Highlights of my 2021:
- Got “evicted” and bought a house.
- Oh my God we bought a frikkin’ HOUSE
- Okay, it’s technically a condo but we have a mortgage
- I’m still not sure if I need to ask the landlord’s permission to hang a poster
- Our rector resigned from the parish
- Stephanie’s father had to be put in assisted living.
For a supposed writer, this was not a great year of writing. I had many challenges to my focus and many demands on my time and working from home while sharing an office with another working-from-home worker who was on the phone all day made everything harder.
Let alone packing up two apartments.
Embellishments
Since I am a writer by some definition, I have a habit of “bumping the bass line” of things and looking for ulterior motives. The following clews presented themselves to me:
- There is an eviction moratorium due to COVID.
- There is a maximum of 10% rent increases in my city.
- We have not had a rent increase in a few years.
So my writing brain determined the only way any management company or rental owner could squeeze blood from this stone was to “sell” the property to a new “owner” (who could quite possibly be tangentially related to the family business that manages this place) and the new “owner” could therefore establish a new base rent and double our rent, using a loophole in the limitation of raising rents.
Of course, I was wrong about this and the real truth of the matter is that the owner did sell the property and the new owner did want to live in our unit and we got the boot. All perfectly panic-inducing legal. Which is why it feels like we were evicted even when we weren’t.
We packed. And packed. And packed. Then our friends came over and helped us pack. Then they helped us move (thanks to all you are all wonderful people) and then we went back and packed some more.
Stephanie offered to make pies for thanksgiving and we couldn’t find the rolling pins, so she had to use a wine bottle. (This is what they call foreshadowing in the writing trade.)
And two months later when we ordered new checks to have checks with our new address on it, they were delivered to the old place and our old neighbor (one of those wonderful who helped us pack and move) said there was also a box of stuff we left behind in a kitchen cupboard. Including the rolling pins we couldn’t find. However, the baguette tray is still a no-show.
Stephanie’s father
This is not my story to tell, but let me say that a person living in a single bedroom apartment for over 20 years is much more than a dozen U-Haul vans’ worth of stuff, including the junk haulers we overpaid to deal with the detritus. February, March, and April were pretty much eaten up by that project.
Writing
I started the year trying to work on a novel project that I’ve started several times already, but organization and momentum and focus all failed on me.
I did write a complete short story that I need to polish up and send out to who knows where, and another flash piece that has no genre elements whatsoever so I have no idea where to send it.
I still like plotting and worldbuilding more than sorting out the stories themselves. I picked up The Story Engine Deck and now have the Deck of Worlds printed out in a pile on my personal desk. I even have a specific notebook I set aside to hand-write the generated prompts and any ideas that come from them. I hope to use these to help me out with some other long-term projects that will probably never see the light of day because I’ve lost the habit of writing.
I wanted to spend the year working on a series of personal essays, just to have something to fill this space but give me a sense of accomplishment. I have instead a lot of notes in an Obsidian vault and some very long reddit posts and comments.
I did come up with a few entries for Better Writing Through Reading but I have to go through them and–you guessed it–polish them up.
The Rector Resigns
According to my notes, we learned about this the same week we closed on the new house, so we really didn’t have the emotional energy to devote to that particular “crisis”. The scare quotes are necessary because this isn’t a crisis. Change is the only constant in the universe and while I know there are people who only came to this parish because of a connection to the rector, there are still a number of people who were here when we called her back in 2009.
I choose to look on this as an adventure. Reviving the community from two years of online services and low attendance and (sadly) lower pledging will be helped by having new leadership. Not that the rector was bad, or doing a bad job, or was not well-liked. She is still well-loved by the community. No, she was tired. For many months she, her assistant, the music director, and a cameraman ran the show from the building. I helped by hosting the Facebook side of things, and it’s the only time I really have opened Facebook in three years.
So our rector is gone, our assistant is on leave, and our supply priest has ended her contract, so we’ll be relying on associates until an interim can be hired and I understand they will be hard to find. But that’s okay. We’re a strong community. We’ll get through.
Working from home
Working from home sucked. Stephanie and I had been sharing a 9′ by 11′ office since April 2020. Now we have our own offices, so working from home sucks a little less. I still miss the office. Even though the members of my immediate team no longer all live in the same city (and even my local teammates worked from home before the lockdown), I was around other people and moving more. I definitely drank more water and I got more daily activity.
I do like having an office to myself again, but I miss people.
I seem to have really taken off as a redditor. I found a few subreddits (what my old school thinking still calls “channels”) that interest me and I have had some great discussions and really flexed my opportunities for pontification and pedantry. So at least I’m having a good time over there.
2021 was a year of lost chances. We had a chance to recover and chose death by COVID instead. We managed to keep our democratic system of government in place for a little while but it’s still under attack. Even Dave Barry couldn’t make the year worth laughing at, and if there’s one thing I think we all desperately need, is the ability to laugh at ourselves again. We take things too seriously.
I hope and pray 2022 will be the year we come back.