Merry Christmas! Late.
Time has been a slippery eel this year. Periods of seeming inactivity made time pass slowly. Then the calendar began to fill, to which we were so unaccustomed that entire months passed quickly and unnoticed. That brings us to the end of the year, with nothing yet posted on the blog.
Here is a brief synopsis to catch up (and incidentally to serve as our Christmas letter). Memory is foggy in Slippery-Eel-Time years, so I have organized the general flow of events by looking through old photos and picking one for each month. Or sometimes two. I can no longer count.
January
Mostly projects around the house and hiking. Chad got me a cheap laser cutter, which he then spent much time and effort to retrofit with niceties like safety interlocks and a water cooling system. I gave it warning stickers and proceeded to burn... er make... stuff.
February
Local van camping trips and hiking at Joe Grant and Arroyo Seco. We were happy to see that many local areas that had burned the previous year are recovering nicely.
March
In a truly talented move, I broke my hand doing laundry. Fortunately, I could still hike, sometimes with Chad, and sometimes with Kean, who was still doing online college from home.
April
Chad and I went out to the desert to Not Act Our Ages to celebrate my very large round-number birthday.
May
More local camping in the van, this time to Bodega Bay. We were lucky enough to find a rare last-minute coastal camping spot (these are hard to come by around here in this era of too many people camping) and explored the hills on our bikes.
June
For the kiddo, gainful employment for the summer as a counselor at Hidden Villa. For Chad and me, mountain biking! Pictured are a trail up near Downieville, and our camp from a quick bikepacking trip to Henry Coe. Both pictures may look idyllic, but rest assured, we also found the requisite amount of suffering on hills that one is never quite fully in shape for...
July
Road trip up to WA! This was the longest excursion of the year -- we spent a couple of weeks on the road, visiting Linda on the way out of CA, meeting my brother and dad on a crystal dig in NV, climbing Lassen Peak, exploring places to mountain bike in southern OR, visiting my parents, seeing my brother again back at his place with the rest of his family, hiking and camping at Mt Rainer, camping on the slopes of Mt. Shasta, and making an early-morning run home through the Central Valley to outrun the worst of a heat wave.
August
The long-awaited dropoff of the kiddo in Southern CA for college! While this was a big transition for Kean, he did appreciate being able to attend actual in-person studio classes at Otis. One nice feature of the area is that one is able to occasionally walk down the hill to the beach.
September
More jolly projects and bicycle time. Chad had an unusual work week in which he was up in the mountains with some USGS folks, assessing conditions in the big Dixie wildfire burn area. I camped with him near Oroville on the way up, but had to be home for a Tuesday night rehearsal, so rode my bike across the Central Valley through a mix of small idyllic farms and large less-idyllic headwind-infested farms to catch the train home from Davis.
October
Many pictures of the cat on my phone. Kean was missing the Bobber, so I instituted the COD, or "Cat of Day" text stream.
November
More fun micro-trips. First a weekend up in SF to celebrate our anniversary, which at that point was about as Covid-free a major city as one could find. It was decidedly odd to be doing urban things like going to dinner, to a museum, to see live jazz, shopping... Later in the month, we made a run down to Joshua Tree to meet up with Kean and some friends for Thanksgiving camping.
December
I sang with Early Music Singers in our first concert since the pandemic started. It was so weird to walk into the church for the dress rehearsal to be surprised by the Christmas decorations, and then realize it was the first time any of us had been in that space for two years. I was the only one bold enough to go with a bright green mask (hey, the director did say any color of mask...).
And to end the year, mountain biking in the snow on the way up to Downieville (lots of Downieville weekends this year, but this was the first one where we encountered snow).
