Year in review 2021

[liv]

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.

Reading In 2020 I read 2 books total. In 2021 a bit more than that, but still nothing like the 50-ish I used to get through in a typical year. They were:

• A deadly education, by Naomi Novik
• Becoming Eve, by Abby Chava Stein
• Aru Shah and the Song of Death by Roshani Chokshi
• A desolation called peace by Arkady Martine
• The book of Judith from the Apocrypha
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

So, 6 and a half books (I'm in the middle of City of Brass by SA Chakraborty and will likely finish it by the end of the year). One of them YA, and one of them a short-ish religious text.

Games

• Still a fair bit of Gloomhaven
• Brand new game, inspired gift by ghoti_mhic_uait: Llamaland
• Slay the spire, a really cool little digital deck builder. I'm getting to the point where my main computer is too old to really run modern games, but StS is turn-based so it doesn't matter too much if it's a bit laggy.

Other than that I've been going more for variety than depth, OSOs now have proper games shelves in their new house with all their games visible and we have been rediscovering and replaying a fair bit. And I have played little bits of a bunch of different Steam and Switch and Android games, nothing really stand-out, just staving off pandemic boredom really.

Media

• We are Lady Parts (TV series) was absolutely the high point of 2021 in any medium.
• National Theatre production of Sophocles' Antigone (livecast theatre)
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Cartoon series).
• About three quarters of Ted Lasso S2 (TV series).
• Star Wars: Rogue One (feature film) which I have declared a chanukah movie so I had a watch party of it with cjwatson and the middle children during the festival.
• Alexander Scriabin: Prelude Op 11 # 9 in E major (piano music), which I decided to pick as my first item to relearn now that I have access to a piano again. It's definitely coming together but since said piano access is sporadic and since I haven't really played in a quarter century, I won't say I can play it yet. But trying to regain my skills is making me happy.

Also we watched two more films from our World Film project: Cuddle Weather (2019) from the Philippines, and The Yacoubian Building (2006) from Egypt, which I haven't got round to reviewing. We have not succeeded in finding a film from Ethiopia that is available to us, so if we do manage to go back to this project the next country on our list is Vietnam.

Places Apart from staying home, we've mostly been venturing out to the Norfolk coast. I've also spent lots of time in the little village near Ely where my OSOs now live, and a little in my parents' home village to the south of Cambridge. I made one trip to SW Wales, and a few to Northamptonshire to meet up with jack's Mum. Other than that I haven't been anywhere, a whole year of never setting foot in London, never visiting 'my' community in Stoke, let alone anywhere more exotic.

My posts

• Sermon: Vayechi [Jewish]
• IWD2021: Academic wives [academia, rant]
• Renewal [Jewish]
• My Queer Jewish history [personal]

Borrowing this category from a friend's locked post:
End of year name and pronouns update My given name and the one I use in person is Rachel. I am not a Rach or a Rachie; if you must abbreviate my name I can cope with Rae or Rachele, but I prefer Rachel.

In formal contexts my title is Dr B, the B standing for the same surname I inherited from my father. If I can't use my academic title then I'm Miss B for preference, otherwise Ms B or Mx B, I'm not Mrs B nor Mrs V[husband's surname].

After nearly 19 years of using it online, Liv feels like just as much my name as Rachel. It isn't short for Olivia or anything else, it's just Liv.

My pronoun is she/her, which hasn't changed since my birth assignment. I have a weird itchiness around personally being referred to as 'they', though I'm completely fine with using that pronoun for others. I am fine with gender neutral neopronouns, slight preference for zie/hir. I also like the Swedish gender neutral pronoun hen. It doesn't entirely conjugate, so hen/hen/hens, but if hen/henom/hens feels more comfortable, eh, I'm a non-native speaker and not deeply embroiled in the usage debates.

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

Comments

[altamira16]

They acquired ferrets?! Surely, their hands are full.

[liv]

Ferrets + toddler is a surprisingly good combination! They arrived just before her first birthday and she loves them with all her tiny heart. They're super-tolerant of being handled, and also really good fun because when they're awake they're always scampering around and leaping and playing. Basically they're the best teddy-bear ever. The only real issue is that 18-month-old sometimes likes to let her 'babies' out of their hutch, which is bad because she isn't fast enough to stop them from running away, so she needs to be supervised to prevent that.

Ferrets + puppy is less ideal; the dog sometimes wants to hunt them so they do have to be kept apart. Puppy + toddler is probably the most tricky to manage, because they do really love each other but puppy is quite a bit heavier and stronger and sometimes her enthusiastic affection for the little one results in the human baby getting knocked over or licked more than she really enjoys.