2020: Year in Review
Published 📅: ....
Last modified 📝: ....
Share this post on BlueskySee discussion on Bluesky
Whew, what a year, 2020 has been quite a rough year.
I could probably wrap up my year in review blog post with just the line above but I figured it's probably more cathartic to dive into what this year has been like for me.
January
Even before Covid was a very big thing in the US, I started the year off by wrapping up an extended Christmas and New Years vacation back home in Washington state. I had been feeling a bit out of sorts for the two or three weeks around the end of December and didn't feel any better at the turn of the new year.
I ended up going to the walk in clinic after I got back to Boston (around the 21st) and they rushed me off to the hospital (or rather told me to go there immediately). I ended up staying in the hospital for about 3 days.
I was diagnosed with Diabetic Ketoacidosis, with a blood sugar reading of just above 500!
For those that don't know, a usual healthy blood sugar reading is around 80-120
Ultimately, I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, and was told by several doctors that I needed to get this under control. I'm immensely thankful to my parents and grandmother for flying out to Boston to stay with me while I was in the hospital and as I got re-adjusted back into my regular life.
Thanks to the new diagnosis I had a whole suite of prescriptions that I needed to take, including insulin. Outside of my diagnosis, January was pretty quiet.
February
Most of February was filled with me still adjusting to my recent health scare. About mid-way through February, Wayfair underwent it's own change.
Around early February, Wayfair (where I worked) announced that we we're letting go of a decent chunk of the folks that worked across the company. Many of the folks that I had worked with in the past were unfortunately being laid off.
This was a pretty big change, through my history at Wayfair we had never had large layoffs, and in many ways it was a first for the rest of the organization as well.
Myself and my direct team were thankfully not impacted, but our partnering teams were unfortunately hit.
March
There's not too much to call out about March, I think most readers (at least those in the US) know that this was when the beginning of the Covid stay at home / quarantine started for most folks.
At Wayfair we started it as a two day (Thursday and Friday) "trial"[1]Jump to footnote, and then ballooned to the end of 2020 through to June of 2021 at the time of writing.
For most of March, I ended up working from my studio apartment, fashioning a hacky standing desk by setting my laptop on a folding chair that was set on top of my desk[2]Jump to footnote.
April: aka March - June
These months all blended together quite a bit for me, working 10 hours a day or so all from my apartment, and barely leaving my apartment for anything besides a weekly grocery run.
It wasn't until June that anything really notably changed for me, given that our date by which we were expected to return to the office got pushed back from July to January, my parents convinced me to fly back out to Washington to work from home.
I took them up on the offer and have been working from Washington since then!
July
During the month of July, my parents and I started work on tearing down the existing deck on the house to build a new one. This work ended up taking almost two full months to complete.
During July, my parents and I took a few weekend drives up and around Leavenworth and Wenatchee.
August
August was pretty similar to July, the notable events for me was visiting Mount Rainier National Park with my family as well as taking a trip over to Winthrop Washington.
Rainier
Winthrop
