2021 was sucky and I'm not sorry to see it gone in the least. In fact, it was horrible, from the Maggot Mob's murderous and seditionist riot at the Capitol in its first week to the acquittal in its penultimate month of the teen misfit thug Kyle Rittenhouse, who as a 17-year old in 2020 illegally possessed and transported across state lines a weapon of war, an AR-15 assault rifle, to a protest march far from his home and used it to gun down three protestors, killing two of them and maiming a third, thus the blubbering pork-faced killer became a l'il darling of the right. (Crocodile tears.)
I made three trips of any note in 2021, all of them notable but only one of which was worthwhile, a business trip to Colorado. I drove to North Carolina in June so I could visit a friend, swim off a beach and attend a black spiritual church with said friend. (Jimmy and I attended a service at Pierce Chapel at the A.M.E. Zion Church in Oriental.)
The service at that church was an enlightening experience as I had never attended such a spiritually inspiring service before. I also did some sailing and swam in a couple of pools so it was a refreshing trip although I was happy to get home after a few days. (Driving home from NC I stopped in at the USMC Museum at Quantico where I saw displayed the weapon my father carried during his two campaigns in the Pacific, the single-shot M1 Carbine with its 15-round magazine.)
I flew to Colorado to inspect my sole retirement investment vehicle I had set in place to provide a modest stream of income, a rental house in . . . get this . . . Louisville, Colorado. Yes, the town that half-burned down on the penultimate day of last year, as in, the day before yesterday. (Thursday's wildfires which burned a third of the town to the ground came within two blocks of my house.)
I saw some people while I was there, my sister in Denver and my niece and her husband there and their daughter, plus two college friends, and I conferred with my property manager and had lunch with my realtor in . . . Louisville. For relaxation during this business trip I fit in a hike in Rocky Mountain National Park and also around the Independence gold mine in Victor, and I enjoyed a brief stop in a casino up on Cripple Creek. (My sister in Denver was nice enough to let me stay at her house on my business trip.)
For Thanksgiving I made a whirlwind trip to Columbus, Ohio, driving there on Thanksgiving day to enjoy a festive repast with my sister there and her family. Then I helped her with some moving of things and sorting for a couple of days and drove home on Sunday. (On the day after Thanksgiving, my sister and I enjoyed a delicious lunch at the original City BBQ restaurant in Columbus, my favorite barbecue joint anywhere.)
That pretty much sums up this past year when we didn't get out of the pandemic thanks to the selfish, unpatriotic 40 percent who eschewed vaccination. Aside from the three aforementioned trips, I made it into the District three times on a perambulation around the Tidal Basin in the spring to see the Cherry Blossoms and two Christmas Lights traipses in December, and I went for a drive in the fall on Skyline Drive with a friend. (Skyline Drive.)
And by the end of the year I had lost a third of my 401K in the stock market and incurred a tax liability of well over a hundred grand in a disastrous and ill-considered conversion, which unbeknownst to me at the time could not be re-characterized thanks to the GOP's tax giveaway in 2017 to corporations and the 0.01 per cent when they changed the conversion rules so that the middle class could pay for their largess to their donors. Hello 2022, what do you have in store for us that will equal or be worse than the last dreadful year? (Amerika.)
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