2020 in our household, in review

[cimorene]

New to Me:

• We moved into OUR side of the house this year! The renovations started last year but we were living in the in-law wing, or the addition, or the tenant side as it now is, until this October. So you could say that many aspects of being a homeowner are still new to us.


• Similarly: Being a Landlord! Legally Wax is the landlord and Wax is also the one who gets the landlording phone calls, but I did a lot of cleaning and painting to prepare the tenant side. Also some planning. Both of us are responsible for building stuff. I'm sure otherwise my skills will be needed more at some point in the future.


• I'd also never met a queer person as old as our tenant before, at least, not personally. I can name some celebrities and so on. But now I know her, adn she's over 70. That's pretty cool. We haven't questioned her specifically on the topic or anything, but she's told us little bits here and there. And it's nice to know.


• Living through a pandemic is also new to me but it hasn't really come very close to me at any point.

Major Life Milestones/Sacraments:

Surprisingly enough, in spite of this pandemic, nobody Wax or I or my parents or sister knew personally has died or tested positive for covid-19, although second-order acquaintances have, things like the parents of old fandom friends and the brothers of old acquaintances. The death toll has been high in America, but nobody in our families have had covid scares either although a few of Wax's niblings have had their classes returned to distance learning after classmates were diagnosed and her brother and our plumber were tested in the fall.

Personal Achievements:

Nothing major, but the house, which is currently half-renovated, is full of small achievements and cumulative ones, like: many excellent choices that look great in the mostly-finished kitchen and bedroom, lots of energetic painting and designing on my part, etc.

Biggest Fail:

When we moved in June 2019 from Turku to Pargas I didn't know that the official change of address form that you file with the post office only counts for MOST of the government organizations, and that doesn't count the unemployment bureau, which needs to be informed manually, and as a result, in 2019 two local shops spontaneously (apparently!) sent me JOB OFFERS (bc they saw me on the magistrate's list of new residents??????) but they sent them through the employment bureau so they automatically went to my OLD address... but after the address forwarding period had ended. As a result I never got them and never replied to them and the employment bureau letters on the subject never arrived. So in early 2020 when social security sent me letters to inform me that the unemployment bureau had requested I get made ineligible for unemployment in retaliation... I received those letters - two of them I think? - and completely failed to notice and read them, because they arrived in the midst of waxjism trying to find MIL's important paperwork from among all her papers that we had but didn't know anything about, trying to wait for the estate to clear probate, trying to keep the plants alive and retrieve stuff from MIL's summer cottage, completely running out of money and trying to pay the outstanding contractor bills of over 10k, waxjism starting to have regular panic attacks and having to get a prescription for them and both of us getting so depressed we could barely prepare food and getting even MORE depressed because our living area was so claustrophobically full of junk that it was impossible to fully clean. In all this my focus from day to day was mostly monitoring Snookums's diet and blood sugar and injections (he's diabetic) and then BB suddenly got so sick and collapsed that I thought she was going to die, and we had to rush her to a new vet just as the pandemic was starting... and then occasionally my leftover brain power would go towards trying to gently nudge Wax about throwing out/going through/organizing some of the three MILLION piles of her mother's stuff that we were drowning in but that I couldn't throw away alone. SO. I've written about that elsewhere, but the letters came in envelopes identical to the little periodic notifications social security always sends you when you get a payment of some kind from them, and they vanished under piles of papers and things to do on my desk and reappeared months later when the appeal period was past and there was nothing the social workers I met with last April could do but try to assist me to get a work practice placement faster. So like, in future, no matter what, I will open (and so far have opened) official letters immediately, even if I think I already know what they say.

Illnesses:

1. I discovered a little splotch on my shoulder that looked like a birthmark, only not one I had ever seen before, last summer. I couldn't find information online beyond that a doctor has to see it, but the doctors just said it looked fine but to monitor it in case it changed. I haven't been doing that exactly religiously but it doesn't look significantly different yet anyway.


2. Snookums already had diabetes and continues to have it. His blood sugar had a period where it was really good (low, normal range almost) and then a period where it was really bad (possibly due to an infected tooth, poor baby) and it might be improving a bit now after some diet tweaks and healing time.


3. BB already had kidney failure but she had a scare last spring. However, she's been pretty much fine since then and has actually become slightly less difficult wrt eating her special food and not eating Snookums's (different) special food.

Most Excitement:

It hasn't been much of a year for excitement. More "relief". Uh, that Lovecraft Country was so good???

Favorite TV show:

Okay okay, this was REALLY hard to rank, but I felt it was important. In order of preference:

1. The Queen's Gambit


2. Lovecraft Country


3. The Name of the Rose


4. What We Do in the Shadows


5. The Outsider

Favorite Film:

Jumanji 2 (I looked this up. It's officially Jumanji: The Next Level, and it came out in 2019, but the end of 2019 was just a black hole in our lives)

Favorite Book:

I'm going to be rereading the Nero Wolfe books more in my lifetime, I'm sure, but Little, Big by John Crowley was the one that blew me away.

Interests & Ventures:

In the spring and summer I got back into recorder, which I used to entertain myself with as a teenager when I played the oboe in school band and youth orchestra. I inherited a few recorders and a big pile of folk and medieval music from my grandmother, who was a hobbyist. Buuuuuuut the practice is kind of loud and the close quarters made it difficult or impossible to manage it without bothering Wax which I found discouraging, and let my practicing lapse last fall. I intend to pick it back up again though.

Also, I started a design blog, designobjectory.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

YOU DID ALL THE THINGS.

Do you have radiators yet?

[cimorene]

No. We don't have the strength to think about finding a list from the yellow pages and calling everyone on it, or whatever, yet. Instead Wax bought another space heater a while ago.

[princessofgeeks]

I am glad you are finding alternate ways to keep warm!