Looking back on last year, a lot of things happened, and I still feel numb about some of them. My father died in the middle of January, right before his 81st birthday. I made it to one year free of cancer, although we had a leukemia scare in the summer that wound up being more cautionary than fatal. And I had my port removed. I celebrated five years’ employment at my current job, which has flown by. Finley started and shuttered several successful businesses over the summer (we’re still scratching our heads over this). We took some trips, and vacationed with friends. I grew more tomatoes in the greenhouse Mark 2, and ventured into some flowers and lettuce. I took out a home equity loan and promptly spent it on long-required projects like tree removal and bathroom cabinets and modern windows and a new driveway. The bathroom itself has inched forward to the point where we’re ready for countertops a full two years after the drywall went in. Our beautiful daughter turned 11 and has grown to where her head is just below my chin. We added a beautiful, anxious, whip-smart neurotic dog to our household.
I’m happy with the progress our family made in 2019, but I’m looking forward to a better year in 2020 for all of us. I think we could all use some luck and good vibes, especially my girls. I want only good things to happen for both of them this year, and I hope somebody upstairs is listening.
There are certain times I miss my Dad a lot. He and I had drifted apart over the last few years, but I miss hearing his voice and asking him questions and having him be there, even if I was too stupid to pick up the phone and call him. I’m still not OK with how poorly I left things with him, and I don’t think I ever will be.
As of the 29th of December and not including this one, I wrote 305 posts here in 2019, an average of slightly more than 25 per month. According to WordPress.org, my average word count per post is 210, which seems awfully small, but I guess the short sidebar posts lower the mean dramatically. That’s also an incomplete survey size, as I only just got that service hooked back up in July.
My site stats are all over the place, but Hazel’s introduction seems to be the most popular post from 2019. Meanwhile, an article I wrote about my Subaru back in 2013 seems to still be one of the most popular posts of all time. Go figure that one out.
Looking at the graph of my posts over time, the trend line still descends slightly in terms of posting frequency due to that crazy spike in 2005. Still, I’ve been on an upward trend since the beginning of 2017. Here’s to another year of bigger and better things.
Interesting...
- October 18
Jen and I have been talking for years about how we can't understand the white evangelical embrace of the Great Pumpkin and his predecessors. A new book goes into the history of evangelicalism and traces its roots back to the beginning of the previous century, and the racism, misogyny and intolerance at its foundation.
Instead of theological criteria, what comes to define evangelicalism is instead your stance on issues of gender and sexuality, the embrace of patriarchal authority, belief in female submission. That’s how you determine who is in and out of the fold.
There's an excellent interview with the author in the Jacobin; I highly recommend reading it for the overview.
October 7
Oh fucking hell. Apparently the asshats that run AT&T are super-conservative and have been funding and supporting OAN, the right-wing propaganda outlet our departed Pumpkin loved so much. Which means I've (through my wireless bill) been supporting this whole mess since 1999, when I got my first cellphone.
“If there was any story involving Trump, we had to only focus on either the positive information or basically create positive information,” said Marissa Gonzales, an OAN producer from 2019 until she resigned in 2020. “It was never, never the full truth.”
October 4
I've been slowly traversing the archives of a blog called Last Stand on Zombie Island, where the author does a weekly post on different warships from the post Civil War era up until the present day. He's very good at the context of the time and place, and is able to find all kinds of fascinating examples from periods in history I wasn't ever aware of.
September 30
Six Colors has an excellent upgrade guide for the new iPhones based on your current model; you choose the one you have and it tells you what new stuff you'll get with one of the new models. I'm not ready to upgrade yet but I'll keep this handy for when we need to make the jump.
September 10
A long time ago, I worked with a bunch of guys who were hired from a Name Brand Consulting Firm to take our dot-com public. I was enlisted to build the pitch deck for the roadshow, which meant I was making edits to Powerpoint slides at all times of the day and night with these guys (they were all guys). One late afternoon, two of them were talking about catching important flights, and one of them claimed he'd called in a bomb scare to hold a flight at the gate until he could make it. This was before September 11, but I remember thinking how sociopathic that sounded, and revolted by how proud of himself he was.
Apparently this tactic doesn't work anymore.
