2020 in review

Two weeks in to 2021, I'm finally ready to publish my summary of the infamous year 2020.  

In addition to the global spread of COVID-19, 2020 was a year with a lot of horrible things:  racial injustice, waking up to systemic racism (which isn't new but our awareness increased uncomfortably), breathtaking political divisiveness that cost lives, a horrible president and then air that wasn't safe to breath, robbing us of the great outdoors on top of everything else.  In December there was evening a shooting within a block of our house, at 5:45 pm.

It was hard enough, even though we know so many people experienced much more hardship.  Our families have been healthy, even if not perfectly so.   We had financial stability and each other.   Dd had his well-run, normal, social daycare.  D got to go to summer camps, learned to read fluently and did better in online school than many kids, from what I gather.

Back when we called COVID-19 "coronavirus" and thought it was a horrible yet dramatic phase, rather than an earthshattering upheaval of life all over the whole world, I wrote two posts about our experience in March and April.   

School and Work

I worked full time all year, which is saying something.   In the six-and-a-half years we've been parents, I've constantly measured the work-life balance of our friends, not in a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses way, but rather in a genuine search for peer role models.  We do not know many couples where both people work full time and if we do, we're all too busy to keep up a friendship very well (pre-pandemic, when we saw friends....).   It's hard and this year we missed a lot of the help we've been so fortunate to get from our parents.

D was still able to go to 5 weeks of the camps we signed up for since they were already outdoors.  I get a good laugh when I recall my stress during the competitive registration process for various camps that started in January.  I was actually worried that there was a week in August where we had not found a camp we wanted to send him to.  This year we had 10 weeks of normalcy and 5 weeks of summer camp, which means he was home with us for 37 weeks.  

As mentioned, D's reading has been one of the best parts of the year.   In January he was reading Bob books and in December he was reading Calvin and Hobbes, Clementine and pretty much any other chapter book that strikes his interest and matches his maturity (e.g. not too scary).   In the spring, we got almost nothing from his kindergarten teacher except for the district's subscription to an online practice website, but first grade has been pretty well organized and he does get something out of it.   We've also bought workbooks and made up a lot of lessons of our own.   

Dd has been in daycare except for the periods shown in green below on the graph of King County positive cases per day.  The times he was not in daycare were spring shut down and the holiday period where we isolated and then bubbled up with my parents.

Jack and I continued with our same employers and both of our industries survived the economic fallout of this year.   Jack designed his first apartment building.  I worked on smart TVs most of the time.

Travel

It's a good thing Washington is a great place to live and explore because we haven't left the state since we went to the Azores in February 2019.   We had plans to go to San Francisco and Vancouver, Canada, but obviously those fell through.

• San Francisco in April
• camping over the Fourth of July at Seaquest State Park where we went on one of the best hikes of the year, on a beautiful ridge with good weather, good morale, wild strawberries and hardly any other people.

• July AirBnB in Cinebar (near Mt. St. Helens) with friends (in lieu of Vancouver Island, Canada, where we weren't allowed to travel)

• AirBnb fail in Sammamish in late August.   We left an hour after we arrived and just went back home.  Ugh.
• Yurt at Grayland Beach State Park with my sister and brother-in-law over Labor Day weekend
• Camping on the beach at Blake Island, with my parents on their boat
• Thanksgiving with just the four of us at Wallace Falls State Park

Friends and Family

• babies born: Emily to R&A,  Anna to P&K, Nolan to K&C and several younger siblings for Dd's PEPS friends (Victoria, Beckham and Kai)
• weddings: two were postponed (one for real, one just the party)
• surgeries: my mom had a second collarbone surgery in January and Gary had a follow up surgery in June
• We actually did have two big family Christmas celebrations in 2020, but they were in January, to make up for the regular celebrations we postponed for Desmond's hand foot and mouth disease and Gary's surgery in December 2019.
• Starting in about June we gathered with our parents and siblings outdoors, meeting at parks and beaches and sharing a few meals in the backyard (Jack's parents') or open garage (my parents').
• Here is my sister's 40th birthday celebration

• For both kids' birthdays, we went up to Liberty. (Dd turned 2)
• December was wonderfully different.  We took Dd out of daycare before Thanksgiving and made a covid bubble with my parents from Dec 6 through Jan 2.   They babysat three times a week and we worked late and took PTO to cover two work days with Dd.  The kids got more attention and we all got to catch up.
• Jack's brother took up hiking this year getting out much more than we did.   In August we hiked Heather Lake with him in weather that is more reminiscent of October or November.

