Hi guys!
Remember me? My last blog post was back in 2015 when COVID was nary a blip on the radar.
A lot has happened since then.
For one, this blog completely ignores the dark 4 years of the worst president this country has ever seen. Maybe it was too traumatic a time to even think about reliving on an online journal.
But I don’t want to get into all that. I feel like, all things considered, I had a pretty great 2021. And I felt the need to talk about it somewhere. Thought about this blog and if I even remembered the password. At some point, I guess Google bought out Blogspot and made this login super easy. So here I am on New Year’s Eve 2020 at 7AM in the morning resurrecting this thing.
Let’s start with the big news. Greg and I finally got married! After getting engaged in 2017, planning a quasi-destination wedding for two years to happen on April 16, 2020, COVID shut everything down a month before the wedding and caused us to postpone everything to fall of 2020… only to have to postpone again to spring of 2021. Then it was cancelled outright by our venue. When we came around to replanning the entire thing during a pandemic, having 80 people all together did not seem like the best idea, so we severely scaled down our wedding to 25 people. We used an AirBNB type service to find a house in the Hollywood Hills that had an amazing view of Downtown LA. We set up a fancy dinner at Greg’s mom’s backyard with a 4-course private chef meal. It was very DIY, but was everything we wanted while still being as safe as we possibly could be. I think it was worth the wait.
Also helping us through this pandemic is our lab rescue London. He keeps us occupied with constant trips to the dog parks. We adopted him in 2019 and he’s been a joy (and a handful).
Given that 2020 was mostly spent waiting for the vaccine in our tiny apartment, no one did any traveling. Greg and I did a few staycations in La Jolla and Palm Desert. This year we more than made up for the lack of travel with 3 trips! After getting vaccinated in April, we spent a week in Cozumel, Mexico in May. Then for our minimoon, we did an all-vaccinated cruise on the Koningsdam (Holland America) which stopped in Cabo, Mazatlan, and Puerto Vallarta. Then we went on our Christmas Market extravaganza in Canada (Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto) and New York. In the mix was a wonderful weekend getaway in Palm Springs proper to celebrate MacArthur’s belated 40th.
And speaking of 40ths, I celebrated mine this year as well with a Mrs. Nesbit themed birthday tea party. Again, because of COVID, we had to limit the amount of people. So it wasn’t the usual rager of previous parties past. But it was still a sense of normalcy in these crazy times. I’ll admit though that as I’ve gotten older I’ve had less drive to go completely bonkers with the themes of my parties. I hope to continue planning themed parties for the big birthday years (hopefully in a house of our own).
Oh and lastly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that after 2 years of this pandemic, that spiky bitch finally caught me. I’m not entirely sure where the point of exposure was. I think it had to have been in New York, but that would mean it would have had to have been incubating inside me for 4 days before I felt my first symptom. Greg thinks I caught it at the gym and felt the symptoms immediately after, which could be the case given that the antibodies produced by the vaccine went to work on it right away. In any case, this highly contagious Omicron variant got me, but as of this writing, I was successful in not passing it on to Greg (which is actually super crazy). I only felt symptoms for 2-3 days and my test didn’t show positive until after the symptoms were subsiding. The hardest part was spending Christmas in isolation, even away from Greg. We had sushi in separate rooms over FaceTime. But like I said earlier, crazy times.
Okay that’s enough recap this morning. See you the next time I have a pretty, pretty good year (all things considered).
Quarantined,
Ricky
