2020

2019 is over.  While on balance it was a good year for me, it seems to have been a crapshow for the world in general.  So happy 2020!  (which will be worse)

None of our friends were throwing New Year parties this year, so we decided to try something new and go to a party at a hotel.  This was a Havana-themed party, with a buffet of Cuban delicacies, a mojito bar, a cigar tent, and a live band, plus we had a lovely suite to stay in and got a made-to-order breakfast on January 1.

As it turned out, the Cuba-themed buffet had more to do with Cuba, New Mexico than with any island in the Caribbean.  Not that it wasn’t good otherwise.  The mojito bar reminded me why I shouldn’t drink cheap rum.  The cigars were Dominican.  The band was perfectly fine, but they weren’t Caribbean either.

This is not to say that good times were not had, it’s just that they weren’t quite the good times I was expecting.  I danced for the first time since my hip replacement, and did well, with no more pain than if I’d been walking.  The party was seven hours long, so we required a rest partway through.  We had fun chatting with folks, but it would have been more fun if some of our friends had come.  The breakfast was good, and we had more chat with folks we’d met the night before.

New Years Day we drove to the Bernardo bird refuge and checked out the lovely flocks of sandhill cranes flying in at dusk.  Among those flocks still on the ground we noticed a single white duck keeping company with the much larger cranes.  One flock at a time the cranes took off, and when the last flight left the white duck ran after them as long as it could.  Apparently it couldn’t fly, and was staying with the cranes for protection.  In the end it was alone in the field, and there was nothing we could do to help it.

That’s a metaphor for so much, right?

Let’s hope things get better during the rest of 2020.