The day

Today is the day.

Or more specifically, today was supposed to be the day.

July 22, 2020 was the day I was set to board a plane at Logan Airport bound for Seoul, South Korea and then on to Tokyo to cover my first Summer Olympics.

Of course, those plans all went out the window, along with just about everything else in the world, back in March when the International Olympic Committee announced that the 2020 Tokyo Olympics would be postponed for a year and will take place in July and August of 2021.

Obviously, I've written many times over the past few months about the impact of the postponement of the Olympics. A few days after the announcement, I was temporarily laid off from my job at Salmon Press, meaning the possibility of covering the Olympics next year was also in doubt.

As we head toward August, the possibility of getting back to work is down the road a bit and with it, comes the possibility of still getting the chance to go to Tokyo and if all goes as planned, one year from now, I will be in Tokyo for the start of the Olympics, which kick off on July 23.

Instead of finding myself on a plane to Seoul, this morning I was up before dawn and off to cook the donuts at the Yum Yum Shop in Wolfeboro, which has been my saving grace the last few months, allowing me to stay busy and still pay the bills

Here's hoping that next year at this time, you'll be getting blog posts live from Tokyo instead of live from my apartment.

Looking forward?

This was supposed to be a good year. There was so much to look forward to, so much to be excited about and things were seemingly looking up.

But, here we sit more than halfway through the year and I can't help but wonder if there is anything to look forward to right now.

On March 11, I boarded an early morning flight out of Boston heading to Los Angeles. The flights were less than half full and it was obvious that change was coming to the country. I traveled to California for a Rob Has a Podcast live Survivor event in North Hollywood. These live RHAP events have been a great time for me over the past few years. I've been to New York City pretty much at least once a year for these events and have also gone to Chicago, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Toronto and Los Angeles on different occasions over the past few years.

I've met a lot of great people at these events and it is always nice to catch up with folks I mostly see online. There's usually other events going on around the podcast and in March, a group of us successfully escaped from an escape room prior to a group dinner before the podcast. With the busy schedule I had covering sports, I usually went in and out the same day and the trip to Los Angeles was no different, as I flew back on a red-eye flight that same night.

That was the day that everything changed.

Sports leagues began cancelling games and then seasons. The high school sports season that was wrapping up came to a grinding halt. Travel came almost to a standstill and all that I was looking forward to in 2020 started unraveling at the seams.

While in North Hollywood eating dinner prior to the podcast, I got an e-mail from the University of New Hampshire Marching Band director stating that our planned trip to Ireland, scheduled to leave just a couple days after I got back to the Granite State, was cancelled. This was one of the things I was most excited for this year. We were heading to Dublin to play in the St. Patrick's Day parade and take a quick tour of Ireland. All the rehearsing and preparing was down the drain.

By the time I got home on Thursday, March 12, the NHIAA had announced that they were working on a solution to finishing out the winter season but within a few days, it became obvious that this was not going to happen and by the end of March, the season had officially been cancelled.

Over the course of the last few weeks of March, the other things I was looking forward to slowly began to fall by the wayside. I was slated to travel with the Kennett baseball team to Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida for a little spring training at the end of the month, but the high school was quick to call off all trips and that excursion was done before it began.

There were also two more RHAP events on the books, including one in New York City in early April and another in Atlanta in late April and those were both cancelled.

But perhaps the most disappointing announcement came in very late March when the International Olympic Committee announced that the Tokyo Summer Olympics were being postponed by a year. After covering the previous two Winter Olympics, I was looking forward to attending my first Summer Games. While this was obviously the right decision for the IOC and my credentials will carry over to next summer, there's a lot of questions.

First and foremost in my mind is the question in the title of this post. Is there a way to look forward? Is there something, anything, to look forward to? 

If there are fall sports at the high school level, I am hopeful that I will have my job back, but I am not terribly optimistic about the fall sports season going on as planned. Additionally, newspapers have taken a huge hit with the Covid pandemic, so there are obviously questions about how things will look even if sports come back in the fall. While I worked a lot of hours at the job, there were obviously tons of things that made the job fun and there was always something to look forward to. Watching sports for a living has its upside for sure.

I am sure that if things can get back to normal, RHAP will host live events again, but if I don't have the flexibility (and funds) that my writing job provided me, it remains unseen whether I'd be able to get to the live events.

If I do have my job back, will the Olympics still be a viable option? And if I don't have my job back, the Olympic credentials are essentially not available to me, even if I am lucky enough to find another job in the journalism field.

It has officially been 100 days since I was "temporarily" laid off and while I was lucky to find a job working with good people at the Yum Yum Shop in Wolfeboro, there's no question that I miss standing on the sidelines on the fields across the Lakes Region and covering the local athletes.

So, I ask, is there something to look forward to? Because right now, it's a struggle to find anything.