• Aside from family we saw our friends Teri and Daniel (and kids) and Read and Anne (and kids) the most as well as a few friends from daycare who we felt a bit more free with because the kids were already in the same circle of contacts at school.  We even made a bit of a bubble with Teri and Daniel (agreeing to be "exclusive" about being indoors without masks with them), which felt wonderfully normal.   Halloween ended up being a highlight of the year since we carved pumpkins with Read and Anne and had a dinner and haunted house with Teri and Daniel.

• On a sadder note, two of my colleagues died suddenly this year.  In the way of the workplace, I'll never know what exactly happened, and the final reality is the same in any case.   The first was a woman in her sixties, named Yoshiko, who I worked with often for 6-7 years, though I only met her one time in person.  The second was a man, named James, from the Seattle office, who was probably in his early forties, who I used to chat with in the kitchen back when we all went in to the office.

Home

• 2020 outdoor projects
• 2020 indoor house projects
• Being home so much did make it easier to have D help with chores.   He sets the table and unloads the dishwasher regularly, though he sometime puts more effort in to trying to get Dd to do the task than it would take to just do whatever it is.   He also sorts his clothes from Dd's and put his away.  Unless we're really behind at bedtime, he scoops the litter boxes too!  Dd likes to sweep and start the roomba.

• The roof and the boîte got lots of use this year.  We played and ate on the roof more than in years past, partly because it is much less scary to be up there with Dd than it was last year.  Here we are eating dinner with my new roof cart and playing in the snow that caught us completely by surprise one evening in December.

Recreation and Sports

• It was a pretty good year for biking and we are well-equipped now for the next few years.  Most of our rides were from home because we didn't have a functional bike rack for four months: zip-strips-are-holding-us-back
• We got an elliptical in June, which has been a life saver.  You don't have to wear a mask, a shirt, or headphones while using it and it feels safe when it's dark or there is a month of horrible air quality (we also have air filters in some rooms for "wildfire season" ).   An added bonus was the enormous box it came in.
• Jack ran outdoors some, though it often felt too crowded, and adapted to using the rings we've had for a couple of years in the entryway and kettle bells, rather than weights.  Bodyweight is plenty.
• D got to practice soccer with some of his team for one hour a week, starting in the fall, which has been fabulous.
• D and Jack went snowboarding a few times and Jack even went snowboarding with different friends twice before everything changed.
• t-ball
• baseball, but Jack did still have a bunch of league meetings and orchestrated the purchase of new uniforms for his whole team, which are now in our basement.
• One of the things I worried about pre-pandemic was teaching D to swim and I have spent an embarrassing amount of time researching lessons and pools.   At the beginning of the year we intentionally gave up on organized group lessons and made a point of making time for me and D to get to the limited hours of our local pool.  He was making some real progress and I can't wait to get back to teaching him AND swimming laps myself.   It feels like Dd has barely ever been in a pool in his short life.
• After reading about the toxic algae in Lake WA this summer (because 2020), I noticed one spot on the SE side of Mercer Island that had a measurement for safe water quality while most of the lake looked bad.   Clarke Beach Park is one of the best places I've ever been swimming in Lake Washington!  In addition to not having toxic algae this summer, it has a great protected area for kids and a bigger area for better swimmers and it also has afternoon shade, since the island slopes down to the beach.   
• We did a lot of walking and playing in our neighborhood, which has some real advantages like getting home in time for lunch and a good nap.
• D and I also did some Cosmic Kids yoga on YouTube which is cheesy, but also fun

