It’s been a long, full, busy, and tiring year. I scrolled through my photos, and pulled out the most representative ones – just a few, you know – and ended up with nearly 80 of them. Yeah, like that.
That’s too many to put in a blog post, so I put them together into a video, just in case you’d like to see (if you can’t see the video above, click on the post title so you can look at it in your browser). It’s mostly about art and travelling, because that’s what I have photos of; the ordinary everyday things, like cooking and spending time with family and friends and sorting and cleaning cupboards and all that – you know, the stuff that makes up the bulk of one’s life – doesn’t show up in photos as readily (and if it does, it’s not that interesting).
The other thing is that it is, once again, the midnight of the year. Did I mention I’m tired? So I think I’ll draw the curtains, turn down the lights, grab my bear, and snuggle under the covers.
It’s a bit of a cliché, that. New Year’s Day, time for new beginnings! New goals, good intentions! If the calendar wasn’t already telling me that it’s that time of the year, a dead giveaway would be my social media feed, which is once again bristling with ads for exercise or weight loss programs (I ususally mark those ads as “inappropriate” or “offensive”). A friend of mine once stated that her goal for the new year was to stay fat and enjoy herself doing so – I can go with that, that sounds like an obtainable goal. (In other words, it’s a way of saying “My goal for the new year is to stop beating up on myself.” Alas, as with pretty much every other goal, it’s hard to stick to.)
However, having said that, I do have a liking for calendar markers. There’s something satisfying in having things happen at a specific day in the calendar. My nice DSLR camera decided yesterday, on New Year’s Eve, that its SD card had about as much as it could take – four years’ worth of photos filled it to the brim – and it quit just as I was trying to film a panorama shot of the last sun rays of 2021. So the next SD card and round of photos will start right at the beginning of 2022, and there’s something about it that tickles my fancy.
The last photo on the SD card
So all that to say, here we are, making a new start on the blog. I don’t think I need to say much about 2021 as a whole – it’s been pretty crazy all around the globe. Personally, I’d had all kinds of grand plans for what I was going to do during this year without blogging – finish books, publish books, build a big body of artwork for exhibitions, etc. Haha. Much like everything else during this year, that didn’t go according to plan.
But then, other things happened. I did a lot of knitting (aka thumb-twiddling with a purpose). I read a lot of books (most of them re-reads of old favourites – I’m almost finished with Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series, and it’s been interesting reading them in order, front to back. I have things to say about them… but that’s a topic for another day). I took a lot of pottery classes and workshops, a not inconsiderable number of them online. In fact, that’s one of the advantages that Covid has brought to the world, the proliferation of online offerings. Clouds and silver linings and all that jazz.
But I’ll stop boring you with the non-saga of our lives. I didn’t actually have all that much to say for this first post back in the saddle, so I’ll stop saying it. Just this for now:
This is Life, the Universe, and a Rebooted Blog. See you again soon!
Sunrise on a midwinter’s morning. (You can pretend it’s rising on the New Year.)
