The 2020's

Exactly one year minus a day ago I wrote a post on this blog called "The 2010's" that was sort of a high-level synopsis of the decade. It seems that all in all there were some pretty good times and the post ended with these words:

Let's hope the 2020's bring just as much [...] good.

Whoops! I guess I probably jinxed it for everybody. Sorry about that. Then again, things can only get better from here, right? (imagine having said that about, e.g. American Democracy around January 4th!). Yes, things can always get worse, but they might also get better. Everyone has a bad day or a bad month or a bad year (*cough* 2020 *cough*) and the 2020's could still turn out to be good. While The 2010's recounted a lot of highlights, let's not forget about that time in October 2016 that I planned to fly direct from Munich to Redmond but then some snowstorm (!!!) cancelled flights, I got sent to Frankfurt, sat there for several hours, got sent to Vancouver, sat there for even more hours, finally got on a plane down to Seattle and arrived some 28 hours after having left Munich and then went on about 3 hours sleep per day for an entire jet-lagged week of giving presentations and not being able to remember more than approx. 0.7 seconds into the past at any given time. The point is that despite that, the 2010's recovered. The 2020's can too! (plus it's a lot harder to have a flight cancelled and then get re-routed all over the world since you can't really take a flight in the first place. Score!)

Ms. Merkel said yesterday that the hard lockdown in Germany would probably have to last up to another 10 weeks. That brings us to the middle of March which is coincidentally exactly when Lockdown #1 started so many moons ago. If the thought of 10 more weeks of this bullshit doesn't fill you with happiness and excitement then we are one and the same. Helga had one of her 3 per week 45 minute Zoom sessions for "online learning" this morning. Heinrich wasn't too amused so did a lot of screaming during that, Helga couldn't hear the teacher and was subsequently muted and so couldn't say anything, and I couldn't get any work done. It was a lot of fun. In this gloomy scenario, however, I force myself to be reminded of the words of a great philosopher of the 2020's (unknown) who said: the two best things about working from home are that (1) you have a home; and (2) you have a job. Good point, Mr. or Ms. Philosopher of these modern times (however, kids might lead to cancellation of point [2] which will then eventually lead to cancellation of point [1]. I hope not though).

I was thinking today that maybe we should move to Augsburg. Why not, right? I had previously considered a change of scenery, perhaps to Zürich for example, but upon discovering it's basically the most expensive city in the world to live in, the shine sort of wore off a bit. But Augsburg? You mean the city that "[a]fter Neuss and Trier, [...] Germany's third oldest city, founded in 15 BC by the Romans as Augusta Vindelicorum, named after the Roman emperor Augustus" [thanks Wikipedia]? Hell ya. But then again, what would we do in Augsburg?