Like a lot of people, I’m ready for this dreadful year to end. I was really feeling fried during my last week or so of work. Throughout the pandemic from almost day 1, I’ve been keeping a list of things that have been bringing me a wee bit of joy during the lonely and frustrating times of this crisis. Here they are in no particular order:

1. Binge-watching The Wire for about the umpteenth time
2. Writing for Opensource.com kept me busy, taking my mind off my isolation, and kept me writing during some very lonely times during the pandemic
3. Eating Shrimp Salad sandwiches from Looney’s North
4. Melatonin
5. Eating Thai food from Yindee Thai on Thursday nights
6. Reading Harvard Business Review articles
7. Getting a new grill
8. Cooking Peruvian chicken breasts from Wegmans on my new grill
9. Cooking from recipes after a long hiatus of just eating crap
10. Watching Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek Enterprise reruns on H&I TV before going to be on weeknights.
11. My iPad Pro for reading books, tracking my tasks, and giving me reminders so I don’t forget anything
12. Melatonin
13. A Very Sweary Dictionary for being such an easy read and showing me I might have been using one or two swear words wrong all these years
14. All of the truth bombs that Meeting Boy drops
15. The Tao of Bill Murray
16. The Holderness Family videos on Facebook for giving me one of the only worthwhile reasons to even go on Facebook these days
17. Cutting up Amazon boxes of which there were many during the pandemic
18. Ted Lasso on Apple TV+ made me laugh out loud when I needed to the most
19. My subscription to Todoist helped keep me on track with the plethora of work and life tasks I would’ve otherwise blanked on during the pandemic
20. Zoom for helping me communicate with my co-workers and helping make starting my new remote job not so awkward

Joy was a bouncing ball for me during the pandemic. I had to catch myself more than once with a little pick me up from this list.

What are some things that brought joy into your life during the pandemic?