Yeah, if 2020 counts I think we’ve set our precedent. There was January 6, and my husband started his own practice, but the conditions under which he started it were not ideal. I was very pregnant. Then I gave birth in March, we lost our childcare, and, well, it wasn’t a very good year. You were there. You remember.
But I don’t generally toss out the whole year due to a rough beginning. And I can’t really remember any other year in much detail besides 2020. And 2020 gave me a beautiful child, so how can I even complain it was a terrible year? But I will anyway. It was a terrible year, and I didn’t really start enjoying motherhood until the year was nearly over.
I retired on January 10, 2020. Awesome, right? Two weeks after that, one of my cats unexpectedly died. Two weeks after that, my mother unexpectedly died. I thought that this year was really not going as well as I had hoped. Then two weeks after that, March 2020, well, yeah.
I don’t remember enough years when something awful happened right at the beginning to come to any conclusions.
And I don’t mention that I don’t usually watch TV unless somebody specifically asks me a question about watching TV. My reason for not watching it isn’t that I think I’m better than anybody who does; it’s because I think I’m more susceptible to being addicted to the thing than most people. If I’ve got one around, I’m going to stare at it. (Computers unfortunately cause me a very similar problem; but I’d find it impractical to deal with that the same way I can deal with the TV problem, by just not having one.)
This is why I’m not on social media. I’m prone to compulsive behavior and social media exploits that weakness.
I do watch TV but maybe an episode a night, sometimes YouTube shows and clips, but I’ve never had a problem with that sort of media the way I do with Facebook/Reddit etc. It’s more often just my husband and I trying to steal an hour after the kid’s in bed.
On the afternoon of December 31st, 2019, I got a phone call from my brother which led to me being on a plane at the stroke of midnight ushering in 2020. Mom died 4 days later.
Honestly, my year did not get worse after that. I know a lot of people suffered that year, but neither I nor anyone close to me got sick, unemployment paid me a large percentage of my usual wages after I was furloughed, and my wife kept her WFH job. We had lots of time together for walks and good dinners, and my time off work help me to process my mother’s death. I was actually thankful that she missed the pandemic.
What percentage of time that you are watching T.V. are you also engaged in another activity (surfing the net, reading, doing household chores, etc.)
is generating a perfectly bimodal curve. There are clearly two types of people, around 50-50 among the population: those that usually/always do something else while watching TV, and those that seldomly/never do.
I use a paper calendar less and less each year. This may be the last year we have one on the wall.
I do use the Zen page-a-day calendar, and plan to in future years, but it has no practical “calendric” value for me — just instructive wisdom that becomes useful note paper (on the back).
We have one at work so everybody knows at a glance what days people are taking off, production interruptions, outside visits, scheduled maintenance, etc. It’s one of those large desk calendars with tear-off months that is supposed to double as a blotter, but we have it hanging on the wall.
I used to get the Think Geek Demotivation calendar. It would have an interesting tidbit for each day. I also have a little brass forty year calendar, which is more of a trinket than a useful thing.
Mrs Magill has a “Dog’s Thoughts” desk calendar which is amusing.
My wife and I have a lot of different things going on - and we share one car, which makes organizing important - so, I go to wikicalendar and print the next few months’ calendar pages, and we write our various appointments on those & keep them in the living room.
We still have a paper calendar, which hangs on the kitchen wall. It’s always been something which my wife buys, and chooses based on the pictures; this year’s calendar has astronomical images. There was a time when we actually wrote appointments and events on that calendar, but we now use our phones for that, so the paper calendar is entirely out of habit and decor now.
I think we have 6. We contribute to bird places, so we get attractive calendars, plus usually get a small freestanding one for a room where it’s propped on a shelf. We each have a paper datebook.
I don’t buy a calendar, but I get them sent to me by nonprofits. My favorite is always the one from The Nature Conservancy, so I put that one on the wall by my desk at home.
At work, I print out a copy of the company calendar that shows all the official company holidays, paydays, etc, and tack it to my cubicle wall.
I appreciate the thought, but we’d need to set up joint owners of the same calendar on our own phone apps (and then would we be sharing notes and lists too?), and then it would be another thing pinging us.