Trump getting voted out was definitely the best thing that happened for me.

I was not a fan of how the year started with Tim's unexpected heart surgery, except I *do* love how his doctor caught the mitral valve damage so early that it was repaired before it could cause any permanent damage. So I guess I put that in the win column for 2020.

Also, 2020 brought us 2 new great-nieces and 1 new great-nephew, and although family gatherings are severely curtailed, new babies are still awesome.

I got an enormous increase for my freelance rate for 2021, which was a definite unexpected good thing from 2020.

Because of quarantine, I've seen several shows from musicians I love, because they turned to livestreaming since concerts were cancelled. I've seen Lyle Lovett livestreaming maybe 4 times now (5 next week with motherfucking Elvis Costello, HOLY BALLS), and there's no way in a regular year I'd get to see him perform more than once. So I appreciate the opportunities that have come about from musicians figuring out how to still perform during a pandemic.

And god YES, the election.

Oh! Also the prospect of a coronavirus vaccine starting to be rolled out some time this month. That will be good.

That's...more good things than I thought I was going to post when I started typing. Wow!

Although I do appreciate that we had a long tradition of hating years before it was cool.

Ha!

I'm not going to think too hard about the ramifications of that

Focusing on the good. We've been pretty healthy this year. We were in a business that wasn't hurt by the pandemic, although things were pretty hectic for a while there while my doctors were trying to figure out how to function.

My eldest child spent the summer with me in Otter Lake, and I didn't kill him. He ended up getting a job he likes, an apartment he loves, and is happier and more stable than he has been in a decade or more. And he sends me pictures of snow because he still finds it a shiny new experience.

My younger son bought a house and moved out of mine, and he and his wife are making me a grandmother in January. Our relationship is very strained at the moment, but I believe the issues are the piles of stress in his life so I am just responding to him when he communicates and letting it be for the time.

OMG, I don't have to move to Canada! The damage that still can be done before January 20th is a daunting thought, but an end is in sight. There are effective vaccines being rolled out, and although there will still be so many thousands of people who will become ill and possibly die, there is an end in sight.

I'm very grateful that most (alas not all) of my loved ones have taken this pandemic very seriously and remained safe and healthy.

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KB, I hate Donald Trump as much as the next person, and I know you probably didn’t mean to be hurtful. However, the term Diaper Donnie is very ableist and hurtful to those of us with disabilities. I do not know if the DT has incontinence or not, but if he does, it is not one of his many character flaws.

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Hey, Laura, that's a perfectly reasonable joke, but maybe not the moment for it, since treating people with disabilities as parallel to toddlers can feel like infantilization, which is a major form of ablism.