Head Tale

1. What did you do this year that you’d never done before?

I had been on the board of Coteau Books, a well-established small Canadian literary press that had been in existence for almost 45 years, for nearly a decade myself.  Unfortunately, the publisher had been seen a variety of issues compounding over the past five years or so, heading towards a very bad outcome that came to a head in early 2020 and led to something I never hoped to do – have a meeting with a bankruptcy trustee!  As I observed in a moment of dark humour during that meeting, “I guess if I have to meet with a bankruptcy trustee, at least it’s not a personal bankruptcy!” 🙁  On a different note, I’m sure most people have  joked about hibernating for the winter.  But actually going into quarantine for a few months, from mid-March to early July in my case, felt like the real-life version of this!

2. Did anyone close to you give birth?
I have twin cousins and coincidentally, they each had babies with their partners this year.  Both were premature (one quite premature and spent a lot of time in NICU) but all are home and doing well now.  

3. Did anyone close to you die?
My parents are in good health, still living at home, but I definitely notice the increasing number of parents of people I went to school with who are my parents’ contemporaries passing away  (that last link is to a close friend of mom and dad’s who died in mid-March, whose funeral they wanted to go to, and who I argued against it with the argument “If you go and catch Covid, you’ll be in the ground too!”  Luckily the funeral was cancelled but funny to think how just one rumoured case of Covid in IH was enough to spook me at the time, especially when my dad was like “Oh yeah, we sat in the same row as her at the theatre the other week!” about the rumoured positive case!)  Unfortunately, deaths sometimes go the other way and the daughter of a high school classmate was killed in an accident this year.  And the prognosis isn’t great for a classmate and friend who I’ve known my whole life who was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer this year.  

4. What places did you visit?

With buying a new house, we weren’t going to go.  But between having realised some equity from the sale of our old home (which also sold quicker than we expected which changed our “moving budget” quite a bit to the positive), plus deciding we could go to a lower end resort and have as much fun as ones that cost thousands more, and just a general “You never know what might happen next year?” feeling, we booked a trip to Crown Paradise in Cancun only about a month before we left in February.  “You never know what might happen next year” was me thinking that we might deal with a family illness or something more immediate, *NOT* that a worldwide pandemic would make tropical trips *very* unlikely for us in winter 2020/2021!  (Of course, I’m surprised at how many people I know who I see on social media are still in Mexico this year – retirees, self-employed artists, others who can work remotely whether they’re in Regina or Puerto Vallarta.) 😉   I’m sad to break our streak of six or seven hot holidays this year but it’ll also be nice to replenish the bank account a bit by not splashing out for a tropical holiday. 

5. What would you like to have in the next year that you lacked this year?
The months of March, April, May and June?  And even though the bankruptcy is basically now fully wrapped up, it still hits me sometimes how sad it is that the world no longer has Coteau Books.  At the same time, another board member made an astute observation that we were just “ahead of the curve in terms of Covid bankruptcies.” 🙁   

6. What date from this year will remain etched upon your memory?
First week of February – Coteau Books’ impending demise becomes reality after we are denied a grant we need to keep functioning.  
Last week of February – Family holiday in Mexico overlaps with Coronavirus spreading around the world – some areas of Italy go into lockdown near the start of our week and the first cases are found in found in Mexico near the end of our week long holiday (though on the other side of the country from the busy Cancun International Airport thankfully!)    
March 16 – RPL shuts down physical branches due to Coronvirus for “two weeks” (which turns out to be closer to four months by the time branches reopen in mid-July.)
July 13 – RPL Reopens (July 9 for soft launch at my branch)
Tue Sept 8 – Kids return to school after six months doing homeschooling (well, “trying not to let them turn feral” might be a better way to describe it!) 😉 
Late Oct/early Nov – three big elections in quick succession – Provincial/US/Municipal.   
Dec 8 – Non-trial vaccinations begins in the UK and soon after, are happening across Canada, the US and most other parts of the world.  

7. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I’ve had this blog with near daily posts since starting it while I was in library school in 2006 so hitting 5000 blog posts in ~5200 days of having this blog active feels like both a major and a meaningless achievement. 😉 

8. What was your biggest failure of the year?
I’ve seen numerous other arts/cultural/nonprofit organizations go through tough times/bad audits/grant reductions but they always seemed to come out of the other end (even bookstores as private businesses are not immune to this reality).  So Coteau having to enter bankruptcy protection and then wind up operations feels like a huge failure in that the board couldn’t right the ship.

