Stressed Out

I’m stressed. I don’t get stressed very often, but it’s happening right now. I tend to get stressed when I’m concerned about money and home projects/repairs, and those two are often related. We had a leak in our kitchen a few years ago any time there was a heavy rain and thought it was fixed. As you can see, it was not.

While the leak is now fixed and we confirmed that there is no mold, we now need to remove part of the ceiling, put up drywall, and repaint the ceiling. And by we, I mean someone that we pay to do this.

We also had a separate leak coming from our dishwasher. It turned out that the gasket needed replaced. We got it repaired a week or two ago, but the guy didn’t seem to do a good job attaching the new gasket. We opened the dishwasher yesterday to this.

The guy came back today and fixed it, but I have little confidence in him.

What else?

* The washing machine seems to be off balance thanks to an apparent broken leg.

* The Moose just left for 3 weeks to an overnight summer camp, and while I think he’s going to have a fantastic time, he doesn’t know anyone, and this is a brand-new experience for him. I worry a little about him.

* I’m starting a new project at work and constantly questioning myself about if I’m doing everything correctly.

* I received my retirement statement in the mail. Although I’m not going to retire for many years, my account lost a lot of money over the last six months. Like A LOT, A LOT.

* I haven’t watched this season’s Better Call Saul yet this season, but I saved the episodes on my DVR. I finally sat down to watch the first episode, and it was gone. Episodes 2 and 3 aren’t there either. It turns out that my DVR was set to keep only 10 Better Call Saul episodes. I guess I figured that I would always watch them immediately, though that clearly didn’t happen this season. I have episodes 4-10, but the first three episodes were replaced with some 2-minute “Stories from Set” specials and a Talking Saul show. Now, it seems like the only way to see the first three episodes is to buy them on Google Play, YouTube, or Amazon Prime. We have Prime but still must pay for them. Why pay for Prime if we can’t get these episodes?

* We just got a new kitchen faucet and had to get that installed.

* The lease on our minivan is up in several months, and I don’t want to deal with car shopping again.

* I received our county car tax bill in the mail. Ugh!

While some of these things are first world problems, many are not. I have no skills whatsoever in doing home repairs, so any project costs much more money than it probably should since we’re paying for labor in addition to the equipment and materials. Now would be the perfect time to make some money from this blog! Meanwhile, can I just go away to a summer camp for a few weeks and not have any responsibilities? (This might be the theme of Grown Ups, but I never saw the movie.)

Sean's Best and Worst of 2020

I should preface this post by mentioning that this is primarily about pop culture items. I mean 2020 has been a pretty lousy year overall, so this is more of a fun look at the last 12 months.

Best Television Show: Better Call Saul

I watched a good amount of TV this year. I finally got caught up on This Is Us, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Watchman. The Good Place concluded in 2020, and I enjoyed The Queen's Gambit and Fargo as well as The Last Dance documentary. (Schitt's Creek and The Boys are still on my list of shows that I want to see.) Even with all of these great shows that I just mentioned, Better Call Saul tops my list. The writing and the acting are just so good. I mean, two of the storylines from the show's fifth season were about a guy not wanting to sell his land/home and another about a construction project by a German engineer and his team. While I know that I'm understating this, on paper, this doesn't seem very exciting. It really is captivating and thrilling though.

Best Movie: Knives Out

I didn't see many "grown up" movies, but I enjoyed two 2020 movies geared for kids in Onward and Soul. Even though the film came out late in 2019, my favorite movie of the year was Knives Out. What a fun and funny film. It's a murder mystery with a family of dislikable characters but it really is fun watching Daniel Craig try to figure things out as the lead detective. 

Worst Movie: Tully

This is another movie from a few years ago that I just saw in 2020. It's not a bad movie, and there are certainly parts that I liked, but it falls into the worst movie category only because I didn't see very many films in 2020. Like Charlize Theron and her family in the film, we also have three kids so part of this film really hits close to home. What bothered me the most is how useless the father (played by Ron Livingston) is, especially when there's a major reveal that I won't spoil here. 

Best Song: Blinding Lights by The Weeknd

My rule is that the best song must be featured in a blog post at some point during the year. While I really like Midnight Sky by Miley Cyrus (who once had the worst song of the year) and strongly considered it, Blinding Lights by The Weeknd is a banger. It's the jam. It's the cat's meow. Am I using these words correctly? We'll just go with this. It's a really good and catchy song. By the way, congrats to The Weeknd for getting best song of the year twice now even though Starboy doesn't seem quite as good as it was four years ago.

Worst Song: ily by Surf Mesa featuring Emilee

You know the chorus to Frankie Valli's 1967 hit "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You." It's a fantastic song with a memorable chorus. Well, how about playing just the chorus over and over and over again with some type of layering? I can listen and like the first 20-30 seconds of the song, but after that, I'm switching the channel. 

Best Book: The first three books of the Harry Potter series

I do pretty much all of my reading during my commute to work. Since I've been working from home since the pandemic started, I've read exactly zero books for myself. While I read some books in January and February, I can't remember what they were. Because of this, the best books I read in 2020 were the first three Harry Potter books to The Moose (my 9 year old son). It's been a nice bonding experience reading them to him.

