Year in review 2021

Well, nothing really happened this year, did it? I made 40 posts to DW, which I think is my lowest total ever by some margin and a lot of those were just administrivia. I have almost no essays I'm sufficiently proud of to want to call attention to them again.

You might have thought that with a full year stuck at home I would have done loads of reading, gaming and other media, but in practice, no, I'm going to end up skipping most of my usual end-of-year media categories.

A year ago I summarized:

I've stayed healthy as have all my close people. I've really enjoyed my job, fortunately with employers who've been entirely supportive of working from home. As part of that I've provided online training to about 70,000 people. I have felt really connected via various unsatisfying forms of technology, but I'm really grateful for my friends and especially my Jewish community. Isolating with jack has been brilliant. He is the most wonderful pandemic partner I could have asked for.

And pretty much all of those things are still true for 2021. Staying home has been a bit easier, because at least since March there have been few if any legal restrictions on social mixing, and we have enough information about transmission mechanisms that I'm happy to deem outdoor socializing safe, as well as take a few calculated risks when case rates are relatively lower. And I'm vaccinated as of summer and boosted as of last week, so that helps at least somewhat, even if not as much of an escape route out of the pandemic as I'd hoped.

So, significant events:

• I got vaccinated against Covid and was briefly optimistic.
• My OSOs bought a big house in the country and acquired several chickens, ferrets and a most excitingly, a puppy. Also a piano.
• I had a week's holiday with jack in Norfolk, including hearing a seal chorus and seeing a crowd of my friends in person.
• My work expanded from creating a bunch of massive, but rather specialist, online courses, to include a huge international project about pandemic response training.
• I took an actual trip, on an actual train, to an actual place.

( somewhat abbreviated other summary )

Previous versions [2004] [2005] [2006] [2007] [2008] [2009] [2010] [2011] [2012] [2013] [2014] [2017] [2018] [2019] [2020]