9. What was your biggest surprise?
Ditto the last answer?  I said there were a variety of factors in the Coteau bankruptcy and it was also a long-time coming.  But a combination of a few major unexpected expenses, staff transitions, not one but two major lengthy staff illnesses (not great in a four person office!) and a whole range of other issues, both within and without our control, that seemed to come to a head at the same time,

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

This year, being able to say I’m 99% sure that not I, nor anyone in my immediate family, had Covid-19 is the main thing to report for this question (99% because you can have it with no symptoms so who knows for sure?  Every time we have a cough or a bit of sore throat or whatever, we think “is this it???”)  We had a couple times where we were worried about the kids who both got tested independently, a few months apart, but given that Shea works in a hospital and I work in a public-facing role, we’re a bit surprised her and I haven’t even been tested (biggest difference between us and the kids is they both had symptoms for multiple days whereas our coughs/runny noses/sore ears never lasted very long.)  Otherwise, no other major health concerns other than the fact that, like many, I put on a few pounds during Covid quarantine that I haven’t yet shed.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Really enjoying our various Google Home devices which we have strategically placed throughout the house so we can listen to music everywhere, broadcast voice messages to each other and much more.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

This was the year of the essential worker – healthcare workers, frontline workers, grocery store clerks, truck drivers, cleaners, teachers, restaurant workers, etc. and one of my big hopes is that we come out of the other end of Covid with a renewed appreciation for people who often didn’t get credit for the vital role they play in keeping society functioning.  RPL was incredibly good to its own workers and there is very little I would find fault with in how they handled things (and if you know me, that may come as a shock!) – from the initial announcement we’d be shutting down for “two weeks” through transitioning to working from home to some brief layoffs for a portion of the staff as the quarantine stretched out longer than anyone expected to doing almost everything they could when we reopened to keep staff and patrons safe.

13. Whose behaviour left you underwhelmed or disappointed?
It was pretty disappointing (but not surprising) that the Sask Party was rumoured to be calling a snap election right up until literally days before they instead implemented drastic public health orders shutting down much of the province.  I was actually sitting in a meeting of a provincial NDP constituency on March 11 as we were trying to map out our plans for if there was a snap election when I got a series of notifications in short order that the NBA had shut down, Trump had banned travel from Europe and, worst of all, Tom Hanks had gotten Covid!  I remember saying “There’s no way that the Sask Party can call an election with the way this is going” and that turned out to be right (though they did hold one during the fall as originally planned and still came out with a strong victory so it didn’t end up changing much. 

I’m also *extremely* disappointed in the vocal minority of anti-maskers who are so selfish, uninformed and ignorant in the face of something that is very real, very dangerous and very easy to lose control of without adequate mitigation efforts.

14. Where did most of your money go?
As mentioned, we decided to take some of the equity from the sale of our house and put it towards a trip to Mexico (and I’d joke that paying $7USD for a package of TicTacs (sure, they were jumbo-sized but c’mon!) in the Cancun airport duty free is my biggest unnecessary rip-off expense of the year!) 

With a lot of uncertainty about facilities and even moving between trailers, we traded in our tiny but much loved old RV for a new-to-us mid-sized one. 

With the wrap-up of Coteau Books, all board members were on the hook for a share of the cost.  In the end, it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be but when we first realised we were going bankrupt, there were some worries that board members could be on the hook for thousands!  Luckily that turned out not to be the case but it was still pretty stressful and I did have to pony up a more than a couple bucks to help cover the wrap-up costs.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Virology!  

16. What song/album will always remind you of this year?
“It’s The End of the World as We Know It” & “Until the End of the World” were the first two songs on my  “Pandemic Playlist” that I often listened to while out walking during quarantine,  I also created a “Relaxing” playlist of the sound of waves on the beach that I listened to pretty regularly too.  Finally, it’s not even a song nor did I listen to it much myself.  But Sasha discovered a Robert Munsch album on our streaming service and listened to it, practically every night, whether I’d already read to her or not!  

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
A) Happier or sadder?  I don’t know if “Sadder” is the right word but definitely, depending on the day, the past year took a toll on my mental health in a variety of ways (I’d suggest that anyone who says otherwise is lying, in denial, or a rich, insulated millionaire!)

