The tentative optimism that developed from the time Holly and I had gotten vaccinated late in the spring withered when we hit December thanks to the emergence of the Omicron variant. Luckily, we had gotten our booster shots in November so Omicron isn’t quite as concerning for us as it could have been. It is distressing, to say the least, that we’re back in a situation where there are so many new cases per day. The 7-day moving average of new cases as of this writing is about 491,000. Previously, the moving average peaked at about 250,000 cases last January. It’s hard to believe that during the summer we almost dipped under 10,000 cases per day.
We feel fortunate that we had gotten to do some things during the summer and early fall. Theoretically, since we’ve gotten our booster shot, we should be fairly well-protected against Omicron, but we’re content to keep a low profile during the winter and hope things take a turn for the better in the spring.
We took advantage of indoor dining early in December for Holly’s birthday.
We went to lunch at Second District Brewing. They require proof of vaccination which gave some peace of mind. It was also nearly empty which also made it comfortable. As usual, all my dining out photos were taken with my Samsung Galaxy S9+.
That night, we went to Vedge which also requires proof of vaccination. We had gotten delivery from them last year for her birthday which was good, but it was nice to be able to eat there in person.
After that outing, we decided to take a break from indoor dining for the foreseeable future. We did return to Second District Brewing on New Year’s Eve for lunch again. That time, we sat outside.
Christmas was fairly quiet. Being cautious, we canceled the plans we had made with my brother. We did get out for some walks specifically looking for Christmas decorations.
Taken with my Canon EOS 5D Mark IV using my Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 lens:
Taken with my Olympus TG-5:
Taken with my Canon EOS Rebel 2000 using my Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 lens and Kodak Color Plus film:
We also finally bought a Christmas tree after being in our apartment for 10 years without one. We have a smallish apartment so most trees would be too large. I had seen a tree available from Crate and Barrel that was quite thin so we decided to get it. We were very glad we did since it really brightened up the apartment and provided some additional cheer among all the bad news of the world.
Over the years, we collected a few Christmas ornament so we were able to decorate the tree. Many of the ornaments have a local flavor. It was fun being able to put them on a tree rather than our usual placing them on our windowsill and other places.
These photos were also taken with my Canon EOS Rebel 2000 but with my Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens:
You can see all my Christmas and winter break photos in my Flickr album.
Photography
Obviously, I covered some of my photography above but otherwise, I have fallen behind with posting about my photography adventures. I still have 3 recently developed rolls of film I would like to post about. I also broke out my light box to take picture of some of our Christmas gifts. I still haven’t taken a close look as to how they turned out, but if they look good, I’ll want to post about those as well.
I did catch up a little during December:
Writing
The big writing news from the month was getting my story, No One Way Things Happen, published in Monday Night.
I’m glad the year ended with that bit of good news as I don’t otherwise have much to show for my efforts. I had worked on some new stories the first half of the year but spent a lot of the second half of the year bogged down with a lot of perfunctory revising. Not that that’s a bad thing. It needed to be done, but it didn’t feel like forward momentum.
I did continue paying a fair amount of attention to this blog. I didn’t post quite as often as I had last year (54 posts in 2021 vs. 63 posts in 2020), but my traffic was a little better (4,003 visits vs. 3,787).
I also dusted off our food and travel blog, SimpleGoodness, with posts about our California trip, our Staycation, and Thanksgiving. I find it hard to post there consistently since I have other higher priority creative endeavors. Although I enjoy having a record of what we’ve done, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to have a separate blog for that.
We did a lot of really great home cooking over our winter break so I need to decide soon whether or not I want to post about that over on SimpleGoodness.
Reading
Short Stories
I continued diligently reading the weekly stories published in The New Yorker. I enjoyed both Kate Walbert’s Marriage Quarantine and Colin Barrett’s A Shooting in Rathreedane but I found Madeleine Thien’s Lu, Reshaping and Adam Levin’s A Lot of Things Have Happened to be particularly good.
Short Stories Read in 2021
In 2021, I read 72 stories.
