Bah, humbug, you say? Granted, this was not the year anybody wanted, with a raging pandemic causing and exposing so many problems around the world. Yet here we are, M and D, your friends with the (normally) once-a-year blog update, carried to the end of the year in good health and decent spirits, thanks in no small part to our families and friends who have kept us connected, even if mostly via video conferencing.
The year started for us with our fantastic trip to Sweden. We have already written a post about that, so in this post we will update you on the rest of our year.
January
January 10th onwards, that is, since we returned from Sweden on the 9th. Right before classes started we had a nice opportunity to catch up in Philadelphia with our friend Sierra, D’s former student who is now a PhD student at the other end of Pennsylvania, which makes getting a chance to see her a rare, happy occasion. D was keen to wear his Christmas gift shirt from M for the occasion:
Both M and D started teaching as usual in January, which was the last teaching-related activity that went as usual in this most surprising and upsetting year.
February
On February 2nd, we had a nice gathering at home to celebrate D’s birthday a little late. It would be the last time we could have many people in our house for an unforeseeable length of time.
The middle of February found us visiting Longwood Gardens for their annual orchid exhibit, which was beautiful as ever and gave us plenty of good photo opportunities.
March
This was the month in which the pandemic’s effects started to be felt in our area. On March 11, Temple University announced a sudden shift to online instruction for the rest of the semester as of March 16. D had one more chance to meet face-to-face with his students on March 12, and then grabbed books and papers from his office and set up office at home. Arcadia University decided to switch to online instruction at the same time, but gave faculty and students a few days off to get ready. M also got books and papers from her office and we became prisoners of Zoom for our teaching for the rest of the year. Like so many other people, we did some last-minute buying at the time, with March 16 still being memorable as the last day we went to the local supermarket.
Lots and lots of online purchases were to ensue, not only for food but also for wine and spirits (and chocolate and chips), throughout the rest of the year. It had somehow escaped our notice until then that Pennsylvania had already in the pre-pandemic times allowed the shipping of wine from other US states, so now that we figured it out, we quickly became members of two wine clubs. As for spirits, it was legal to order for delivery from Pennsylvania-based distilleries, so we started doing that too. Eventually, we also found restaurants that were selling cocktails together with dinners for take out.
We also bought a bunch of gift certificates to support favorite restaurants and a local bookstore, and became members of Bookshop.org to be able to buy some books online while supporting indie bookstores.
During March and April, we also had a series of online video visits with friends and family, which were wonderful, if inadequate, substitutes for face-to-face visits.
To stay in sort-of-acceptable physical state, we started (almost-) daily walks, initially around the neighborhood, staying far away from others, as we should. In the first couple of weeks of the lockdown, neighbors wrote inspirational messages with chalk on the sidewalks and street pavement.
April
On the first Sunday of April, M used instructions from New York Times to make some masks; it was the first of at least two such sessions. The results look sharp:
M’s masks become popular with our friends and we gave some to them. They also helped M produce them, we should say gratefully, by sending along those metal strips from coffee bean bags that are so handy for limiting the fogging of eyeglasses when embedded into the top of the mask.
During April we also continued watching streaming plays from the National Theatre of London, something we started doing in March, if memory serves.
May
We continued the daily walks and photographed lots of flowers in neighbors’ yards. We did a lot of cooking at home and tried out some cocktail recipes. For an alternative to walking for outdoor exercise/amusement, we got a pickle ball game set that we played with a few times in our back yard. Here is M at it.
Our semesters ended reasonably well, both of us having managed to transition to online instruction without too many problems. It was a big disappointment for us and all our graduating seniors that graduation ceremonies were held in improvised, virtual ways, but there was no escaping the need for it.
June
In anticipation of a subdued celebration of M’s 60th birthday on July 1, with no visitors due to the pandemic, we ordered a Sacher torte online from the Hotel Sacher in Vienna with plenty of lead time, thinking that there might be a long delay in fulfillment and delivery due to the pandemic, but to our surprise it came almost immediately, in early June:
This month was momentous for M professionally speaking, as she became chair of her psychology department. It could not have happened at a more challenging time. She did have good support from her colleagues, though, and as of this writing, everything has gone fine, except for her being constantly busier than ever before.
We also started having visitors, at most two at a time, outdoors at a safe distance. Here are our dear friends Suzanne and Kevin:
A very pleasant activity we were able to resume was visiting the Morris Arboretum.
We can’t forget to mention that all through the summer we were reading several books and websites, as well as attending webinars, on how to prepare for a good hybrid or online-only class, as it looked more and more certain that this would be the way we’d teach in the Fall semester.
July
July month started with a quiet celebration of M’s birthday. On the 18th, we were lucky enough to have clear skies and access to a place with relatively low light pollution to photograph comet Neowise. Here is a photo M made of the comet.
Near the end of the month we spend a few days in Ocean City, NJ, very cautiously, avoiding the boardwalk and stores, where altogether too many people would be seen not caring to wear a mask even if they got near other people.
