Mrs Piper and I suddenly realised that the last time we had friends in for an evening was when we invited the students in for a pre-Christmas dinner, early in December 2019. It was a lovely evening, good guests, nice roast turkey (if I do say so myself), pleasant conversation.
Who knew that a year on, that would be the last time we socialised in our own home like that. And who knows when we’ll be able to do it again? 
An odd year, that’s for certain.
Indeed and good riddance.
My only worry is “how much worse can it get”?
So many times over the past 20 years I have thought we (as a country and society) have hit a low point. Surely it can only get better…right? Nope. It got worse.
I’d like to think we have hit bottom and there is nowhere to go but up yet I’ve been burned enough on that one before that I don’t want to jinx it.
It’s odd for the wife and me because we’ve actually benefited. Both still working. Investments are all up. Healthy, and I will take the first of my two Covid vaccine injections next Tuesday. Travel has been scotched for now, even to the other islands, but that’s helped us to save more money. Thankfully, Hawaii is one of the “safer” states for Covid, and it’s a solidly blue state. And she got her US citizenship a couple months ago. We’re constantly remarking how lucky we’ve been.
Knock on Formica!
These are the good old days…
This has been the first Christmas Day Mrs Trep and I have ever spent on our own. When we were first married, it would be spent with one or the other parents. More recently, we have always had Trep jr here. This year, with new variant Covid raging through South East England, and a new set of rules in place, he had to stay away.
j
I had a baby in March, and he’s lovely. But overall I have not been in a good place. It’s easy to blame COVID and that has certainly contributed, but I can also point to behavioral issues that really haven’t helped.
I’m not the kind of person who can just leave my sense of well - being to the winds of fate. No matter what I’m going through, there’s always this feeling like, “I should be enduring this better.” And I feel that way about COVID. The problem is not COVID but my response to COVID.
The thing is, I don’t know how to solve this particular problem. My old ways of coping are not available to me. I just have this vague thought like, “This time next year I must be doing better.” Because I cannot live like this any more.