Since we moved to New Mexico, I have created a new picture album each year and called it “Living in New Mexico <the year>.” I haven’t written an accompanying post because the picture captions have usually been able to give a good idea of what we have been up to each year.
This year, 2020, is an exception.
I have created an album Living in New Mexico 2020, but I’m adding this post because 2020 was such an unusual year.
The year started out normally and we went to Spain to attend Festival de Jerez, as we have been doing for some years. However, by mid-March, the whole world changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We had to rush home from Spain before we planned to, and we found New Mexico to be almost completely locked down. We certainly were not impacted as much as many other people, but we did have to change our day-to-day behaviors.
For the rest of the year, we could not drive around New Mexico, attend concerts, go out to eat, visit family and so on. Like many others, we tried to be as careful about our health as we could. We found ourselves taking many pictures of nearby features and clouds and sunrises and sunsets.
I completely changed the look and feel of our website–twice. [It’s a long story and telling it winds me up, so I won’t tell it here.] I “touched” every one of the picture albums (there are more than 40) and picture pages (around 20) to make sure everything operated the same way. I wrote a lot of PHP code for the website to get and display weather information and moon-related information.
We were very fortunate that we each had lots of projects that we could do without leaving home.
It doesn’t show up in any of our pictures, but I am on the Board of Directors of the National Institute of Flamenco and I had to learn how to do every meeting in the last nine months of 2020 online. That was a challenge.
We got through the year in good health.
We look forward to a 2021 when there will be ways to protect the population for COVID and when everyone can get back to a more “normal” way of life–whatever that means.