anyway, i feel like i'm doing myself a disservice by neglecting this journal because i feel like 20 years from now me won't have anything to look back on from now me.

i won't try to cover everything, but will hit some highlights...

covid started out early in 2020 as something i'd occasionally hear mentioned on the radio, then in mid-march i was scheduled to go to california for work the next day and was in a meeting for the emergency / risk management team and found out i wouldn't be going anywhere.  at first, when i asked if employees would be given the option to work from home i wasn't exactly laughed at, but i could tell that no one expected that to happen.  i think we ended up closing the office a week or two later and now here we are 7 months later and i've been working from home for the majority of that time.

wfh is good and bad.  it's good because there are almost no distractions.  i can set my alarm for 8:25, get up, brush my teeth, put the coffee on, take my 5 second commute to my home office and be at work no time at 8:30.  it's bad because it gets kind of lonely.  in the office when things are slow you can walk over and talk to your colleagues.  at home they're just a teams call away, but it's just not the same.  you can't really video call someone for no reason.

also - when covid came, budgets got slashed so there's not a lot of "new" stuff going on.  well, that's not exactly true.  we've used this as an opportunity to get caught up on a bunch of the stuff that had been sitting on the bottom of the to do list.  we've also used it to try to implement new stuff that doesn't cost money, like a new employee intranet.  the tour's 2020 schedule ended up missing something like 10-15 events that had originally been planned.  fortunately, lpga was in a pretty good financial position when this hit so we've not had to worry about layoffs.  they tell us the office will do a soft reopening after thanksgiving and open back up business as (mostly) usual in january.

during covid, noelle and i have done a lot of home improvement type stuff.  i tore down my old shed because the roof and floor were rotting and built a new one.  i'm working on rescreening the back porch and getting a new storm door.  noelle picked up a small wooden table and storage cabinet from facebook marketplace.  we sanded and repainted them and are using them on the porch.  we also got a new beer fridge.

i painted the house.  the paint was stained from sprinklers and rain splash in a lot of places and had faded pretty badly in others, so it needed it.  my original intent was to invite the family and friends over and have a painting party, but i ended up doing most of it myself.  i got about a day's work out of noelle.

noelle bought some new plants for the front flower bed and is working on pulling the rocks out to plant them.  that is a huge pita and i expect it'll probably take 2 weekends to finish.

we also replaced the hall lights with led fixtures, replaced the light fixtures in both bathrooms and added some recessed led fixtures in the living room.

the laminate flooring in the house is really starting to show its age.  as well, i ended up ripping out most of the carpet and replacing it with laminate one room at a time so the flooring is kind of a hodgepodge at this point.  i'm planning to tear everything out and replace all the floors later this year.

i'd really like to paint the kitchen cabinets and redo the countertops, but 1) painting cabinets isn't hard but man is it tedious, and 2) granite countertops are expensive!

it seems like restaurants started reopening around july, so since then we've been able to go out to eat which has been nice.

i booked an alaska cruise for next june.  my parents and sister's family are going with us.  we're flying in to anchorage and staying in an airbnb there for two days prior to the cruise, then the cruise is 7 days going from seward, ak to vancouver, ca.  i'm not looking forward to the long flights, but i think once we're there it should be amazing.

i traded my 2011 f150 for a 2019 f150 last year.  had a ton of issues with it, fought with ford for 3 or 4 months and finally convinced them it was a lemon so they bought it back from me.  i was originally looking at buying a honda or toyota but ended up buying a used hyundai sonata from carmax because the new cars i was looking at didn't seem like they were worth the asking price.  it's ok.  it's a nice car, but i sure do miss having the room of the truck.  for me, for cargo and for the stuff i got used to carrying around with me in the tool box - which as it turns out was quite a lot of stuff.  i liked the idea of having a fairly complete set of tools with me everywhere i went.  now i've got to make do with what i can fit it a small rubbermade container in the trunk which amounts to a hammer, pliers, some screwdrivers, a small socket set, utility knife and that's about it.

we've slowly started planning for solheim '21.  i had an awesome time at solheim '17 so i'm really looking forward to it.

that's about all i can think of right now, so i'm going to end it here.