Reading, Watching, Thinking

• The Lemonade War, is the first and best book of a series we read to D.   A sister and brother run competing lemonade stands and it includes insightful discussion of their feelings and quite a bit of arithmetic.  We also found the Clementine series to be quite fun.
• D watched Wild Kratts more than anything else.
• The last time we were in a big crowd was when D and I joined my sister to watch the hilarious Cat Video Fest compilation with a full house in lower Queen Anne.  It's hard to believe that was less than a year ago.
• Jack and I laughed pretty hard at the movies Knives Out and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
• Dd and I made it through most of a Music Together session in early 2020.  We'd already signed up for the next session, which was virtual and didn't really work for him.
• I read some more of the Outlander series, and for the first time had a paper copy of one of the books while waiting for the eBook hold.  It was on super thin paper with small font that I just couldn't figure out how to adjust!  Also there there were no page breaks for chapters and it practically hurt my wrists.   Somehow Dd had no problem with his large book.

• Together Jack and I had fun reading and then watching the Robert Galbraith detective series (by JK Rowling).
• Eye opening fiction I read included: American Dirt, The Hate U Give, and Out of My Mind
• Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson about racism in the judicial system was heart wrenching.   Talking to Strangers by Malcom Gladwell was really interesting.   I like audio books for practical reasons but both of these were made more powerful by being read by the authors.
• I even read (listened to) Little Women for the first time.
• We read the first Harry Potter book to D just after kindergarten ended (such as it was) and we all had a lot of fun with it until the confrontation with Voldermort at the end.  Book two will happen when it happens.
• In January, my mom, D and I went to the MLK Day march.  It was my first march ever.

Food

• It was the year of the salad kit.  With a little extra effort the four of us can eat a Costco sized salad kit in one meal and I don't even care what is in the dressing.
• We also made a lot of pizza 2-3 times a month and got a lot better at it.
• I found the perfect guilt free chocolate, by alter eco, which I first tried through our Imperfect Foods box, which I also recommend.  The chocolate is super-dark, organic and vegan and it is not exploiting workers or the environment.   I'm not saying I've managed to cut out other kinds of chocolate but it's a start.  A lot of chocolate is grown with horrible labor practices (including child labor) and unstainable agricultural methods.  

• During the spring lockdown D and I picked a bunch of dandelions for an ill-conceived project.  It inspired us to cook up some greens.  As prepared with balsamic and raisins, they were not great, but it's cool to know they are edible and, in fact, used to be cultivated.

Health

• The biggest thing, at least for half the family, was the end of nursing Dd.  It was a little hard for me to stop what with the pandemic, but once I finally made up my mind, we all adjusted fine.
• We definitely had fewer small viruses, though Dd brought home a cold in September that resulted in me having a pretty bad cough for over three weeks in September and October.  By the time I got a COVID test, things were quite well organized and not yet inundated by the third wave.

• The kids both had molluscum (harmless but annoying skin virus) that we ended up treating with lots and lots of duct for most of the year.  I think it's all gone now.
• I tried a supplement called Jubilance which I had been looking forward to for a few years, but put off until after I was done breast feeding.   It claims to reduce emotional PMS.  It actually did for me, but it also gave me regular headaches, so after the third cycle with headache days I am finished with it.
• One more 2020-style event of 2020 was that Dd got a tick bite on D's 6th birthday.  We didn't find it until the next day and I only saw it because he had such a small amount of fine, blond hair.   Therefore, I read about ticks a lot and will need to keep reminding myself that just because we didn't have them around here when I was a kid, doesn't mean they are not here now.   Some of them do carry diseases, even in the Seattle city limits.  

Ok, that's all she wrote.   May 2021 be healthy, peaceful and rewarding.

MOMA careers

A few months ago Jack's mom and stepdad gave us a box of kids' books from their house to sort through.   One thing we found was his "Fun With Architecture" stamp set from the Museum of Modern Art that foreshadowed his career as an architect.  How funny!