I'll add that I just bought two books that I'm really excited to read: The Big Door Prize by M.O. Walsh and The Cold Millions by Jess Walter. I wouldn't be surprised if one of these books is on the 2021 best of blog post.

Best Sports Moment of 2020: Manuel Margot Catch

This was a tough call. As a Pittsburgh sports fan, the Penguins exited the hockey playoffs much earlier than expected (more on that below) and the Pirates were lousy. The Steelers started the season 11-0 but lost three consecutive games and looked terrible in the process before rebounding after being down by 17 points on Sunday. So while there were championships with fans and then championships without fans in 2020, this catch by Manuel Margot of the Tampa Bay Rays in game one of the American League Championship Series is the play of the year to me. So cool, and seeing this live, I really thought he might have fallen into an abyss. 

Worst Sports Moment: The Pittsburgh Penguins

While I didn't expect the Penguins to win the Stanley Cup, I did expect them to defeat the 12th-seeded Montreal Canadians in the first round playoff series. The playoffs generally only have 8 teams per conference. Montreal wouldn't have even been close to reaching the playoffs in a typical year. Such a terrible series. 

Best Blog Post: Songs of 2000 & 2020s Predictions

This was an odd year for Sean's Ramblings. As I looked through my posts from this year, I was a lot more "serious" than usual. Lots of "heavy" posts about the pandemic, the state of the country, and my family including a post about my dad passing away. So while I don't know if these were the "best" posts, my posts about the songs of 2000 and predictions for the 20s decade were the most fun and more in line with my "typical" blog posts. Don't mind me as I continue to put words in quotes!

Worst Blog Post: Kangaroos Wanted

I wrote an entire blog post about someone looking for kangaroos for a kids' birthday party.

Best Musical: Hamilton

Have you heard about this show? It's about the guy on the $10 bill and was created by Lin-Manuel Miranda who was in one Brooklyn Nine Nine episode and one How I Met Your Mother episode. I never saw this live and for the most part avoided the music because I first wanted to hear and see it on stage. Well, I still haven't seen the show live, but I watched the film version of the show which was actually three performances of the show from June 2016. It lived up to the hype!

Best Podcast: Ya Jagoff!, Owls Americast, The Tony Kornheiser Show, and The Poscast

I don't listen to podcasts as much as I did when I was commuting to work, but I rarely miss episodes of these podcasts. I like listening to John and Rachael to hear about all the cool things going on in Pittsburgh on Ya Jagoff! Owls Americast is my connection with Sheffield Wednesday. The Tony Kornheiser Show gives me a sense of big sports stories (with some really good guests) along with various rants of Tony's life. And The Poscast is based around baseball but always makes me laugh. All of these podcasts gave me some normalcy in definitely abnormal times.

Best Blog: Josh's World

This might be the third or fourth time Josh's World has won this. I like Josh's take on things. Nothing against Josh, but I also need to expand the number of blogs I read. I tend to read the same sites, and there are fewer and fewer individual blogs each year.  

Please feel free to share some of your own best of and worst of 2020 in the comments section below.

If you're curious, you can see how some of my best of and worst of picks from the past few years hold up, please click here.

Even More Notes From Home

Why do I have to repeatedly ask my 6 year old (Pedro Tulo) to put on his underwear? You would think that once would be enough, but I end up repeating this request 4-5 (or more) times!

My 2 year old (Luigi) can now open the refrigerator on his own. What could possibly go wrong?

I definitely need to figure out the mask thing or get new masks. I’ve gone to the grocery store 2-3 times over the last few weeks, and I learned that I can't wear glasses with the mask because they fog up. The masks are also a little tight and uncomfortable around my ears. Oh, I can’t talk very well with them on either. I guess they work, but a little comfort would be nice.

Speaking of masks, Vice President Mike Pence visited the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota on Tuesday and walked around the hospital without a mask. A HOSPITAL! I don't consider myself a germaphobe, but whenever I'm in a hospital or doctor's office, I use sanitizer on my hands every two minutes. And that was before the coronavirus.

There seem to be a lot of conspiracy theories about everything out there, so I'm sharing one of my own. Mike Pence knows that he's never going to get elected president, but he wants the job. So he visits a hospital without a mask in the hopes of contracting the coronavirus. Pence probably feels that he's in good shape, has no other medical conditions and is surrounded by some of the best doctors in the world. He'll be fine. However, Pence passes on the coronavirus to an older and not-as-in-shape Donald Trump, who becomes extremely ill (so that he can't govern) or passes away. In either case, look who becomes president. Already in the position and with what is going to be a mess of an election in November (hello voter suppression!), Pence gets re-elected president. Again, there is a 0.0001% that this is true, but why not have fun with a conspiracy theory?

My brother is the king of class-action lawsuits. No, he’s not a lawyer like Jimmy McGill / Saul Goodman against Sandpiper on Better Call Saul. He just follows class action lawsuit websites and adds his name when it applies to him. He’s also forwarded several lawsuits to me over the years. They usually don’t amount to much, but I recently received a check for $72.04 from an airbag settlement. Woo!

Finally, I'm sharing this link from The Washington Post for when I look back at my time at home in 10-15 years. The online learning for my kids in elementary school has gone, um, poorly. Fortunately, this week (knock on wood...like every California redwood tree) has gone well.

Photo by PBS / YouTube.