Category: diary Page 5 of 17

Reporting live from the edge of 2021

Shouldn’t it be enough that I bothered making a list of resolutions to begin with?


For the last several years, I’ve been taking stock of how well I kept my New Year’s Resolutions–a typewritten list stuck to the fridge with a magnet that in the last couple years haunts me more than anything.

2020’s list became laughably out of sorts as soon as we dove headfirst into the cesspool that became the pandemic. Lesson learned. I created 2021’s list with global disruption in mind–but I somehow failed to account for the personal disruptions that would come along this year.

Which is to say, another year gone, another list of resolutions left unresolved. At some point it might be worth pondering why I do this and whether I should keep doing it. And conveniently, I’ve already packed my typewriter. Makes it easier to avoid having a neat little list ready to go tomorrow morning.

Even so, there’s something worthy about having goals, even if you don’t meet them all. We all need something to aim for, and even if we don’t cross the threshold of accomplishment, we’ve at least moved forward.

I dialed back my typical list of 10 resolutions and came up with seven. Here’s my report from the last day of the year.

Google-dipity


Google-dipity: N – the act of stumbling across something very cool on Google Maps while wasting time on the internet.

https://goo.gl/maps/aQPGMmJ4s1KKHffs9

Holy City


Somewhere in the finite stretches of our lives, we crossed an invisible threshold and passed into the stage in which we travel with one of our pets. I realized this in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where I stood with our seven-pound chi-weenie on a leash, watching the drive-thru line snake slowly by,

The occasion: a quickly-planned weekend trip to Charleston, one that happened to coincide with Kel’s birthday, but one that was mostly made possible by the clearance of normal weekend events. Late Thursday evening I decided to cash out a small bevy of credit card points and book a hotel room. I hadn’t been to Charleston in years; it had been even longer for Kel and would be the kids’ first trip.

Rapidly-planned trips require an odd sort of coordination. We weren’t going to be there long–checking in Friday evening, taking advantage of everything we could Saturday and Sunday morning, then planning to get home in time to take care of chores and the other business readying for the week ahead. We ought to only plan to do three or four things, tops. We decided we owed it to the kids to book a hotel with an indoor pool. We planned to visit the USS Yorktown, a WWII-era aircraft carrier permanently parked on display. I figured we would do a very short tour of Charleston’s historic downtown (you know, show the kids a place where George Washington slept). We would, no doubt, end up on the beach for a walk.

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