The streak was much longer than usual and started in the East and weirdly headed almost perfectly West. This shooting star was also a bit slower and more long lasting that other shooting stars I've seen, though it still dissipated very quickly. I was also surprized that the shooting star was so visible, given the wisps of clouds and the suburban light pollution.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cwu5MeWr6cJ/
Allie and I were lucky to be able to visit Sydney, Australia late last year. Even still, the Australian fires, which kicked off this crappy year in late 2019 and early 2020, were already starting to consume large regions. The fires got much worse after we returned home from our vacation.
Allie did get a chance to visit family in Asia in February. She was very lucky to get back home before things got covid-crazy. Since then, we've been keeping mostly to ourselves. Multiple plans to spend time with friends and family were cancelled. We have no plan to meet other people until covid-time is over.
That's not to say we've been hiding indoors as shut-ins. Face masks and copious amounts of the appropriate hand sanitizer are always ready for our visits to the store and other necessary locations. I've also been working from home almost 100% of the time, only going into the office (after site approval) a couple of times to access specific stuff on my work desktop computer or paperwork at my desk.
I am weary of the need to keep vigilant against the nasty virus. However, out of love for my neighbor (and of course, family members), my resolve is not weakened.
| Month | Event |
|---|---|
| January | Australia fires |
| February | Africa locust plague begins |
| March | COVID-SARS-2 explodes |
| April | Relatively minor events |
| May | George Floyd's horrific murder |
| June | Worldwide protests about George Floyd's murder |
| July | Multiple natural disasters in Asia |
| August | Beirut explosion |
| September | Western US fires |
| October | Terror attacks in France |
| November | Massive COVID-SARS-2 resurgence |
| December | Arecibo Observatory collapse |
| January 2021 | Riot on Capitol Hill |
Irish are a hard group to actually offend. Someone said "hold my beer" and this abomination was birthed straight from the bowels of ifreann. First, the reaction:
When I started this blog 18.5 years ago, it was used as a true log or journal of my life. I slowly transitioned away from this for various reasons. The biggest reason is that a publically available record of your life can reveal things which may be useful to use against you in one way or another, by both people you know and people you don't know. Beyond that, the world is different today than it was in the early aughties. Another reason is that Facebook took over many of the duties of life-record without all the work of building my own content from scratch every time I wanted to post something. Facebook is still not good for long-form or detailed accounts of events. For that, blog remains the superior platform for recording my view of events in writing.
Even still, there is value in providing an online journal of one's life. For me, and most humans, memories fade. Specific memories are still noodling around in our heads, but they are buried underneath millions of other noodles. I didn't realize the importance of this until recently, when I was going over my blog's history.
Reading the past posts reminded me of events, and even just average days from my past. In fact, I ran across a couple of posts that describe things that I don't remember at all now, similar to how no-one remembers most of the first two years their life but there's those embarrassing baby photos that your parents pull out from time to time.
Posting about my life doesn't generate traffic like my posts about life in our Universe or beeper codes, but that's not the real point of this blog anyway. I'll still post about things I find interesting in the same manner as before. However, I'll try to post a bit more about my daily life too (more than just Instagram photos). I've actually started doing this since September this year. I hope to do it even more often.
