When we moved, I had no idea that we would be completely changing our lifestyle thanks to an actual community around us. It turns out that having tons of families in similar positions around town, a walkable town, and one that actually runs events to encourage the community makes a huge difference when raising a family. In the few short months we’ve lived here, we’ve started to feel like we belong thanks to the incredible support from all around.

It’s become impossible to ignore some of the worst aspects of the olympics, like the arbitrary and inconsistently enforced rules, the blatant nationalism it encourages, and the attempt to silence athletes voices while doing absolutely nothing about rampant doping. Yet, in spite of all of this, I still find myself more and more drawn to the games each time. I’ve become even more invested in the stories of the athletes, far more into the track and swimming to the point that we watch the trials, and devoutly tuned in every single night of the whole games this year to watch any event that was on (except I would read when diving came on).

It was supposed to be a hot vax summer, but with the Delta variant spreading throughout the country and cases spiking again, it looks like this summer may have been an outlier and this winter will feel just like last year. Just when it was starting to feel normal to hang out with friends and family again, travel a bit, and sit at a bar or restaurant, it seems like we are going to be forced back to choosing between those things and the risk to our health, especially parents with kids too young to get vaccinated.

I’m sitting on a Coach bus at 100% capacity with about 50 other humans at 8:20 in the morning at the gray entrance to one of the barrels of the Lincoln Tunnel when the bus was supposed to be in New York City by 8:00 and it feels like the walls of the tunnel are closing in. It’s my first day heading back into the office since March, 2020, and my first time heading into a new building from our new house.

Last week’s post seemed pretty popular, so here I am again with an update on some stuff we did as a family this weekend. It may not have involved downloading iTunes for the first time in a decade to get an iPod working, but the music I listened to on it definitely helped while I got some work done. This weekend involved much more time out in the sun, and I’m still paying the price in exhaustion from it.

I’m in a bit of a writer’s block phase right now. I haven’t been able to think of anything interesting to write about for the past few weeks, and completely cleared my queue of posts. I really don’t want to lose momentum on writing though, so I figured maybe the best think I could do was just write about what a fun but crazy weekend we had, especially since that’s a major reason I didn’t have any time to write something else.

There are a ton of incredible books to read in 2021. 2020 changed my reading habits considerably. I now read almost entirely from actual paper books from the library, unlike before when the bulk of my reading was on audiobooks. Moving closer to a library, and the recent reopening of the library meant that I could get just about any book I wanted fairly quickly, so I’ve been tearing through books from the library ever since.

The pademic hasn’t been great for so many people’s health and fitness. Many are staying home, living more sedentary lives than before, on top of lives that were already probably pretty sedentary. That’s exactly why, now, over a year into it, it’s time to invest in our fitness again. If not now, then when? I’ve actually been able to get far more into fitness over the past several months than I ever had before.

For the last year, we haven’t been able to travel as a family the way we loved to before the pandemic. While we did take a few short road trips to get a change of scenery, we weren’t able to go out and see and do things because of safety concerns for ourselves and children. This Memorial Day weekend, since we were fully vaccinated and could find plenty to do outside, we were finally able to start feeling like we could have a normal family vacation up in Martha’s Vineyard.

Vaccination rates in much of the country are rising, the summer is here, and it finally feels like the pandemic is loosening it’s grip on our lives. The last two weeks, especially around Memorial Day, have really started to feel like there is an end in sight for the virus’ grasp over our lives. After getting fully vaccinated, with much of the country doing the same, and with the summer in full swing starting to open things up again, there are several reasons to be hopeful about getting back to life from before the pandemic.