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.