2020 Recap
I’m bad at remembering things so it’s helpful to write stuff down. Thus: a recap post for 2020.
2020 was a surprising year! For everybody, of course, and we’ve said around here that so far we have had the best possible pandemic. But let’s recap!
January
- We got a fish!
- F & I went to a KU bbball game
- T played on a rec basketball team
- BNB EOY dinner at BonBon
- BNB Seattle Trip
- Allen Fieldhouse Tour with DNA
- January 30: my first saved screenshot re: coronavirus in China.
February
- I used my ‘rona worry to stock up on emergency supplies. I feel SO smart about this.
- BNB played with clay at Muddy Waters
March
- Kirklands went to AZ. Covid hit the fan during that week, it was weird and I was legit worried about not being able to fly home. Last plane trip of 2020.
- School shut down (for a few weeks, they said)
- BNB went all-remote (for a couple of weeks, we said)
- Church went to zoom (for a couple of weeks, we said)
- Soccer shut down (for a couple of weeks, they said)
- Gym shut down (for a couple of weeks, they said)
- Pandemic shutdown in full swing. We stopped eating out, went for a lot of walks, started sewing masks.
April
- launch of v1 of Neumz, which got a ton of press
- School went ‘remote’, which was extremely half-assed. We tried to supplement with some other requirements
- started regular zoom calls with college friends
- started movie/pizza Friday nights with kids, because what else?
- gym passed out equipment and I got a rowing machine at home!
- F soccer officially end for the season
- E got laid off officially from her job, starts part-time job of just trying to get unemployment
May
- the spring was beautiful, and we spent many, many hours on the porch and going for evening walks.
- TK and I discover geocaching
- Cheesey Day News starts (I think?)
- We taught the kids to play Spades, and really doubled down on our board games.
June
- FK started baking bread, in true pandemic style
- We didn’t got to Maine as planned
July
- gym reopened, with lots of restrictions
- the summer was mild, which was a relief because there was nowhere else to go
- EK didn’t go to Poland as planned
August
- started homeschooling (The Studio Kirkland Center for Ongoing Virally-Induced Development)
- Dad called to tell me about a UFO, which we figured out was a Google Project Loon balloon
- FK soccer restarted. He got to guest play on the next team up, so we had more soccer than usual all fall (and spring 2021)
- I started teaching a lecture course at KU - ADS300. Zoom lectures for that many people were rrrough at first.
- I think we visited STL this month? It felt like we were putting my folks at risk.
September
- Kansas road trip to the Little Jerusalem Badlands, newest state park. I got chased by a tarantula hawk wasp.
- EK started residential carpentry class at local tech school
- FK took an online architecture class
- I took my first COVID test (randomly selected for KU, despite teaching all-remote course)
October
- an early snow!
- low key Halloween, sort of. We made some costumes but didn’t go trick or treating. I walked Kuel around his neighborhood and we saw many covid ‘candy chutes’
November
- BNB went to visit an alpaca farm
- crazy Presidential election, I took a week of screenshots showing electoral maps
- Zoom pie night, which was sad but I enjoyed our pies.
- lovely at-home Thanksgiving. EK made a beautiful meal, and we had a whole ham all to ourselves.
- No chicago trip.
- I started growing a pandemic mustache, finally
- BNB finally gave up the lease to our (empty) office
December
- EK demo’d TK’s room down to the cinderblock, and the interior walls to studs. Rebuild commenced in 2021, I think.
- I stepped down as Trustee at church
- Nice quiet Christmas at home, then drove to STL on xmas morning to see fam. Still felt weird to be in person!
All in All
I feel like the highlights here are negative, but it was actually a beautiful, positive year for us. E and I say it feels like we stole and extra year with the kids, and we loved spending so much time together, free from our obligations and activities. We ate every meal at home for a better part of a year. It felt like we moved out to the countryside. And nobody got the ‘rona. Yet.
The Cheesey Day News Weather Report
One of our homeschool/pandemic projects, mostly spearheaded by Editor-in-Chief Trudy, was The Cheesey Day News, a local paper that the kids produced. We’ve done 8 issues so far? They write stories, fill it up with games and puzzles, and have even taken some ad dollars.
I had only a very small part of it, but I got to make a weather report for each issue, which I very much enjoyed.
Knockoff Sculpture
Look, copying from master craftsmen is a perfectly acceptable practice, right? So I saw and adored this series of concrete sculptures from David Umemoto, and wanted to make my own. What better pandemic pasttime?
Here’s the original sculpture I wanted to try to copy:
Figuring out how to make an inverted version of this, the negative space that I could pour concrete around, pretty much broke my brain. There were a lot of spreads in my sketchbook that looked like this:
First I realized that I could build myself a set of negative shapes, so I got a bunch of stock wood and started making myself building blocks. These involved a lot of cutting and sanding, and at the end of the day I had a bunch of wooden blocks.
