The dragonfruit plant had a good grow this month. I don't think I was quite as productive, but I did some miscellaneous bits and pieces.
January was a month for stop motion animation, robots, dragonfruit, and snow.
I had all of December off work, following the end of my previous job. I couldn't go travelling of course, but I definitely needed the time off: in both jobs I finished this year I'd been saving up annual leave to carry over, with the result that I'd taken very little off. I played some computer games, had a few very nice local walks, and read quite a lot.
November was quite a stressful month but it picked up towards the end. On the first Monday I was made redundant with a month's notice. I was overwhelmed at how lovely everyone was when I mentioned it. A whole bunch of people forwarded me job ads and I applied for a bunch of them. One of them came through, and after four interviews with them during the next couple of weeks, I was offered the job! I start in January.
The main two conferences I was looking forward to this year were cancelled, but I made up for PyCon UK by making welsh cakes, which are traditionally served during breaks there in Cardiff.
I can't really find a good theme for this month; it was a lot of miscellany but I feel like I did a fair amount.
In an alternative universe, I would have been in Australia this month, perhaps watching the perseid meteor storm from the middle of a desert. In the real world, the only meteors I dealt with were the ones that dumped Tiberium into the Command & Conquer universe, as I bought the C&C Remastered pack to play Tiberian Dawn for the first time. (And yes, that was a terrible segue.) I also harvested a good amount of homegrown vegetables, inspired a cursed Mr Blobby meme, and drew a bunch of cat faces, which turned into a late attempt at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
naarmamo, the Art-Making Month.
In July I attempted to fix a broken laptop using another broken laptop, and ended up with two broken laptops. I also found a recipe that I like for Millionnaire's Shortbread, tried tempeh for the first time, and had homegrown courgette for the first time too. I also watched through Sense8. On my third Jovian birthday, I spotted and photographed Comet NEOWISE from my back garden.
I started my new job on the first day of the month, so naturally was quite worn out learning new things to begin with! However, my garden came alive, and for a while I had spinach, golden raspberries, flowering courgettes, broad beans (though they later got decimated by aphids), chickpea plants, apple blossom, and cauliflower seeds.
May was pretty quiet, but I did manage to have a second solitary Easter when I discovered that the shops had a lot of chocolate eggs discounted a few weeks after due to low demand. This was my last month of my previous job; I finished on Friday 29th. My new driving licence also arrived in the post, and I watched through all of the would-be Eurovision entrants on Youtube with Emily and Tim in a surrogate Eurovision evening. I also planted out most of the vegetables in the garden, and started growing some thyme and rosemary.
LOCKDOWN.
It was around the 3rd March that I first mentioned COVID-19 on my Twitter feed and I planned to essentially lock down the weekend following that, two weeks before the official lockdown ended up beginning, not least because I had an Important Appointment that I really didn't want to be ill for. (That ended up being rescheduled to be a video call, so it worked out okay.) My (now previous) employer scuppered that plan somewhat by calling me into London for an international meeting, but as far as I know I didn't pick anything up.
Surprise Tromsø! There were reindeer to be raced, Emily's birthday to be celebrated, and annual leave carry-over to be used up, and that meant an unexpected third trip to the arctic before Emily was due to finish her year's contract out there. In addition to those flights, I also had Flight, a multi-sensory experience in a shipping container in Nottingham. On the 29 Feb I spend an evening with Samathy, Lex, and one of Samathy's friends at the board game café, which I think was the last time I met up with any friends or family.
In a rotten omen of things to come, I started 2020 quite ill with flu-like symptoms, and had to miss a New Year's Party. I was just about well enough a few days later to, in a move that would be shocking now, travel to London on the train for a couple of art exhibitions I'd booked. For the other weekends, I watched Frozen 2 at the cinema, signed An Important Thing, and made vegetarian haggis for Burns Night.
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