TL;DR

Privileged as it may sound… Overall it was a good year for us as individuals. Lots of family time and good balance of work. Bigger picture, a few inconveniences but fortunately nothing bad or grave.

Full disclosure

It started out with us (me and Swathi) moving continents and settling down in a new place. We were getting to spend more time after work, commute time drastically reduced. We had lunch together too on many days. Swathi got a job shortly; contrary to her belief that it would take a while for her to get one.

Within 2 months in the year, we were mostly gearing towards more time at home, thanks to the continuing pandemic. One of our first apprehensions were – how are we going to manage the few weeks of WFH for both of us. We’ve never stayed together all day for more than a week. This one felt like it might go on for a couple of months… Given all that, YES, I think, generally, mostly at a high level, more or less, we did approximately, reasonably well :-) We both still have hair left in our respective heads and we don’t fight tooth and nail! Talking about hair, we both learnt to dress each other hair and obviously she does a better job than me. There’s probably one thing which she cannot beat me on, which is the art of saying NO!

We started cooking more at home along with managing work and we ended the year with mostly cooking with occassional work! We learnt to run both of our working setup from a 500sqft hall + kitchen with sometimes the restroom being the meeting room for one of us! We have been extremely fortunate to have food on the table on all 366 days of this year, sometimes more than what we would need. I’ve personally spent more time in the kitchen this year, than sum of all the previous years put together. Before you even ask, (in tamil) Romba thappu very wrong! Stuff like cleaning, cutting vegetables, and sometimes catching up on twitter from the kitchen area so we can each “attend” our meetings simultaneously.

I’ve developed/dropped some habits in this year…

  1. Coffee – started with way too much of it and has since then been regulated and rationed.
  2. Yoga has continued to be MIA this year
  3. Movie watching has increased, but, no regrets there
  4. Reduced distance between me and cooking (see above)
  5. Learning to live with making progress at work in dispersed chunks instead of a regular stream
  6. Working on write more (from non-existent to non-zero number of articles this past year)
  7. Reading has taken a huge hit… Started 5-7 books, completed 3!
  8. Starting to spend more time on what I should be doing long term.
  9. Homemade meals, predictable dinner schedule and Bed time - Got into a good routine.
  10. Stayed alive!

That’s how the year was!