As the end of 2020 approached, Becca and I discussed whether to send an annual holiday card. For reasons writ large, we decided to pass. In the interim, we received many cards and updates from friends, some of whom took the unique opportunity to poke fun at the circumstances of the most recent year. Dox, I am looking at you! Your card made me laugh out loud!! 🙂 So, here is a quick replacement vis a vis a blogpost.
2020 began with a trip, along with former NYU classmates, to Bogota, Colombia. We enjoyed the time reconnecting with friends (and making new friends along the way.) We loved Bogota and are thinking about returning to Cartegena and Baranquilla in the near future.
A photo following lunch downtown in Bogota. 
Dinner at Adres Carne de Res, a very wonderful, but eccentric, locale! 
Museo de Butero 
We had alot of fun noodling around Bogota.
In March, we visited Aruba. The spread of the coronavirus was becoming increasingly worrisome throughout the week. At the end of the trip, while driving to Queen Beatrix Aiport from our hotel, our cab driver remarked that the worsening pandemic caused nearly all visitors for the following week to cancel their trip to Aruba. We were returning to the USA at about the precise beginning of the global shutdown.
So, we experienced the shutdown. My initial pivot to work from home over subsequent days involved converting our home’s outbuilding into a home office.
I did eventually return to the house. Here is a photograph of my home office from yesterday (1/16/21) following a very nice webinar I hosted with Carl Seitz, the president of the Lehigh Valley Business Coalition on Healthcare (LVBCH), featuring my friend and colleague, Rob Berger. [Rob did an awesome job detailing opportunities for mid-market employers to save money on their pharmacy expense! Ping me if you would like to see a recording of his talk.]
In some respects, 2020 feels best summarized by a quote in Scott Galloway’s Post Corona:
“Nothing can happen for decades, and then decades can happen in weeks.”
Scottish MP George Galloway
The truth is, as bizarre and challenging as 2020 was, it was a good year for our family. The kids are both in virtual school, supported primarily by Becca as their learning coach. Holger, a first grader, is thriving. He loves learning about animals and has concluded that he will be a video game engineer as an adult. Camilla, a fifth grader, is also flourishing. Her future ambitions have evolved: in kindergarten she wanted to be an author; subsequently, she wanted to be a librarian; most recently, she aspires to be a special education teacher. I don’t know where life will take her, but she is bright and hardworking and, like her brother, very caring. I am proud of both Camilla and Holger.
Holger studies… 
Camilla in our home office…
Becca has been highly involved with Congregation Brit Shalom as VP for Education. She was volunteering a few days per week for Strawberry Fields’ coffee shop in State College, Good Day Cafe, but stopped going in during the pandemic. Our kids are fortunate to have her supporting their daily efforts to keep up with expectations for their education.
For me, work was quite an adjustment this year. Our firm, USI, moved all ~200 offices to WFH initially, and implemented a quick and effective shift in our operating model to cope with the issues at hand. Our CEO, Mike Sicard, remarked to our teams that, in history, society has previously been forced to cope with economic recession (e.g. 1930’s), social unrest (e.g. 1968), and global health concerns (e.g. Spanish Flu); 2020 was unique in that all three crises presented themselves simultaneously. Indeed.
Some of our time during the year involved exploring areas of Central-PA more than we had previously. There is tremendous beauty across this area of Pennsylvania.
We all took time to continue learning during the year. Becca took a virtual class on authoring books for children with Susan Bartoletti from Penn State; I took a virtual night class with Dan Gode from NYU-Stern. The class with Professor Gode also inspired me to invest into learning how to create simple programs in Python; I continue to tinker with Python applications during evenings. An unanticipated (and quite cool) tangent to this effort is Camilla’s apparent interest in computer science. She has started tinkering with Logo (#oldschool) and Scratch (which is an MIT developed program for teaching concepts including conditionals, operators, and loops). Over the past few weeks, we have jointly run through CS50 on edX.org. Based on her quick grasp of base-two counting, and enthusiasm for applying concepts into programs for her own “choose your own adventure” stories, I wonder if she may find her way into engineering!
Thinking about this blogpost over the past few days, I wondered about the best closing thoughts for my post: I could share an optimistic quote from a historical leader, such as Madiba; I could attempt to connect aspects of current politics to my recent reading of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Rather, as I look for a final time at the cards we have received this year, and as I think about future decisions to be made about 2021 holidays cards, I ask you to reflect kindly upon the following cartoon from the December 28th issue of The New Yorker.
Happy New Year to you all! I speak for all Thorsens when I write how excited we are to see you this year, unmasked, confident, (vaccinated), and healthy! Cheers!