But wait, there's more.   I still have the "Fun With Hieroglphs" stamp set from ...... the Museum of Modern Art that I was given when I was about 10.   The path from Hieroglphs to linguistics is pretty clear, although I didn't really understand what linguistics was until I was 19.

Choosing gifts from the MOMA gift shop should be done lightly, now that we have scientific proof of their potency.   

 

2020 outdoor projects

Following up on the garden post I did in April, the corner where our parking strip touches the alley saw a lot of action this year.  First, trucks including garbage trucks, drove over it a bunch and made it muddy.  I got the biggest rocks I could manage off of craiglist and put them there.   Someone took them.  Then the street and the alley were torn up over the course of several months and the parking strip was part of the staging area.   Several smaller plants were destroyed, but our trees made it through and they did replace a section of our sidewalk that was in bad shape, saving us the expense and hassle in the future.    

February - my short-lived rocks in the mud

May - pouring our new sidewalk

May - they definitely re-paved some sections more than once

June - four months in and still going strong

September - the rosemary we transplanted from the roof is happy, along with some yarrow and wildflowers

November - I moved the small pavers to the curb and put in some much bigger and more useful pavers

The road and alley work was prime entertainment during the first covid lockdown, when Dd was out of daycare and most everything else was paused.  They put data cables in our block of the alley and the block to the north.  In March and April the work was shockingly close to our house, but nothing was damaged.

I think something they did broke the storm drain just outside our house.   I know that the pipe that goes under our transplanted rosemary bush is ancient and broken, but I can't be sure the drain worked or the pipe wasn't broken before all this work.   In any case, the drain just overflows and the water runs down our sidewalk, rather than draining under our trees and rosemary busy and out in to the street.   If we have prolonged ice and snowmelt there might be a problem.  

So far in this post I've mostly described work we observed, but we did do a few more outdoor projects ourselves.

• On the roof Jack modified the planters so that the two roof drains are easily accessible for cleaning.
• As a birthday present to myself, we bought a box leaf azara tree (evergreen, fragrant flowers) and a 170 gallon trough planter and put in on the ledge in the boîte.   It was hard to plant and it had terrible transplant shock.  After almost all of the leaves turned black and fell off, there is some new growth and I think it will live.   Lesson learned.

• In November and December we finally took the plunge to cut the sports net we have in the boîte, which allowed us to attach it to the fence on the north and south sides of the boîte.  This gives us about 75% more play area and makes it way easier to get bikes in and out.   
• After three Christmases with our last tree "Lefty Right Northtip", we bought a new Black Hills Spruce in September and brought him in for two weeks for Christmas, successfully preventing him from experiencing a false spring.   

• Other new roof plants were: sage, thyme, a new lavender (lavandula angustifolia), a drwarf Alberta spruce, two low pink flowering plants (Dianthus Gratianopolitanus) and a yellow flowering plant whose name I have already lost.

The blueberries were a flop that flowered but did not fruit (hence the little bluegold bush we added to befriend the existing high country bush).

I'm not sure why, but I pruned the raspberries back last winter, so they spent all summer growing and only considered making berries in the late fall, when it was too late.   This winter I didn't cut them back at all.

We had good luck with our carrots and the fragrant jasmine plant continues to be one of our most pleasing roof plants, blooming several times.

Roof gardening continues to be a learning experience.  I've found that it is too sunny for most greens on our roof in the summer because they bolt immediately.  Parsley, on the other hand is self-seeding and growing even in January.

2020 indoor house projects

I find this review of all the home improvement tasks we did really satisfying.  So many are things that no one besides us would ever notice, especially in a year where hardly anyone else has been inside our house....     

• We finished the stair shelf by putting up more cabinet doors and pretty paper backing on some more of the cubbies.

