...and, we're back!

I spent New Year’s 2020 in San Francisco with some of my wife’s college friends, en route to an annual kickoff event at company headquarters in Seattle.

This sentence encapsulates much of what made 2019 such a big year for me. For one thing, I wasn’t married when it started. I got married in the spring, which was and has been wonderful. Our wedding was simple but pleasant - we held it at a beer hall called Houston Hall in lower Manhattan, the ceremony and reception all in one room. Still, it demanded a few months during which our free time became wedding planning time, and although I loved it, I was definitely happy afterwards to sit back and just be married.

We had a calmer summer, punctuated by a trip to the Czech Republic with my wife’s family, where her father is from. I had a few chances to try out the Czech I’ve been learning. Everyone was very encouraging to me, perhaps because it’s an uncommon surprise to meet a foreigner trying to learn the language! Then, in the early fall, my wife and I went to Europe again, this time by ourselves to London on honeymoon. We both tend to prefer urban vacations, and neither of us had spent any real time in London; together we took in museums, churches, small breweries, two Tottenham matches (unfortunately one of them was this one; at least we had great seats), a science-themed afternoon tea, and many rides on the Tube.

Shortly after returning, the company that I had been working at, Custora, got acquired by a company called Amperity, which is the other big-in-2019 thing about that opening sentence. I had been at Custora for almost seven years. I’d joined when it was six people in a room, a year after having quit a finance job with unclear plans. To see the end of that chapter of my life and the way it unfolded was, for many reasons, both rewarding and bittersweet. I remain at Amperity today - the job’s good, the product is well-built, and I’ve met a lot of impressive and likable people here. But the weeks before and after the acquisition were a roller coaster.

Some of my wife’s college friends traditionally get together every New Year’s, and for 2020 it was going to be in San Francisco. Amperity also was slated to have a company-wide kickoff in early January. So we spent a few days in SF before I continued alone up to Seattle. On the afternoon of the 31st, we were picnicking in Dolores Park, it was a mild and sunny day and we had a pretty view of downtown, I had a drink in my hand, and I remember thinking, man, 2019 was really something. There were some real highs, but at the same time I’d appreciate it if 2020 were a little calmer, a little more like things feel right here in this moment.

Well, I guess we all see how that wish went. I count myself lucky, of course - no health troubles, I can work from home - but sometimes that moment from New Year’s feels like a sort of cosmic joke.

But it’s reminded me that it’s high time I revived this blog. One of my friends joked that COVID-19 would force people to confront harsh realities about their long-term life goals; as he said of himself, if he’s holed up in his apartment all day and he’s still not learning Spanish, will he ever? I’ve always wanted to write and to be good about writing regularly, and I’d like to have a presence on the Internet again, independent of any other platform or social media. Lord knows that over my life I’ve left a trail of aborted, half-finished blogs and other writing attempts, and maybe this will be yet another. But I’m not ready to give up on this quite yet. NYC and NJ are starting to open up (I hope not unwisely), but for now, I’m still at home, and here it is: I’m writing, again.