Then it was just a matter of building the reverse version, and putting it in a mold. It went… OK? I had a few attempts that failed miserably because I didn’t build in sufficient wiggle room to get the wooden blocks out, and then destroyed the concrete trying to get out all the molded parts. I applied generous sprays of Pam cooking spray, but who knows if that helped.
I suppose the original artist must use nylon pieces or something, but at the end of the day I had a draft I was happy enough to keep:
Lots of room for improvement, primarily getting a smoother finish on the concrete, and getting much sharper edges and corners. Also finding a better way to get it all the negative mold shapes out cleanly. Maybe coating the individual pieces of block in some kind of wax?
Guédelon
A pandemic obsession of mine has been the castle of Guédelon.
Look, how frigging up my alley is this? There is a castle in France that is being built right now, using only methods available in the 1200s. They have a good-enough media team so they produce good videos and photos, AND you can go volunteer there.
I made the kids watch all four hours of a BBC special on it called Secrets of the Castle (which is silly in places but super interesting throughout). I watched their short web series called Les Feux de Guédelon.
This is the sort of thing that’s either self-recommending to you or not. Do you want to learn about medieval stone masonry? How they lifted really heavy stuff to build castles? Woodworking? Blacksmithing? Food? Weapons?
The incredible part really is that people are doing this NOW. It’s one thing to read about how this worked on a plaque in a museum. It’s another to see people who are taking years to develop skills and create a microeconomy of everything you need to build a castle.
Yes, I get that there’s a real dorky historical-reenactor thing happening here, but they’re not just camping out in old clothes. They’re making stuff! I ate these videos up, and if there weren’t a pandemic on I would be seriously looking at booking flights to go visit. My consolation is that they will probably still be doing this for ten more years, so I’ll have a chance.
Little Profits
One of my New Year’s Projects (resolutions are Stupid, but time-limited projects are Great) is to memorize a bunch of poems. I have a pretty bad memory, which I chalk up to being a future-oriented person. But I love poetry, and have often wished I had more at my fingertips. So in 2020, I’ve been learning a few poems by heart. Trudy is participating too! There are a few poems she’s learning separately, and some we’re learning together.
January’s poem was Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson. I’ve always loved this, and gosh it is a fun one to say out loud. It’s long, though, and was a difficult start! The best most helpful tool was finding that there are readings of this poem on SPOTIFY, so I could practice this on a commute or bike ride. Really helpful! I have very much enjoyed having this memorized now - it’s got so many great turns of phrase. Plus it is so dramatic! It’s a real barn-burner.
Next up for February was a shorter but weirdly more difficult one, God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins is fun to recite but with tongue-twisty bits and unnatural phrasing, so it took more brute-force memorization. Very satisfying to get correct though, and also audio versions were very helpful. This isn’t my favorite Hopkins but I was intimidated by his phrasing, and limited myself to something that I could find an audio version of. In retrospect the way some of its word choices just don’t translate anymore make this a less valuable poem to have in my pocket. Modern usages of words or phrases undermine what Hopkins is trying to say, so it takes a lot of mental effort to track with. Valuable for what, Matt? I don’t know, it’s not like I’m pulling these out at parties. But when Hopkins says things like ‘it will flame out’ he means that sparks of light and heat will appear - not that it will end. But I do love the rhythm and alliteration: once you get the hang of why do men then now not reck his rod? it is just FUN to say.
March was The Sun says Yes by Adrian Mitchell; Trudy memorized this whole thing with me. It’s a favorite of ours from ‘A Poem for Every Night of the Year’ and we have written our own extra stanzas before, so it was great to work on this together - especially over our spring break road trip in Arizona, where T & I had a lot of hours together to practice.
For April I added the apocalyptic The Second Coming by Yeats, to go along with the world-shaking events of Corona Time. Turns out I don’t really like this poem! This was the first example that turned out not too hard to memorize, but unsatisfying all the same. It’s so well-worn that the coinage has lost its shine for me. Most of it feels trite.
May has been Billy Collins’ “The Country”, an old favorite and one that I have often wished I had at my fingertips. It’s a great story-poem, and one with a lot of humor that anybody could appreciate. Plus, Collins’ phrasing is so natural - it felt more like memorizing lines for a play compared to Tennyson or Hopkins. But I still found it useful to have an audio version, and I went so far as to rip an mp3 from a reading on youtube and load it on my phone.
What’s in June? I’m not sure, but I expect to do the St. Crispin’s Day speech around that time of the year, and somewhere in here Coleridge’s Xanadu, since I reference that all the time.
I am super into this project, and with five months in, it seems like a sustainable thing I can do for a year’s span.
(Little Profits?) The title of this note comes from the first line of of Ulysses, the poem I started this exercise with: It little profits that an idle king…