For me, it started in this those first early days where Shea had to go into the hospital while I was at home, even as we read horror stories of overrun Italian hospitals and not knowing if that might happen here.  Or having to take our seven year old for a Covid test in April with only one of us being able to even go in with her.  On to concerns about both sets of grandparents, especially as my hometown became one of the worst outbreaks in the province at one point.  To just general uncertainty about the long-term health impacts of people who ended up getting it and may never fully recover plus worries about the future of the economy.  I mean, at the same time, we also tried to keep perspective about how lucky we were – we both kept our jobs through the entire year, our parents are all at home and healthy instead of at higher risk in a care home, our kids were healthy and their school had only one diagnosed case, we timed our move into a new house (home office!  parklike green space right out our back door!  Guest room if we did have to isolate!).  But still, the constant uncertainty, worries and frustration were *very* draining at times.

B) Thinner or fatter?  Fatter unfortunately.  I’ve heard Covid-19 referred to as the “Covid +19lbs” and though I didn’t gain quite that much, I definitely put on weight eating a lot of comfort foods and drinking more than I probably should since the spring.  

C) Richer or poorer?  Covid played havoc with the stock market and therefore our investments but they’ve all pretty much rebounded so that’s good. (And my greatest stock pick of all-time?  Buying Apple stocks when Pace was born and which have grown massively!)  Covid also greatly lowered our day-to-day spending without buying gas or eating out as much or even just the mindless shopping so we noticed that in our bottom line as well.  I wasn’t sure if I would be laid off or not but fortunately, was in a position to keep working from home, even as most frontline staff were laid off briefly.  And as much as I hate to admit it, Shea’s job as a nurse is about as stable of work as you can find in a global pandemic as she just kept going into work every day as if very little had changed in her life.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
When I got frustrated with the rat race, I used to joke that I’d like to build an off-the-grid house at our farm and just leave society.  That might’ve turned out to have other benefits when Covid hit had I followed through!  Otherwise, it’s weird how much I missed “everyday things” this year – haircuts and walking through a mall and not feeling stressed by visits to a grocery store (I have to follow arrows to go all the way up one aisle just to come down another aisle the opposite way to grab one thing?!?)  Suppers with family and friends.  Even though it felt like nothing was happening at times, I wish I’d done more to document this year with diary entries and photos and maybe more intentional blog posts – “April Covid Report”, “May Covid Report” instead of being a bit scattershot and sporadic.  I mean, when else than a pandemic would you be required to put on a mask to go *in* to a bank?!?

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Like I said, I found Covid very stressful at times – trying to get the kids to do their homeschooling before just deciding to let them go feral, worrying about Shea going to work in the hospital.  There was a lot of focus on “mindfulness” and as I said, I spent a lot of time listening to a playlist of waves on a beach so obviously I see some benefit to that type of technique.  But I once heard mindfulness described as “religion for secular soccer moms” and I can’t get that picture out of my head anytime someone promotes “mindfulness” as the solution in troubled times.  (I’m no expert but given what I’ve seen, I also wonder if mindfulness sometimes encourages denial about the reality of life by encouraging people to be in the moment without focusing as much on the future?)  

20. How did you spend  Christmas?
Like many, we had a quiet Christmas with just our immediate family.  Although it was sad to not be with grandparents or other family members like we’d normally be, it made for a relaxing day – no pressure to make a big meal, no “hosting” stresses, no fighting over the remote (okay, maybe we still did that, even with only four of us!)  Heck, we even ate our Christmas turkey meal in our PJ’s since none of us got dressed all day!  

21. Who did you spend the most time communicating with?
It was a pretty frantic time with lots of communication with the former Coteau Board members (who resigned en masse as a strategy to limit our financial liability when the bankruptcy became a certainty after a few last “Hail Mary” attempts to save the press) The former board members then re-branded as “Friends of Coteau” to continue with wrapping up Coteau operations.  During quarantine, it was great to get to better know other staff from across the system when we’d end up working shifts together answering phone calls and chat requests from the general public.

22. What was your favourite TV program?
Being at home allowed me to watch a lot more TV than I probably have at any time since I was a kid.  There was lots of very bingeable content – “Tiger King” was the perfect trash TV at the perfect time near the start of quarantine.  “Narcos Mexico”.  “The Dark Side of the Ring” was a docu-series about wrestling’s greatest controversies.  “Too Hot To Handle” was another trashy reality dating show on Netflix.  Heck, even watching Trump and CNN’s sensationalistic Covid/political coverage felt like a different form of reality TV.  “The Last Dance” about Jordan and The Bulls.  “Sons of Anarchy” (it’d had been on our list for a long time but we never got to it prompting one Philadelphia-based friend we talked to while doing “Covid Chat Roulette” one night to quip “What?  They just get that in Canada now?”  We got a free year of AppleTV when we bought a new iPad last year but didn’t find much to make us want to keep it.  But Shea and I both really enjoyed Ewan MacGregor’s “Long Way Up/Round/Down” series about a few different long-distance motorcycle treks he did with a buddy (I list them in the order we watched them, not that they were released.)  I think they grabbed us because travel seems so…foreign…right now (pun intended.)

