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captainsblogI added the latter to the list because, well, 2020 and all- plus countdowns of this kind remind me of Casey Kasem, who did not die this year but is perhaps most famed, not for lists like this or stoned characters, but for a botched dedication to a dead dog....
We'll still take them in that order, after a brief hiatus for events of the past few days:
It snowed. I know, ice in the wintertime. After the pretty but moderate Christmas Day snowfall throughout the area, Wrestling Boxing Day was promised to be hit-or-miss. By noon, it was mostly miss, so I headed out to run some errands, it promptly started to come down, but the radio was optimistic about me being able to get out for groceries and such by the end of the afternoon:
"The lake effect snow band will remain stationary over the northtowns for about two hours," they said.
"Then it will move south into ski country," they said.
"Fine, I'll go out after it stops, they plow us out and it's over," I said.
Man plans, God laughs, plow doesn't plow.
Wait. They eventually did.
By the next morning, people were digging out of the almost-foot that fell on us and the way more they got to our immediate south. We begged out of a park visit, but got out around the block for a bit-
- before Pepper settled in for a long winter's nap, which Bronzini promptly joined-
He's settling nicely into his place in life as the sole youngun in the house- posing for us-
- helping Mommy rebuild his kitty castle and getting into the routine of playing in it (heard last night: Ray, can you pick up the tube of Krazy Glue before Krazy Kat gets into it?), and generally snuggling in all the right places.
Once plows came all round yesterday, I ran those remaining errands, including an attempt to obtain my 2020 tax software from Best Buy, since I had a ton of rewards certificates from them. This turned into a cluster of download hell which was only fixed this morning after an almost hourlong pause before speaking with the product vendor. Late yesterday, though, we then resumed our weekend of entertainment, which included the premiere of the new Wonder Woman film (fair), the Disney/Pixar movie Soul (better), and continuing a binge of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which has now reached my birth year and, in the last midseason 2 episodes we watched, Upstate New York. The depicted Borscht Belt resort was one I'd never been to, but I recognized the exteriors, from hundreds of Route 17 drives, as being on Oquaga Lake near Deposit. Unlike many of the fancier schmancier ones like Grossinger's, the filming site still exists and still brings the schmalz every summer, including homaging the series at Scott's resort last year.
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That leads nicely into what else we did while staying in these past nine-plus months. Not a single film, nor an attended play, nor a visited summer street festival, but plenty on the living room screen and from bookstores and libraries to distract from the craziness outside.
With the arrival of the kids' HBO Christmas present, we now get most of the streaming services. Netflix has brought Schitt's Creek, Dead to Me, a final season of the Danish series Rita, the short and sweetness of the holiday series Dash and Lily, the return of Millie Bobby Brown in Enola Holmes, and some remarkable made-fors including My Octopus Teacher, Da 5 Bloods and Uncorked. Amazon brought not just Mrs. M but Upload (a great first season including an aging Cancer Man and an aging-out kid of a longtime LJ/FB friend of ours), Avocado Toast (a Canadian quickie that Orphan Black's Donnie makes a brief appearance in), and, a few weeks ago, an older Jim Jarmusch film called Paterson that we really loved as a poem to poetry as a passion (more about that to follow).
CBS has brought a new season of Star Trek still in progress and a shorter re-ENGAGE!ment of Picard; Disney gave us several of their films and a second season of The Mandalorian, oh heck it's THE BABY YODA SHOW. Hulu brought one of our favorite comic artists to life in a series called Woke, and we've returned to watching Sunday Afternoon Delayed episodes of SNL there, getting to know the newer cast and appreciating the humor and music.
The screen has also popped up poetry every other Wednesday. The group moved out of live venues in March and anywhere from six to 20 of us have joined to listen to each others' poems, respond to prompts, watch our kittens walk across the camera (when they're not turning it off;), and generally be there for each other. Another event that will be moving inside in 2021 is the author lecture series we've gone to for the past two years; our tickets for the final winter/spring 2020 shows will be converted to Zoomers as Marilynne Robinson and Ta-Nehisi Coates have committed to do their canceled appearances virtually in the spring. We have Marilynne's latest book in the house; overall, I've been behind in reading of all kinds, but most recently grabbed library e-downloads of Christopher Moore's latest Shakespeare riff (which Eleanor also loved) and of the newest from Swedish author Fredrik Backman who we knew from a prior film adaptation. On the periodical end, the New Yorker continues to be a bedrock of reading lives, despite them defying at least two efforts since June for me to pay them to renew our subscription, and our local daily paper is still holding on, despite Warren Buffett selling it over the summer and its online presence becoming distractingly clickybaity. And we've renewed Funny Times, a monthly broadsheet of cartoons and comic commentary that we'd subscribed to for years.
We can use all the Funny we can get right about now.
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Which, of course, leads into DEATH.
Despite the 300,000 on the toteboard, and the 1-in-1,000 Americans to perish, we have yet to experience firsthand a relative or close friend who has died or even taken seriously ill from COVID. I hesitate in writing that, because this fucking year still has four more days to work out its stuff, and incubation periods are such that anyone, including us, could wind up taking the Swim That Needs No Towel from an infection borne of this hideous year.
Still, as of now, the closest I come is one of the earliest to go: my boss for over a decade, from late 1995 to mid-2006, passed from it in a Rochester nursing home back in April. For Don and his family, it was likely a relief, because he'd been showing early signs of dementia not long after I left there and, for the past few years, he'd been in a nursing home with the end stages of it.
Beyond that, to friends-of-friends and client or customer contacts, more than a few. Famous people have not been immune; quite the opposite. From the musician John Prine to the greatest Met ever Tom Seaver, from the stupidity of Herman Cain to the legacy of Charley Pride- all have crossed over with the virus in them.
Others we've lost include, most tragically, The Notorious RBG; the Pioneering John Lewis; the too-young Kobe Bryant and the never-aged Alex Trebek.
And somehow, nobody's choked on a hamberder.