperiling your favorites in the moment. There are too many enemy fighters, the walls have been breached, a key hero has lost their nerve or even turned heel. On a lot of days the news, social media, the doomscroll as a whole just make it feel like defeat is assured.

Terrible things keep happening. Our government is doing a lot of them intentionally.

Conspiracists are salivating at the prospect of a race war in the streets, and the occupant of the White House on down to trigger-happy, racist, bully police soak in the validation of their habitual abuse of minorities. The shining light of so many people righteously protesting is ignored, and unfortunately the pretty justified rioting plays right into their hands. There are tanks on the streets, secret police, government abductions and executions. All of this is covered in detail in the press and it doesn’t matter.

Public health malpractice is costing tens of thousands of lives, and they’ve so successfully tied it to identity that people who might be most vulnerable to COVID are the ones howling in protest of measures that might save them from it. The red-faced old white men and retired women braying about how their freedoms are being trampled and injecting themselves with bleach. Every time some wave of stupid is beaten back he just invents a new one. Old people are getting sick, young people are getting sick, governments won’t shut down, or ones that do won’t pay people not to work, or businesses to stay open. My city’s hollowing out and so is yours. It’s going to be a decade before things come back to where they were a year ago. It may get worse before it gets better. It may cost anyone like you or me something even more if we’re unlucky. Nothing is being done other than an inevitable fake dog and pony about a vaccine that isn’t done yet that might be a just-good-enough fake to get him reelected.

And let’s not forget the election itself. Twenty years of Republicans engineering victories from elections they deserve to lose by denying a say to people they don’t like and scaring just enough people into voting for their worst impulses. Their coalition is stagnant, fetid, aging, dying, and being peeled away, albeit too slowly by the very things i’m describing. But they’re still going to win. Maybe everywhere. This is probably what’s most frustrating. They cheat faster, better, and harder than people who don’t cheat can fight. People who don’t cheat are fundamentally ill-equipped with the imagination to conceive of all the ways you can cheat. But cheat they will, from doctored videos pumped into people’s Facebook feeds to scary men at polls to drive people away, to Russians tampering with the totals. To our founding fathers and the goddamn Electoral College and the fact that somehow Wyoming gets to tell Massachusetts what to do in life.

The odds are stacked against us. We are too naive to stop cheating. We’re too weak to actually beat COVID as thoroughly as we must. We’re not anti-racist enough to see how these things are affecting people who aren’t us. We’re too lazy or beaten down or tethered to jobs and children to actually fill the streets when outrages occur; maybe nothing would get us out there, and maybe we’ll find out soon when the ultimate outrage occurs. It may happen that he steals the Presidency, or refuses to leave office, or encourages ‘our’ jackbooted cops to billy-club us into submission, and it may be that we can do nothing about it. But perhaps more likely, we will do nothing about it.

In short, the movie reference that applies is from Spaceballs: “Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”

Definitive “Sesame Street” Power Rankings

99. Any recurring character in an animated segment

98. Baby Bear: That voice is just the worst thing. The worst thing.

97. Rudy: Seemingly the heir to Baby Bear’s annoying voice, Grover’s tendency to screw up, and Telly’s stubbornness all in one. Rudy is not endearing.

96. Rocky (Zoe’s pet rock): Rocky makes Zoe a terrible character whenever he’s around, which is a lot, actually.

95. Mr. Noodle and all other Noodles: There’s a Tiger King style documentary to be made about the world of Noodles and i can’t wait to see it.

94. Elmo taking on different forms in Elmo’s World: These can be downright terrifying and they sometimes make my son cry.

93: Elmo’s World Guests: Pretty much only have one of two old-time Noo Yawk accents.

…

88. Elmo’s Dad: It pains me to note that Elmo’s Dad is supposed to be an engineer. He’s also an obvious attempt to construct a boomer’s idea of a Cool Dad. He has a soul patch and plays a saxophone in a classic rock band. FFS.

87. The Crumb: Mid-20teens Sesame Street had a lot of expensively animated missteps. This is one of them.

86. Velvet: Elmo the Musical was never aimed at me. I do not condone musical theater. Velvet is annoying, even correcting for that admitted bias.

…

77. Prairie Dawn: Mostly down here for telling Abby she could only dress up as a princess, but honestly it’s the most she had to do for years.

76. Dorothy: You’re killing Elmo’s World, Dorothy. It grinds to a halt every time you’re on the screen.

75. Grouchetta

74. Giant Elephant Guy: Exceptionally annoying voice, made up for by being very obvioulsy a dude in a suit, which is a little funny.

73. Stinky the Plant

…

A bunch of others that don’t really register.

…

25. Bert: Poor Bert. He’s redeemed some by his pure love for pigeons.

24. Barkley

23. Herry Monster

22. Guy Smiley

21. Baby Natasha

20. Gonger: Cookie Monster and Gonger’s food truck is underappreciated. A little bit of talking about following directions, a little bit of how-it’s-made film, and occasionally they’re just kinda sneaky funny.

19. Julia

18. The yip yip aliens: They lose major points for their implication in this season’s dreadful Number of the Day song.

17. Ovejita:

16. Any and all penguins

15. Murray Monster: One of the few new characters that does a good job of doing old Sesame Street things, notably, muppets interacting with random people on the street and going and learning things about new places.

14. Snuffy

13. Any and all chickens: The chickens are never not funny.

12. Telly Monster: Telly can be annoying, but only because he tries so very hard.

11. Slimey

10. Elmo: You’ve gotta give him some credit for not making you absolutely want to murder him, considering his ubiquity. That being said, cocky “yeah baby” Elmo is the worst and belongs at the other end of this list.

9. Abby: Once they toned down the “magic things are magic!” introductory interactions with Abby, she became a lot more likable, despite her overuse. Animated Abbys do not count here, they mostly suck.

8. Rosita: Rosita seems fun in general and ideally she would be around more.

7. The Count: His love of counting is so pure.

6. Two-Headed Monster: They’re funny and i don’t have more of a justification than that.

5. Ernie: As a kid, I identified with Ernie. Ernie was fun. Bert was not. I’m sure it’s tough to be a Bert in this world, but it was never something i could wrap my brain around.

4. Big Bird: Big Bird is nice. He’s the embodiment of nice. If we could have Big Bird be our ambassador for our first contact with aliens, i think he, Mr. Rogers, and Tom Hanks would handle that job just fine.

3. Oscar: is my wife’s favorite. A true Gen X’er’s muppet.

2. Grover: Not Super Grover, importantly, and especially not “Super Grover 2.0”. Real Grover is cheerfully foolish and curious and sure of himself before he makes peace with his ignorance. Super Grover 2.0 is a boring buffoon.

1. Cookie Monster: Cookie Monster is the rampaging id we all want to be in our lives. Not me though, i’m like that all the time and people still like me.