Day 296 - One Hell of a Year... But

So here I am writing this on Monday evening, January 4, 2021. 2021... if that doesn't look like a sci-fi year I don't know what does...well, maybe 2025. The year we've left behind, perhaps better know as the Year Which Shall Not Be Named, was painful and exciting in a scary way, and brought the best, and worst, in humanity. We've all been pretty obsessed with ourselves, in part thanks to our insane self-obsessed leader, but also with all of the gender bending, mask protesting, science ignoring (on both sides) and power grabbing being done.

But there was a lot of good being done too. A lot highlighted in Krazinski's Some Good News but everywhere people bent over backwards to help out. Yes, some companies made out like a bandit like Zoom and Amazon while smaller companies folded under the strain, but overall, for a time, most people stopped being dicks to each other and remembered we're all in this world together. Until they forgot. 

The people in my life, however, didn't forget and so for the most part - with a few bumps along the way - this past year has been amazing as much as it's been annoying. 

The Party That Never Happened: I planned and threw my wife a 60th birthday party on March 14th - well, I tried, but that was Day 1 of the Great Time Out so the venue closed, but we gathered in a smaller group of a couple friends and mostly family, and the thought was there. Heck of a way to say Happy Birthday. Fun, nevertheless.

To Sir With Virtual Love: Because of the quarantine and church closing, we decided to lead the church's kids ministry online, making videos to share the week's lessons with the children of Chaffin Church, and incorporating the curriculum we used normally in person. Everything went online and even now we're online - but that isn't before we did start a new chapter of kids church where we took over the basement every Sunday, in person and masked up, to have a special service only for elementary kids, and it began to grow very quickly, until we had to close up shop because of the renewed spike. As the year came to an end however, we did manage to have a special Christmas pageant: 

Domini Instructorus: on that note, this year marked the first time I ever gave a sermon. It was in front of the necessarily small in-person congregation, as we were still new to opening the church up on a trial basis, but I think it was a good message and I enjoyed it. Here's a video (my sermon starts around the 8 minute mark).

Here Comes The Bride: as I mentioned in an earlier post- I think... now that I think of it I never actually posted anything on the website except for a photo I took that day, on the day. Huh. I thought I had. Anyway, my daughter Amanda married a very cool dude named Joel and now the Fisher-Katz-Keohanes (yep they combined both their last names and Joel's was already hyphenated) are living in newlywed bliss in New Hampshire.
I talk about this in the video for my next blurb. 

Take My Wife, Please: My quest to do something, anything, outside the house led me and friend Marty to attend a socially distanced adult education class on Stand Up Comedy. It was tremendous fun and I learned a lot. At the end we could invite a couple people to join us in a bigger room and had our 'final' presentation of our, at least my, very first stand up:

Walking Men, and Women: The end of Summer marked the first time in decades... decades... that I finally joined my brother Paul for the MS 50-Mile Walk. He'd done it, often with our sister Anne who has MS, every year at the Cape, but this year everything was virtual so he did a good chunk in our old hometown of Burlington Ma. A number of people joined him throughout the weekend for support, and on our leg, no pun intended, it was Paul, me my sister Ellie and sister-in-law Sara. We had a tremendous time and, interestingly but not surprisingly, he raised more money in 2020 than any year before!

Other tidbits:

One surprise right around Christmas was a pretty major science fiction magazine accepted a story for publication. I'm still waiting on details and a contract so can't say much more, but looking forward to announcing that. 

The New England Horror Writers released out latest anthology of stories, Wicked Women edited by Trish Wooldridge and Scott T. Goudsward. I did the internal formatting and publishing as usual, which is a heck of a lot of work on top of contracts with the authors and paying them all (years ago everyone decided the Christian should be the treasurer so no one runs off with the till). 

Boy.. I'm forgetting stuff. There were many moments of pain and stress as well from other stuff, but these moments do also tend to refine us, make us learn the good and bad of ourselves and hope that we get better at Life in general. So much more, and if I remember other stuff I WILL come back here and add to this post.