2020 in Retrospect • The Adventures of the Scuba Jedi

Originally published in December of 2020

Well, here we are. Who would have thunk it a year ago that we would be where we are now. The one bright spot in an otherwise gloomy year is the White House crazy train is finally slowing down. That is all I will say regarding politics.

I was reading posts from days gone by, I am a bit depressed. Pre-pandemic I was not doing much compared to the past 10 or so years. At least, I wasn’t writing about the things I was doing. A few Uber driving stories and that is about all.

As for this year, the last time I got together with friends was February where we went to a play. After that I managed to squeeze in a weekend at Ren Fair before they shut it down late March. During that time our offices at work sent most people who could to work at home. This was a huge challenge for the IT call center. We are on the front line taking calls from people who were hurled computer equipment and told to call us if they needed help. Boy, did they. All I will say about this is this:

I think the most exciting thing that happened to me was in January before the shit really hit the fan was I was in my first major auto accident. Not my fault and I wasn’t hurt. However I did need to replace my car for obvious reasons.

There I was peacefully driving home from the office and thinking, wow, traffic is going surprisingly smooth today when I saw my lane I needed to be in come to a grinding halt. I know this section of road and how it slows way down because of poor engineering, so I was able to stop. But, the car behind me not so much. The driver did not have insurance, luckily, as an adult not only do I carry full boat car insurance even though that car had been paid off for a while. Thinking back, this was probably the best thing that could happen to me. My car (see above) had very high mileage and I was going to replace it in 2021. I had driven so many thousands of miles with Uber that, though in good shape, it was mostly worthless because of the miles. I was dreading trading it in as I would get nothing for it, and as usual, I don’t have a lot of savings to spill on a down payment. My credit had been in the toilet for a long time and I was worried I was going to get screwed on interest rates for a loan. I took a lot of effort using the Uber money to get ahead and surprisingly enough my credit had recovered. The Enterprise Rental Car place gave my contact information to sales and they contacted me about replacing my car. Long boring story short, it was a great experience. Insurance came through with paying the Kelly Blue Book and I had the money for a pretty decent down payment. My interest rate was low and I ended up with a cool “new” car and do-able payments. That would have never happened if I went to a regular dealer and traded the car with a gozillion miles on it.

The big green bow makes it easier to spot in the parking lot amongst all the other silver Altimas.

So, that was January and February. March, relocated from office to home. I won’t bore with details about that. A few technical challenges, had to upgrade my internet so that people could hear every word I was saying on the phone rather than every other word. I just want to say that I am grateful that I am fortunate to be able to do that. Business continuity in a disaster. Not everyone so lucky. On the Uber and Lyft pages I belong to online many drivers were S.O.L because business dropped severely. So even though it has sucked with how busy we are supporting all the new work from homers at the end of the day I am truly grateful for it. Could have been a lot worse.

Other than the off hike or road trip, not much else to report. Our annual campouts were cancelled this year, and that was a bummer. One key person in our group passed away without being able to see him again and that was very sad. My annual Christmas gathering, Festivus will not be taking place for obvious reasons. Hopefully 2021 will ring in better days to come. But I will leave you with a few images commemorating 2020 and a quote from one of my favorite movies (silly as it may be), “Ever After” the line uttered by the great Angelica Huston,” Just remember, no matter how bad things get, they can always be worse”.