23. Do you hate anything that you didn’t hate at this time last year? 
Chinese Wet Markets?  Just joking – in addition to trash TV, I binged on books about pandemics/viruses and of the half-dozen or so I powered through at the start of the pandemic, most said it was just a matter of when, not if, a pandemic would go worldwide and it could come from anywhere so it’s silly for people to blame “Chinese people eating bats”.  (Now, if we want to talk about “Chinese governments that hide information and are slow to react” that’s a different conversation.)  

24. What was the best book(s) you read?
Again, being at home allowed me to do a lot more reading than I have for a long time.  As I said, I probably read about half a dozen books about the history of pandemics/viruses – both fiction and non-fiction – but if I were to pick one, probably a quickie book by a science writer called “Covid 19” did the best job of giving the background and history of pandemics but also being the most timely since the others I read were usually 5-10 years old now.  Even a lot of books that weren’t technically about Covid/viruses ended up connecting to the topic of the year – I particularly enjoyed “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari.  Or one called “The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World” by Stephan Brusatte about how a species can rule the world than have that end abruptly due to a global catastrophe.  

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
After he passed from Covid, I got more into John Prine’s deeper catalogue beyond his best known hits.  I really got into Spirit of the West again after watching the documentary about John Mann’s diagnosis with early onset dementia.  And I also got into Justin Townes Earle after his untimely passing.  In fact, I make a direct connection between two of those artists – so much talk this year was people complaining about the over-focus on Covid at the expense of mental health/addictions but I always thought – why can’t you show concern about both?  Covid is dangerous and should be treated as such but we also need to recognize the impact that quarantine and other responses to Covid can have on people’s mental health/addictions/domestic situations/etc and do our best to lessen those impacts too.

26. What did you want and get?

I didn’t know I wanted it until Shea told me but I quite enjoyed our new trailer. 😉  I was very fortunate to not get laid off.  And I really wanted a vaccine and am amazed and proud that humanity was able to develop and release an effective vaccine (multiples actually) as quickly as they did.

27. What did you want and not get?
There were many of us – on the board and beyond – who did everything we possibly could to save Coteau Books but it simply wasn’t possible.  In a moment of dark humour, one board member joked that if Covid had hit a month earlier, we could blame our bankruptcy on that instead of the numerous other factors that contributed to the press’s end.  But part of me realises it’s a relief that Coteau closed when it did as publishers, like so many other small businesses, are also struggling as they try to survive the disruptions of Covid on their businesses and I can’t imagine the added stress of trying to guide the press through this year as a member of a volunteer board.

28. What were your favourite films of this year?
Many studios who couldn’t release movies into theatres as they always had shifted strategies and began releasing them direct to home users.  Shea and I wanted to watch “King of Staten Island” starring SNL’s Pete Davidson this summer but I screwed up and after ordering it for $20 from a streaming service, realised I couldn’t download it to take to the lake to watch – only stream it where we had good Internet.  I had 14 days to watch from date of purchase but didn’t catch that I also only had 48 hours to watch the whole movie once I started for some unknown reason.  And since I’d literally watched five seconds of the credits when I first ordered it, when we got back to Regina our movie had “expired” and I had to pay to stream it again.  Still cheaper than actually going to the theatre but a good reminder of why I like piracy so much! 😉

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
Covid has played with our sense of time in many ways including the fact that I spent much of this year thinking I was 48 when I actually only turned 47 in the summer.  So either that’s Covid playing with my sense of time or (crazy inappropriate joke warning) I’m starting to suffer from early onset dementia like John Mann.  (Ouch!)  Anyhow, I think we had my birthday while camping at the lake.  Camping is always our refuge from the world but this year in particular, it felt like a place where things were “normal” if only for a weekend or whatever.  

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
No pandemic?  I’m not excited to go back to the old normal and I hope society changes in many ways to a “new” normal – from bringing in better universal social programs (Universal Basic Income!) to employers being more open to people working from home to, as I said earlier, more appreciation for the unheralded workers who keep society working.  That’s the dream anyhow – time will tell how much of this happens but there were big changes (FDR’s New Deal) coming out of other previous major societal changes – wars and depressions and yes, pandemics.    

