Read on to see why this is a relevant picture for this week.

(Sunday Paper, Year VI, Issue 11)

If you’re like me, you’re a little weary of seeing all the “a year ago at this time” pieces, whether they’re Facebook memories or newspaper articles or any other number of ways to recognize that we’re at a year of full-on pandemic.

But, well, that’s certainly the lead story this week.

When people talked last year about doing a pandemic journal it was not something that appealed to me - I appreciated the historical nature of the moment and I appreciated the fact that people did it…but I didn’t feel like I wanted to record the day-to-day of something so unsettling.

But, as this space each week morphed from what it was to what it is…..well, that kind of ended up being exactly what I did.

The one thing I wish I could change about my records of the past year-plus is when I was sick in February. I wrote about that a little bit, but not in enough detail to capture whether or not I really had COVID.

I don’t want to come off as “guy who says he had something just to sound like he was part of something” - but it wasn’t an ordinary sickness. I don’t want to get too detailed here (it’s too late to get that accurately detailed)…but I’ll tell you that I experienced illness in a way I had never experienced it before. (If you want to know specifics feel free to reach out. I just don’t need to write it now.)

Other than that, though, a year ago I wrote a post about a week eerily similar to this one - I had broken out the grill for the first flash of warm spring-ish weather, and school was canceled and it felt like some bonus family time….as opposed to what it became, which is family time all the time. (For this week’s picture I just happened to be grilling on Thursday and had just looked at last year’s post and thought it would be a good homage pic.)

It would be another week before the first “Stay At Home Dad” post, which I thought was a clever little one-time play on words…before it became a theme and then continued for a full year.

I think if you were to read through all of the “Stay At Home Dad” posts you would capture an arc that most people have followed this past year - an uncertainty about what lay ahead, an attempt to cope, an acceptance of what was happening, an adjustment to a new way of living, and just normal everyday life…with the rhythms of a year - holidays, birthdays, etc. - mixed in.

This link will bring you back to the posts beginning last March, if you’re interested.

How long will I continue with the “Stay At Home” posts? I figure I might as well stay with it until I’m not just staying at home.

When will that be?

Well, I don’t expect it to be anytime soon.

But I think we’re all starting to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Notes

*With an eye on having only just recently put the end-of-the-year reading post up (which it’s hard to believe was two-and-a-half months ago already) and an eye towards the fact that I’ll have to do another at the end of this year…the reading has been slow so far this year. I’m reading Barack Obama’s memoir, and it’s really well-written, but it’s slow going for me. I don't get through much more than 10 pages a night…and some nights I don’t crack it at all. I do have a couple of other books on hand - this might be a year of overlapping books, which I read depending on my mood. But, I am through the economic crisis part, so maybe it’ll be less of a slog when I’m not reading about bailouts.

*The weeks on Twitter have been hit or miss…this week was a pretty good one, I thought. You can follow me there by clicking here. And if you don’t like the Facebook page already, you can of course do that by clicking here.

*Some very warm weather at the end of this week led to some outside time for the first time in a while. It was nice, but I tried not to get too attached because I think it’s going to be cold again this week.

*Kind of went crazy with some unnecessary purchases this week. But they’re fun. I’ll be posting about it in one of the upcoming Wednesday posts, so keep an eye out for that on the Facebook page.

*Did you turn your clocks ahead? Consider this your public service announcement.