- The Rivals, Andrea Lee
- A Challenge You Have Overcome, Allegra Goodman
- The Wind, Lauren Groff
- Casting Shadows, Jhumpa Lahiri
- Good-Looking, Souvankham Thammavongsa
- The Case For and Against Love Potions, Imbolo Mbue
- Future Selves, Ayşegül Savaş
- The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- The Open Boat, Stephen Crane
- Paul’s Case, Willa Cather
- Hands, Sherwood Anderson
- Araby, James Joyce
- The Dead, James Joyce
- God Mother Tea, Selena Anderson
- The Apartment, T.C. Boyle
- A Faithful But Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed, Jason Brown
- Sibling Rivalry, Michael Byers
- The Nanny, Emma Cline
- Balloons, Thomas McGuane
- Children of the Good Book, J.M. Holmes
- A,S,D,F, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
- Before the Valley, Rachel Heng
- Foster, Bryan Washington
- The Coast of New Zealand, Cynthia Ozick
- The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
- A Hunger Artist, Franz Kafka
- Offside Constantly, Camille Bordas
- In the Event, Meng Jin
- Liberté, Scott Nadelson
- Howl Palace, Leigh Newman
- The Nine-Tail Fox Explains, Jane Pek
- The Heads of Dirty Children, Alejandro Puyana
- Octopus VII, Anna Reeser
- Enlightenment, William Pei Shih
- Kennedy, Kevin Wilson
- The Special World, Tiphanie Yaniquq
- My Apology, Sam Lypsyte
- Unread Messages, Sally Rooney
- Satellites, Rebecca Curtis
- The Theresa Job, Colson Whitehead
- Coda, Tessa Hadley
- The Rocking Horse Winner, D.H. Lawrence
- Miss Brill, Katherine Mansfield
- The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, Katherine Anne Porter
- Sweat, Zora Neale Hurston
- A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner
- That Evening Sun, William Faulkner
- The Circular Ruins, Jorge Luis Borges
- Hills Like White Elephants, Ernest Hemingway
- Superstition, Sarah Braunstein
- The Iceman, Emma Cline
- The Mom of Bold Action, George Saunders
- The Year of Spaghetti, Haruki Murakami
- Pnin Gives a Party, Vladimir Nabokov
- The Monkey Who Speaks, Han Ong
- Yente, Olga Tokarczuk
- Desire, Esther Freud
- The Ghost Birds, Karen Russell
- Not Here You Don’t, Thomas McGuane
- The Umbrella, Tove Ditlevsen
- The Depletion Prompts, David Means
- The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, Jamil Jan Kochai
- Hello Goodbye, Yiyun Li
- Detective Dog, Gish Jen
- The Hollow, Greg Jackson
- Marriage Quarantine, Kate Walbert
- A Shooting in Rathreedane, Colin Barrett
- Lu, Reshaping, Madeleine Thien
- A Lot of Things Have Happened, Adam Levin
Books
I finished 2 books in December and ended the year having read 47 books, which is the 2nd most I’ve ever read in a year behind the 48 I finished in 2019.
I read Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, for the 2nd time. I remember loving it the 1st time and I’m happy to say I also loved it the 2nd time. I picked it up again in anticipation of the TV series. I watched 3 episodes and lost interest.
I also read Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds. I hadn’t read anything by Hannah before but have been curious for a while since many of her other books have gotten great reviews. I did like The Four Winds. It focused on a family dealing fleeing from Texas to California during The Great Depression and The Dust Bowl. There was a trying stretch of the book where the family had to deal with one tragedy after another, but it was a good read overall.
I ended the year by starting a re-read of The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. I have read it several times but not since the movies came out, the last of which was released 18 years ago.
