As we close in on a full year of pandemic I decided to get off my literary butt to write a wee blog post about how tired I am of everything right now -- just a big pile of pandemic fatigue and zoom fatigue and quarantine fatigue and winter fatigue and February fatigue and meeting fatigue and social media fatigue and email fatigue and leftovers fatigue and meeting fatigue, etc., etc., etc., etc. ETC!!!
If I had to pick one word to describe that essay, it would be "tiresome."
Nobody wants to read that post, including me.
I'll settle for saying this. If you're tired of it all, please know that you're not alone. We're with you.
Instead of the tiresome essay, perhaps instead I'll give you all a quick update on the state of the ol' Patio Boat Blog in 2021. As anybody who stopped by here in the last year has seen, the blog's been pretty much closed for new business. This wasn't by design. It was collateral damage from a bad case of "Sitting at my desk at home all day" fatigue. Once the pandemic hit and I moved to full-time work-from-home status, I began spending *a lot* of my time sitting at this desk with my work computer. I also began taking *a lot* of photos after the work day, mostly of sunsets as I sat out on the lake. Those took a good deal of additional sorting out on my home computer, conveniently located four inches away from my work computer.
There was not a lot of creative spark left after that. And there was ZERO desire to sit at my desk for any additional time. I did try writing a few posts about quarantine life, but they were pretty whiny. I reckoned the world had enough whining without my contribution. I did try writing a few posts about the appalling state of politics in the United States. I reckoned the world had enough political fury without me throwing a few extra blog posts on that pile, too.
So, other than sitting at the desk and working all day I mostly just spent the last year taking pretty pictures, mostly of sunsets out on the lake.
The best of the pretty pictures got uploaded to Facebook or turned into calendars at year's end. I put together 10 different 2021 calendars this year, which was crazy. I guess that made me more of a photographer than a writer for the last year. Ironically, though I've never been a prolific writer, I was an incredibly prolific photographer for the last year or so. I went back and counted in November and in the 12 months between Thanksgiving 2019 and Thanksgiving 2020 I took more than 20,000 photos.
About 1/2 of 1% of all the pretty pictures I took made it into a calendar.
Here, have a pretty picture:
It is just barely possible that I turned to taking pretty pictures as my way of dealing with the whole freaking world falling apart as a reminder that there was true beauty even when all seemed ugly. Gosh, that sounds noble when I type it. But mostly, I was so tired at the end of every workday that I just floated out on the lake, stared at the Sun, and brought my camera along for the ride. Then sorting them out afterwards to pick out the best of the best was a heckuva lot better thing to concentrate on that the horrific state of the world.
A better blogger would've shared many of those pretty pictures here. Alas, gentle reader, you have me. Maybe I'll post some as we go along in 2021.
As I write up this little lunchtime post, it crossed 50 degrees on our porch thermometer for the first time since November. Spring is coming. Vaccinations are coming. The end of the pandemic is coming -- though I reckon Monique and I will need to be hunkered down in place for a few more months before our turn in the vaccine queue comes. Still, just as I now think about everything before the pandemic as The Beforedays, I'm starting to think about what comes afterwards as The Afterdays.
I'd like to put together the occasional blog post in the Afterdays. I may have useful thoughts about things when one day I am not so fatigue fatigued. I'd like to hope the last year has given me some useful perspective on things that I didn't have before. I sure hope so.
Anyway, that's the State of the ol' Patio Boat Blog and your not-so-humble correspondent in 2021: plum tuckered out, but slowly lurching back to life and hoping for better times in the Afterdays. We shall see.
In conclusion, I give you my new life coach and animal spirit: Madeleine Kahn as Lili Von Shtüpp singing "I'm Tired." Hang in there folks. The Afterdays are coming.