liv | Year in review 2019 (Reply)

As many of my friends are reporting, 2019 has been an excellent year personally against a background of terrifyingly awful politics. I've spent far too much of it in a mindset of, we might or might not leave the EU in a few weeks, and nobody has any idea how that will work. And, surprise, I still feel like that as the year closes. I started the year hoping to emigrate to escape from the politics, but that didn't work out.

At the same time, I've completed a successful and very positive short term project at work, taken a couple of months (not entirely intentional) break, and started a new job I'm really excited about. I've remained in stable, happy, long-term relationships of 12 years, 10 years and 5 years. And I never see enough of my friends but there have been some great moments of connection. There has been some tension over our different reactions to terrible politics, but an amazing solidity underneath that. I've done enough learning new stuff to keep me really happy. I like where I am Jewishly, just the right level of community commitment, connected and active but not overwhelmed.

Significant events

The first half of the year was dominated by my partner's amazing road trip. Being apart for so long was difficult, but it was really brilliant to be able to support her in visiting every country in the EU and several more besides.
I successfully completed a major educational research and innovation project in February, and then had a glorious half year extension when I got to pursue and develop my academic interests and build on the skills and institutional knowledge from the main phase of the project.
There was a period around July-August when it felt like everything was in crisis, and I just felt really lucky that this fell towards the end of my job contract. In particular, my father-in-law died suddenly. I was there with jack and his mother for the last days, and a few weeks later helped to run the funeral. I found I have a lot of what's referred to as "resilience" but is actually a sufficiently comfortable and secure life that there is spare capacity to deal with this sort of bolt from the blue.
I lead a seminar on the Hagaddah. I took two excellent online courses with the Leo Baeck college, one on Exodus with R's Kahn-Harris and Ashworth-Stein, and one on Maimonides with R' Solomon. I sort of half completed a more in depth online course with the Woolf Institute about Jewish, Christian and Muslim relations in Europe. I really want to go back and at least learn the material even if I've got somewhat behind the group discussions. I also went into my third year teaching cheder, and started an online pre-bar mitzvah Hebrew class which Judith has been joining in with.
In October, I started the best job ever, and I'm really loving it.

Places:

Most of my travel this year was going out to see

ghoti_mhic_uait, so I had a week in Lyon, a long weekend in Leipzig, with associated trans-continental trains, and a weekend in Stockholm which I never ended up writing up as it was interrupted by my FIL's final illness. I didn't take many just the two of us holidays with

jack, but we did have a spa weekend in Suffolk and a random city break in Galway arranged around a job interview. Plus I had a few days of Oxford nostalgia with

pseudomonas,

hatam_soferet and her husband and daughter; and a weekend in ~~space~~ Leicester with

cjwatson for our fifth anniversary.

Books: Similar to last year, I read about 15 books (including short story collections and long fanfics). Most of them were during the period I spent a lot of hours travelling across Europe. Most memorable were:

A skinful of shadows by Frances Hardinge
Moonwise by Greer Ilene Gilman
The cut out girl by Bart van Es (CN: Nazi Holocaust detail)
Declare by Tim Powers
Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma, Good Omens (TV series) fic by nnm.

Music:

Inkkubus Sukkubus and New Model Army live at WGT
A very good choral concert in King's College chapel with cjwatson, including Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms which blew my mind.
De Profundis performing Palestrina's Sicut lilium Mass based on the Song of Songs, with ghoti_mhic_uait in Trinity College chapel.
Cambridge University Recorder Ensemble doing a whistlestop tour of the history of recorder music from Mediaeval Europe and pre-Columbian America to contemporary pieces, with Judith.

Games:

Scythe. Unquestionably the board game of the year for me and jack. We've slowed down a bit from playing it at every possible opportunity, but we've played all the way through the Rise of Fenris campaign twice as well as playing the base game more times than I can count.
Wingspan. Predictable, yes, but it's so lovely!
Codenames. The most consistent family game we've played this year, different variants, but we keep coming back to it.
Everdell. I bought this for a wood-themed fifth anniversary present for ghoti_mhic_uait, so it's only been in our polycule meta-collection for a couple of months, but it's just delightful, both pretty and playable
Monster Legends. This is a terrible microtransaction-ridden clicky phone game that I started playing in spring mainly to indulge Andreas. But somehow it's held my attention for most of the year. It's creative, it scales well as you level up, even though it's exploitative it's also fair: all the random stuff is transparent with meaningful odds, and you can succeed without having to put money in the virtual slot.