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept this year?
Living the cliche, I often had “day PJ’s” and “night PJ’s while working from home.  🙂 

32. What kept you sane?

Probably shouldn’t admit this but both Shea and I saw our drinking go up a fair bit during the year.  It was sort of a running joke that I’d meet her at the door with a mixed drink during my quarantine after she’d had another stressful day at the hospital and that daily drink (or two!) became a bit of a constant in our lives.  (We’re not alone – I didn’t bookmark it but saw one study that said drinking alcohol was up 56% for Canadians during quarantine.  The study I found just now said drinking was only up for 18% of Canadians so that’s a bit better.)  Sarcan Recycling reopened and we waited until September to take our returns and it was a nightmare – we don’t take them regularly as it is so we had cans and bottles from probably *last* Christmas – dozens of bags and boxes of cans and bottles!

33. What political issue stirred you the most?
It was a crazy year in politics too – the Democratic primaries leading to Joe Biden beating out Bernie Sanders, just as Hillary Clinton did four years ago.  But unlike Hillary, Biden got it done and beat Trump (though it’s scary that ~70 million Americans saw all the crazy crap Trump pulled over the last four years and *still* said “Yeah, I’d like four more years of that, please!”  There were a lot of elections this year – US, Sask provincial, municipal – and I was involved in all of them to a bigger or lesser degree (does snarking on Twitter count as US political involvement?)

34. Who did you miss?
We missed a lot of people – Shea and I didn’t get to see our parents as much as we would normally as Covid restrictions ebbed and flowed throughout the year.  I have an aunt who normally spends a month with us in May and she couldn’t come out this year for the first time in maybe a decade or more?  Something simple as being around strangers at restaurants or malls or whatever makes you realise how important human contact is.

35. Who was the best new person you met?
I got to know the Coteau Board members pretty well during the bankruptcy process via nightly meetings at one point.  Everyone was engaged and committed to helping do this right, as ugly and sad as it was.  I think it was the bankruptcy trustee who observed “I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen this.  Most boards or owners would walk away as the easiest, least expensive path but you guys are committed to doing right by creditors, authors and maintaining the legacy of Coteau Books.  It’s pretty amazing.”

36. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned this year.
Always check if any board you’re on a) has liability insurance and b) it’s paid up (we had a panicked moment that this might have been a bill that got missed but luckily, it was in place which allowed all of us to breath a major sigh of relief to know we were a lot less likely to be on the hook for any major liabilities!)  On a related note, one person who was on our board made the astute observation that  “People in bad situations make bad decisions” as a caution that we may overreact or panic or whatever.  That observation was made in reference to the initial stages of the Coteau bankruptcy when there were a lot of unknowns but as 2020 went on, I saw how well that same phrase applied to various people dealing with Covid – from governments to employers to anti-mask protesters.  

37. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year?
“That’s great, it starts with an earthquake/Birds and snakes and aeroplanes.” from REM’s “It’s The End of the World (And I Feel Fine)” felt like it was written for this year!  

38. Link to a photo that sums up your year

39. Best App of the Year
We went pretty heavy on smart devices that were controlled by Google Home/Google Assistant.  Everything from Google speakers throughout the house to LED smart lights to our security cameras to a smart TV – all of which are wirelessly connected to our home network.  A small highlight of my year was programming the three LED lights over our kitchen island to turn on in an alternating pattern of red-green-red when I say “Hey Google! Griswald Family Christmas Lights” out loud! 🙂

40. What single moment defined your year? 
After months of being shut-in, I finally took Shea up on her offer to give me a “quarancut” and even let the kids get in on the action.  

41. Best Meal
Our first sit down meal after being in quarantine and eating nothing but drive-thru or takeout for months was at arguably Regina’s best restaurant, The Willow on Wascana.  We picked it because it has the best patio in Regina, overlooking Wascana Lake and the Legislative Buildings, and we wanted to sit outside if we could.  But when we arrived, the day ended up being cool and windy so we decided to eat inside – one of only two sit down, inside meals we’ve had since Covid hit! (The other one was less memorable – we braved a Cora breakfast joint when we went to a series of appointments on the east side of Regina and simply needed a place to eat as we were both starving.  Our first two choices – a pub style grill and a chain steakhouse were both closed in mid-day – possibly due to them shifting their Covid hours to only being open in evenings though they had no signage to explain either.  So that was maybe our least inspiring meal?  Oh, and like a lot of people, we tried to order takeout from different restaurants throughout quarantine but it was actually a local catering company, Legacy Catering, that provided probably our best meal of that time!