• Jack put smart switches on the porch light (so it goes on when it gets dark) and on the entry way chandelier (so it goes off after 10 minutes).  They work 85% of the time, which is great, but also is why I won't be getting "smart" door locks or anything critical yet.
• Back in the summer of 2016 we hastily ordered and assembled the kids' IKEA closet systems in, just before we moved in.  Both rooms needed a few more shelves to maximize the use of the space, but we waited long enough that IKEA had discontinued the line.  Luckily we managed to find the few shelves and parts we needed on eBay.  Especially now that they are filled out, I'm quite happy with the alcove + closet system + curtain approach we have.   As the kids grow, we can re-arrange the parts to allow for more hanging space and we can replace the curtain fabric (which I sewed when we lived in Boston) if anyone starts to care about how their room looks.  In the small bedrooms, closet doors would just get in the way.

• On the roof door, Jack installed a door closer, which was more complicated project than anticipated, requiring a lot of fiddling and replacement parts due to the thickness of the wall and the dyslexic instructions.  He stuck with it and now it works, making the door not slam up on the windy roof and holding holding it open when it is pushed open all the way.   Letting hot air out of the roof door is key for making the third floor more comfortable.  We can stop wearing out bungie cords now.

• We washed all the windows and tried out some new equipment and methods.      
• We put up some more electric blinds on the north wall of the second and third floor (blinds and leaking windows saga).
  

• We patched and painted the walls for the first time.  Some look okay and others are quite obvious because the paint looks different.   I don't know the trick yet.  I think after four years (and the window issues) I have come to terms with the fact that there isn't really a honeymoon period where a new house is maintenance free.  Since this is our first house, there are tons of small maintenance tasks we've just never done before.   
• In December we pulled out the manual for our water heater and cleaned the thimble sized filter that pumps water in to the water heater compartment.  It gratifyingly improved our shower situation from cold-scalding-icy-icy-icy to cold-scalding-warm.   There are more issues to work out here, but it's a big improvement.   
• On level two we still have some electrical weirdness.  When Jack's computer is on, and the bathroom vanity light is on, and the printer runs, the circut shorts..... or something like that.  Jack replaced the thing-a-ma-bob in one of the vanity lights and that seemed to help.   We removed the vanity lights for a couple of weeks also, to test.   One got broken while it was off the wall, so we ended up replacing both with a cheaper, similar looking version, which at least took less than half an hour (with both of us) to rewire.   I *think* it's all working now, but when the printer runs the office lights do flicker.

I'm including organization here too because it is so satisfying, and requires time and effort also. 

• We bought an enormous new heavy-duty shelf for the north part of the basement, which is a big improvement
• I organized arts and craft supplies in a big cabinet by the dining table, instead of on the stair shelf.  So far D has been appreciative and tried to keep it nice.  D draws less than a lot of kids but being home for almost the whole year has definitely made us do more crafts at home.
• We switched our ugly bathroom shelf to the entry way, where it is slightly more functional, and brought the cabinet from the entry to the bathroom, where it is at least super well organized.  Bonus points were awarded for spending $0 on this.

• One easy and fun thing we did was put up this PEony (get it?) wall decal in the third floor bathroom, where we have spent quite a lot of time working on potty training

blinds and leaking windows

Yesterday people moved in to the last of the six townhouses across the street from us.  The houses were being framed when Dd was born in 2018 and the first people moved in in March 2020, just when everyone with the option, shifted to working from home.  Blinds became very important, for us and for them!

Gather round, while I tell you the story of our blinds and the leaky windows behind them.

We bought our blinds in four batches from The Shade Store between Dec. 2018 and Sept. 2020, because they are not cheap, even with Jack's professional discount.  Prior to that we had paper blinds on the second floor and no window coverings on the third floor.   I mentioned the new neighbors across the street but our downhill neighbors also had trouble adjusting to the reduction of privacy caused by our house.  In the first year, on two occasions they asked us not to open our (cumbersome, rarely opened, paper blinds) so that they could have privacy in their yard, and I think their house which has few curtains.  We said we were saving up to buy blinds and they offered to split the cost with us.   We declined and pointed out that virtually no one in our neighborhood has outdoor privacy.  Yikes.

