Todd Swank's Favorite Moments of 2020 Todd Swank's Diary Entry for January 3, 2021
Since 2020 was such a crazy year, I thought it would be fun to dedicate this week's blog post to reviewing my favorite moments from my blog throughout the year. I found it ironic on my first post of last year my lead photo was me and 65,000 Vikings fans watching the Chicago Bears beat the home team. I should have known from that point it was going to be a bad year.
February 7, 2020
Last Day Working at Oracle
The year started off on a real positive note when I accepted a new job selling Master Data Management solutions for Stibo Systems meaning my 5 year stint at Oracle was complete.
I enjoyed my time at Big Red, but I've been having fun in my new job as well.
February 15, 2020
It's pretty surreal going back to the beginning of the year and seeing all the fun get togethers we had with various friends. This is what I miss the most from pre-pandemic times.
March 1, 2020
March 15, 2020
The beginning of March took us on week-long vacation to Florida. It was the scariest vacation of my life. We'd had it planned for a couple of months as it was the first time Luke and Avery's colleges had Spring Break on the same week. So we thought we'd do it up right and plan a bunch of fun activities in Orlando. The week before we started getting nervous about the trip because of the coronavirus outbreak. The Thursday before I was at my doctor for a check-up and asked the nurse about how concerned I should be. She told me I should be more concerned about the flu. Miss Sheri asked her doctor if we were ok going on vacation, she said she was coming to Florida the same time and she wasn’t worried about it. So we said it must be OK.
How naïve we were.
March 29, 2020
We all learned how to Zoom each other to be able to communicate with family and friends. For some reason the photos are never as nearly as exciting as they are when we're able to get together in person.
We found new ways to entertain ourselves at home as quarantine dragged on. The hot tub was used quite a bit more than it had in awhile. Luke and Avery abandoned college in March and ended up staying home with us until they returned to college in August. We actually ended up having some of the best family time we'd ever had before so there were definitely some positives to the pandemic.
May 10, 2020
We spent a lot more time outside together than usual. Despite our increased number of rounds of golf, for some odd reason my game never improved a bit. As a matter of fact, it seemed to have regressed the more I played.
May 25, 2020
When Minnesota partially re-opened in the summer, we took advantage of the new rules and started hanging out with good friends again including Ron & Sue Korkowski who invited us over for some cocktails by the pool. Which is much better than how we had been doing it the previous couple of months which was cocktails by ourselves.
I was much more aggressive than Miss Sheri at re-connecting with people again. She insisted on maintaining the 6 feet of social distancing barriers in place at all times. She eventually relaxed a bit by leveraging new techniques. She used to drag the dog by the collar to push him closer to people as a kind of a canary in the coalmine type of test. The dog seemed fine, though, so all was good!
The boat was put to a lot of good use when the weather warmed up although it's a lot more fun when we have others join us which wasn't always as easy.
Luke & Avery, celebrated their 21st birthday and I celebrated my 50th birthday in July. Which ended up being perfect timing because it allowed them to surprise me with some of my favorite IPA and a shot of Fireball. I'm really enjoying them being of legal age.
We were supposed to fly to Vegas for our birthdays, but decided it would be safer to do a driving trip to Colorado instead.
The Stanley Hotel was one of our only indoor activities for the whole trip so we all made sure to mask-up. The guide from our horse-back riding trip told us the Stanley Hotel is one of the most haunted places in the United States, so I was excited we signed up for the night tour which was also known as the "Ghost Tour". Seemed pretty scary. It wasn't.
We loved visiting Rocky Mountain National Park. Some of the worst forest fires in Colorado history burned through this area a couple of weeks later, so we were very lucky to see it when we did.
We saw a herd of elk with several babies which was a highlight of the trip.
August 23, 2020
We stopped by to see Devil's Tower on the way home which was something we've always wanted to do. It's pretty tall.
September 27, 2020
Miss Sheri slipped on some acorns which led to a trip to the emergency room which is a very interesting experience during a pandemic.
November 8, 2020
We spent a lot of time this year walking the dog in a wide variety of places. He's a great guy, but we are very, very hopeful we'll be able to get back to normal sometime in 2021 and start being able to hang out with good friends again. Then we can start leaving the dog at home.
In 2021, I became fascinated with TikTok! I haven't had any luck going viral yet, but I keep working on it. Maybe this will be my year!
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