Year-end Wrap Up

2022 is nearly over.

Good riddance to bad rubbish? Or are there gems to be found in this landfill of a year?

The big story in 2022 is the same as the big story of 2020 and 2021 - Covid. It finally caught up with me (“I went to Iceland and all I brought home was a case of Covid”) and although I was over it in a week, the lingering effects of an ear infection induced deafness lasted over a month, the Weaver also succumbed to the virus. It was a time span which coincided with the birth of our first grandson (premature and is still in hospital). November was not a fun time at Flippist World Headquarters. 2022 was also the pits from a monetary standpoint—but I find it amusing that a 0.1% bank savings account rate outperformed my carefully-curated IRA investments over the last two years. In other bummer news from 2022: World War III started.

Moving on from that bleakness, in the words of Monty Python, let us “Look on the Bright Side of Life.” The Weaver and I did manage to get out of the house this year, to California in March, Seattle in April, and we made a return visit to Mineral Point, Wisconsin. All of this travel led up to my eighth trip to Iceland, a trip that was extremely intense (except for the time spent lolling in the hot pots at the swimming pool.) Was it worth a case of Covid? Is my Iceland infatuation finally over? I’ll be exploring that question in depth in the coming months (big announcement Sunday).

Flippist World Headquarters, December 2012:

Looking back as I enter the 19th year of Flippism is the Key (a quarter of my life!), I find that it has been a long, strange trip, indeed. Almost all the bloggers that I interacted with in those early years are dormant, notable exceptions are Carrie Marshall, and Alda Sigmundsdóttir, both of whom have published memoirs this year. All of the rest of the bloggers I followed in the aughts have ceased posting and only a few from ten years ago still write (Bob, Sheila, and the aforementioned Carrie. Even my long held connection to all things Icelandic, The Reykjavík Grapevine, has dropped its daily coverage. A new social media site, Post, holds some promise. I’ll be posting more music videos in the upcoming year, you can see all of them at the link in the sidebar. I’ve also been exploring the site ooh! which is dedicated to the discovery of old-school blogging—evidently there is still some life left in this archaic form of internet communication. Or is the internet is already over? Don’t get me started on GPT-3, it is humbling to think that a set of AI algorithms could replace my labored scribblings here.

Or my illustrations:

AI generated image of Minneapolis ala Vincent Van Gogh.

So here’s to 2023 and, at the risk of being made a fool, could it be any worse that 2022?

Would it make things better if I posted more cat pictures?