Our windows started leaking a little over a year after we moved in.  I am still annoyed that they apparently did a crap job installing them, but I am thankful that all of the cost of repair, which must be ridiculously high at this point, has been covered by the subcontractor.   2020 reminded us that there are worse problems to have.   As I write this, I only know of one leaking window in the house, behind the kitchen stove, and I am expecting a call about it tomorrow.

Let's mix it up by going top to bottom, rather than in chronological order!

On the third floor we installed white painted boards just below the highest windows and attached the blinds to them.  This means that we can never block out all of the sunlight, which is fine for the third floor, with the exception of a few late summer dinners where the sun is in just the wrong place.   We did this because the west windows of the kitchen, where there are actually three stacked windows are too tall for any of the type of blinds we wanted to buy, and top-down electric blinds don't exist.  The opening at the top doesn't intrude on privacy and in the summer we keep the operable upper windows that are kid-safe and rain-safe open almost all the time.   I'm pleased by how you can't really see the wood we mounted the blinds on at all.

Jan. 2019 and May 2019 with Dd brightening things up

We did the third floor west wall blinds in Jan. 2019 and the third floor north wall blinds in March of 2020, which was good timing with the new neighbors across the street.

At one point, I thought we should wait until the windows were all fixed before spending money on nice blinds, but it seems unwise to put any hopes on the end of window repairs.

To appreciate the blinds in our bedroom, I must include some picture of just how bad the west wall of our bedroom has looked at different points.  

Here is the initial water damage from Dec. 2017, which prompted the first round of  window-repair scaffolding for about 2 months at the beginning of 2018 (when I very much wanted to take first-trimester naps at lunch time but there were men inside and outside my windows).

Aug 2018, "fresh" $5 paper blinds                                               March 2019 "black out" paper 

                                                                                                      while Dd shared our room  

The fall of 2018, when Dd was a newborn, was the third attempt at fixing the bedroom corner leak.  A guy from a new crew took the complaint seriously and cut out the drywall in the corner, going up about three feet to trace the leak.  I guess I was too annoyed by the window and enamored by Dd to take a picture of it.  It remained all chopped up for months though.  At some point they replaced the drywall, but it leaked again (along with others) and they came back with the scaffolding (round 2) in Sept. 2019.

May 2019 - blinds that open from the top or bottom!

Sept. 2019, nice blinds with scaffolding

During this second round of scaffolding they accidentally broke the window over the front door.  Then the took it out, realized it would be better to leave it in until the replacement came, re-installed the broken window and ordered a replacement without measuring the window.  The very large replacement then came and did not fit, so it was taped up in Seahawks colors for several weeks but did not guillotine anyone walking in or out the door.

Here's Dd enjoying scaffolding round 2, just before his 1st birthday.

Moving now to the office, we installed the blinds in March 2020.   Unlike the third floor, where we were able to hike the patches in the wall where we had to cut out drywall to put in the wiring, in the office the holes were much closer to the ceiling where a picture would look quite odd.   

Here's a picture where you can't see the patch in the wall!

So how do we like the blinds?  Mostly they are great and we can't believe how long we made it without them on the third floor where it's easy to be blinded by the sun or feel like you're in a fishbowl.  The electric blinds really are pretty cool.  They have a remote and so you can raise or lower a whole batch of blinds with a few clicks and you can program them to close or open at certain times of the day.  In the office, two of the blinds open halfway every morning so that the plants I have by my desk get sunlight even on weekends when I would forget about them.

On the other hand, they have a sticking problem and a couple of them look like this when they are lowered.   After a few agonizing minutes they mostly unstick themselves, but it looks pretty terrible at first.   The company readily sent out replacements for this issue and for the cases where their measurements were wrong.   We ended up deciding to stick with the stickiness and used the replacements on other window, so we got a couple of free shades for our cheapness.

All that remains is to keep getting the windows fixed and to put up the five blinds on the south wall of the kitchen, which have been sitting in the office, waiting for us to make time for them.  It will be interesting because we'll be putting glass behind the stove but over the blind, to protect it from cooking.  Wish us luck!