Today is my fifty-second birthday. The last year has certainly been eventful, mostly due to the pesky pandemic restrictions and lockdowns.
I have been on a mission to read books, watch movies and write more. I wanted to travel around the UK and explore some of its wilder places. I had made plans to visit several iconic motoring events to photograph some of the rarest cars in the world. The travel side of things unravelled quickly as nationwide lockdowns kicked in and made moving about tricky.
So I had time on my hands. I read a lot of books and wrote in my journal. I made time to learn everything I could about COVID-19 and how it affects people. I've watched how people have let themselves get caught up in mad conspiracy theories about government plots to reduce and control the world's population. I've watched protestors fighting for civil liberties being shot and beaten on the streets of America. I've seen people showing solidarity for the Black Lives Matter branded as racists?!
I watched an orange person with weird hair lose the White House to a man wearing Ray-Bans.
It was sad to see Australia and parts of the USA burn, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold around the world. Astronauts flew into space from Florida once again aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon rocket.
I became an orphan. I continue to watch my son become a man. I've helped my wife to resurrect her cake-baking business. I reconnected with a good friend and her children, all of whom I care about deeply.
I began fasting, following my circadian rhythm and avoiding food from sunset to sunrise for a minimum of 13-hours per day.
Lately, I have been spending a significant amount of time sorting through all of my digital files and placing them into highly secure cloud storage facilities. As part of this process, I am creating a legacy vault. The vault contains all of my personal information, such as passwords and logins for my online accounts, software keys and serial numbers. My will, and instructions for executing my estate, are all held in this secure environment. I am also digitising my paper documents and saving those as PDFs. For redundancy, the copies of the most critical documents are backed-up to a second secure site.
I'm not going to make too many predictions about how the coming year will pan out for me. I learned a long time ago that I need to relax and take each day as it comes; however, I am determined to reduce my use of social media to less than zero.
There's probably a lot more for me to say, but it's my birthday, and there is cake, and fresh coffee.
Until next time, adieu.