Well, as I write this, YES! But here’s a recap of our last month of the crappiest year ever.
Surprisingly, not a lot happened. I attended three more concerts, though: a livestream of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, who I’ve never seen live because they always come to Denver for one night only and it’s always a Friday or Saturday in mid-November when I have other plans. That was pretty cool to see even if it was pre-recorded. This time, in typical 2020 concert-from-home fashion, I did some needlepoint while it was playing. 🙂 The other concerts were two recorded shows by Matt Nathanson and his band, and a Christmas special by the Goo Goo Dolls that actually put me in the Christmas spirit.
On December 19th, my Grzankowski family had our first ever Family Game Night and it was a LOT of fun! My cousin Linda found an online game platform with lots of different tiers of games, and we played several different games through our phones. It was SO great to see everyone and catch up! I hope we do it again.
Next up was Christmas. Here is the Polanycia cast of clowns.
We had an excellent lunch…
…followed by tearing through presents…
…followed by the traditional non-traditional movie, which was Cheech and Chong’s The Corsican Brothers. It was cheezy funny.
Then we ended the evening with our traditional drive around Erie looking at decoration displays. There were a lot of lights this year which was wonderful to see. Here are the most extravagant houses.
Anyway, my boss basically told me I had to take the week off between Christmas and New Year’s since we already got December 24, 25 and 31st and January 1st off as company holidays, meaning I needed to just take 3 days of my own vacation time for a week and a half off. My first and only non-surgical vacation of the year.
OH…OKAY!
Of course, the time went by too fast and I did not get nearly as much of my projects done as I wanted to. But I did accomplish something extremely rare: relaxing in my pj’s with my coffee and a magazine when I woke up most mornings. That was quite nice.
The two main projects that I worked on were finishing my 2020 Traveler’s Notebooks and doing an I Am album. I’ve done a Traveler’s Notebook before about 13 years living in Colorado. It’s a plain paper notebook that measures 4.25 inches by 8.5 inches, so not only does it require working in miniature, the book is stapled in the middle so you can’t get too bulky with puffy or raised embellishments. I decided to do TNs in 2020 after a photo printing company began creating monthly timelines of COVID events and news in the TN size and I figured, “What is there really to scrap in 2020 that would deserve big 12×12 albums?”
I had a BLAST throughout the year making little mini layouts and ended up filling two TNs. Check them out here!
I will get the pictures of the I Am Album up next month.
So, to close out this wonderful year, here’s an image of something that was pretty freaking awesome in my neighborhood. It just showed up one day next to the little free library…it gave me a smile and some hope during the holiday season.