August
August went by like July, minus a trip to the shore but plus visits from various friends, taking advantage of the warm weather to sit in our back yard, enjoy some food and conversation, and, as was the case with Olena (another friend who’s D’s former student), give us a demonstration of historically accurate broadsword fighting.
The last week of August was also the first week of the Fall semester for D (M started a week later). We were thankful that our desire to teach fully online was accommodated. Temple University did try to start with some in-person classes, but that experiment was short-lived, as COVID-19 cases at Temple started spiking and the university moved all in-person classes online (except a small number of classes that can’t be done online, such as some nursing and medical school classes).
September
Amid the teaching (with its attendant constant making of short videos and grading of online quizzes, really kind of draining), we did continue with our escape routes, like photography, to blow off some steam. The following sunset panorama was a gift from the sky on the 4th of the month.
On the 7th we had a chance to visit the Morris Arboretum again, this time with friends. Here’s a green “fireworks” image from that visit:
We also took a weekend trip to Ocean City again, where we met a small “COVID pod” of friends cautiously in open air and did not visit stores (where it was common to see from the outside customers blithely shopping without masks on) or crowded beaches.
We also added a new destination for our walks, the Churchville Nature Preserve. It is a nice place for a Sunday morning walk:
October
October’s weather did allow some more outdoors visiting with friends. Early in the month we had a visit by Mike and Eva.
We also took advantage of good weather to attend an outdoors family gathering in New Jersey to mark our niece Avery’s first holy communion.
Leaf color this month was good, though we have had it even better in select past years. These two images from Alverthorpe Park in Jenkintown give a taste.
A little later in October, we had the opportunity to visit this park again with our friends Suzanne and Kevin. Here is Suzanne walking alongside M, followed by a photo of M and D taken by Suzanne.
On Halloween weekend, we stayed at an AirBnB in Kennett Square for a couple of nights, to be near Longwood Gardens to visit for the chrysanthemum exhibit. This also allowed us to have a nice stroll in Longwood Gardens with our friends Ellen and Jim, who live nearby. Here is a photo of M with Ellen and Jim and then a photo from our walk in the meadow.
November
Elections were the big starter of the month; this blog is hardly the place to discuss politics, but we did vote in person, wearing both masks and plastic shields over our faces.
Later in November we took some walks in the Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust. There D was lucky enough one day to capture a photo of a hawk with its lunch in its left talon, waiting to be consumed. This was taken with the regular lens of D’s Fujifilm X-T2 camera. If only Santa’s gift of a long lens for this camera had arrived already!
For Thanksgiving we ordered takeout from one of our favorite restaurants in Princeton, which had a complete Thanksgiving dinner ready to pick up in a box. It felt so very strange to drive to Princeton to get the food and drive right back, without doing any of the usual things we do in that town (buy books, take pictures, buy chocolates, buy clothes), but as mentioned already, we were trying to stay as far away from infection possibilities as we could. Here is M at our Thanksgiving table (just by ourselves, but the weather was good enough to start outside). Sadly, shortly after this photo was taken, we were chased inside the house by a persistent wasp, which also managed to come in after us undetected and sting M (painful, but with no bad allergic reaction, thankfully).
December
December started with a visit to Alverthorpe Park with our friends Reiko, Troy, Jordan, and Cooper. It was D’s first serious attempt to use the long lens Santa brought (very proactive Santa was on this occasion). Here is a sample photo (the goose was a good 30-40 feet away):
Later in December our first fully-online semester of teaching came to an end. Both of us felt that teaching online, especially under duress, instead of by choice, was a very difficult endeavor. Every class takes longer to prepare, you are endlessly making videos and slide sets for class when you are not endlessly grading assignments, the only exam format we felt made sense was open-book — which is very hard to write at the proper level, you are missing face-to-face contact with your students, they miss it too, it’s overall a sad necessity. However, we managed. Most impressively, M managed to reach the conclusion of her first semester as department chair in one piece and with her department functioning well, despite seriously diminished resources.
In the middle of the month we had a snow storm that was followed by several days cold enough for the snow to stay on the ground. We were lucky to be able to take advantage of a little free time that we made for ourselves in the middle of final exams to go to Alverthorpe Park and to the Morris Arboretum to make photos in the snowy conditions. We leave you with a photo of a deer from Alverthorpe Park and a gallery with some photos from the Morris Arboretum, including some from its holiday train display with miniatures of famous Philadelphia buildings made out of wood and other natural materials. Tip: for the gallery: clicking any one of the photos displays bigger version; this is important for some that can only be viewed uncropped in this fashion.
We leave you with the wish that the year 2021 will be massively better than 2020 was. We are so looking forward to being able to hug our friends and family and to visit them indoors without qualms, not to mention going to the opera, concerts, theater, and restaurants and our very own classrooms to teach our students face-to-face!