Books Read in 2021
In 2021, I read 47 books:
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
- Spritz: Italy’s Most Iconic Aperitivo Cocktail, with Recipes, Talia Baiocchi and Leslie Pariseau
- To Be a Man, Nicole Krauss
- Richard II, William Shakespeare
- Henry IV, Part 1, William Shakespeare
- Henry IV, Part 2, William Shakespeare
- Henry V, William Shakespeare
- A Promised Land, Barack Obama
- The Shadow Box, Luanne Rice (Kindle)
- The Ardent Swarm, Yamen Manai (Kindle)
- The Trouble with Being Born, E.M. Cioran
- In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri (Kindle)
- Soutine / de Kooning: Conversations in Paint, Simonetta Fraquelli and Claire Bernardi, eds.
- Minimal To Conceptual Art: Works From The Dorothy And Herbert Vogel Collection, John T. Paoletti
- This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Kindle)
- Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon
- The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
- A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
- Whereabouts, Jhumps Lahiri
- Where to Land, Hal Hartley
- Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
- Aftermath, Chuck Wendig
- Aftermath: Life Debt, Chuck Wendig
- Aftermath: Empire’s End, Chuck Wendig
- Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Best American Short Stories 2020, Curtis Sittenfeld, ed. (Kindle)
- A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
- The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
- Seek You, Kristen Radke
- Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
- To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
- Dune, Frank Herbert (Kindle)
- Last Call, Brad Thomas Parsons (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- Passing, Nella Larsen (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- The Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, Carlos Basulado, Scott Rothkopf (Eds)
- Suzanne Valadon: Model Artist Rebel, Nancy Ireson
- Transcendent Kingdon, Yaa Gyasi (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- Matrix, Lauren Groff (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- A Short History of Decay, E.M. Cioran (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- Waiting for Godot, Samuel Becket (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
- The Four Winds, Kristin Hannah (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
This Creative Midlife Posts in 2021
- December 2020 Update
- Canon AE-1 with Kodak Tri-X
- Minolta XE with Arista EDU Ultra
- New Photo Light Box
- Favorite Photos from the 2nd Half of 2020
- January 2021 Update
- Snow, the West, and Old Digital Cameras
- Testing My New Replacement Cameras
- Another Wine Label Tracing Project in Procreate
- One More Roll from 2020
- February 2021 Update
- Reaching One Year of Self-Isolation
- Two Cameras One Kind of Film
- Minolta X-700 with Kodak Pro Image 100
- Spring Walk with My Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
- March 2021 Update
- Canon Rebel 2000 with Kodak Color Plus
- New to Me Olympus XA
- Spring Walk with Olympus TG-5
- April 2021 Update
- Testing My Pentacon Six
- Canon AE-1 with Lomography Berlin
- A Few Firsts
- Olympus Pen EE-3 with Lomography Color Negative
- Two Delaware River Walks
- Semeli Wine Label Drawing
- Staycation Visit to Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens
- Spring 2021 Staycation
- Camden Waterfront with Canon EOS Rebel 2000
- May 2021 Update
- Olympus OM-1 with Lomography Potsdam
- June 2021 Update
- Second Roll with My Olympus XA
- Trip to FDR Park
- Practicing with Longer Lenses
- Favorite Photos from the 1st Half of 2021
- July 2021 Update
- Flexaret Automat with Lomochrome Purple
- Canon AE-1 with Kodak Color Plus
- August 2021 Update
- Remnants of Hurricane Ida
- Minolta X-700 with Kodak Color Plus
- First Impressions of My Traveler’s Notebook
- Canon Rebel 2000 with Kodak Pro Image
- Red
- September 2021 Update
- October 2021 Update
- Minolta Hi-Matic 11 with Kodak Ektar
- Fall Color
- November 2021 Update
- Olympus XA with Kodak Color Plus
- New Story in Monday Night
- Minolta XE with Ilford Delta
- Flexaret Automat with Ilford FP4 Plus
SimpleGoodness.us Posts in 2021
- 2021 California Trip: Travel Day
- 2021 California Trip: Day 1
- 2021 California Trip: Day 2
- 2021 California Trip: Day 3
- 2021 California Trip: Day 4
- Highlights from Staycation 2021
- Thanksgiving 2021
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