Journal: July-December, 2023

July 3 – Barb retired, Allie home for July 4

August 7 – Travel planning, Bill Barnett

October 21 – General updates, population musings

December 2 – 9 – Billzpage issues

December 15 – Medical lessons

December 16 – December ruminations, retirement outlook and Billzpage directions

December 30 – Holidays with Allie, year end wrap

July 3

Barb is well and truly retired, even if she can’t quite get used to it yet. She’s been very busy decluttering various areas around the house and starting to set up her/Allie’s study upstairs. She had an emotional last couple of days at work last week, clearing out the last bits of her physical and electronic office and saying goodbyes to various coworkers.

Allie unexpectedly decided to come down with Perri for the July 4 weekend. She arrived Friday night on Barb’s last day and will stay through Wednesday, the 5th. Today she is working from home in the dining room. She went to the pool with Barb on Saturday then we had dinner at Grille 620 to celebrate retirement again. Barb was so drained she almost fell asleep in her mussels. Allie and I enjoyed a couple of relatively new menu items – grilled shrimp with orzo and an improved grilled seafood medley – but we brought most of that home so we could finish Barb’s mussels.

Yesterday we had a good dim sum at Asian Court, arriving at 10:45 and quickly getting all our favorite dishes. We would have got even more but we already had a fridge full of leftovers. We followed that with a shopping trip to Ace hardware so Barb could pick out a straw hat for some sunning protection. We couldn’t resist also getting some more flowers for the front and an Old Bay hat for Joe.

Allie and I headed down to Bethesda to see Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, my first movie in a theater in quite a while. Despite my best efforts, I nodded off for a bit in the middle, though it’s quite hard to tell what I missed. The choppy, show-within-a-show structure was had to keep up with anyway. Like other Wes Anderson films, this one is an intricate bauble playing on multiple levels in surreal scenery and colors. Allie and I enjoyed it though we’re hard-pressed to explain why or what the film was about. I look forward to seeing the whole film again at some point.

Afterward, we took a stroll around Bethesda Row then had dinner at Jose Andres’ Spanish Diner. We shared some Asturian cider, delicious anchovies over potato chips, gem lettuce with garlic and pimenton, butifarra that was too warm a choice for this hot day so we brought most of it home and ordered a chicken salad that was lighter and more refreshing….but we brought some of that home, too, adding to our larder of leftovers.

Today was not great for the pool so Barb decided to run some errands of her own, taking some items back to work/daycare and hoping to pick up a paper calendar. Allie’s working and I’m watching the start of Wimbledon while I work on this. I’ll shortly head out to the store to pick up burgers and fixins for tomorrow’s 4th of July cookout with Leslie.

In other news, I’ve been able to nail down my vacation to Spain to see Laurie from August 10-24. We will have some adventures in and around La Losa with Maggie and the boys, see Laurie and Maggie’s friend Terry Guerin and her family, then Laurie and I will head to Logrono in La Rioja and Hondarribia in Basque Country. I’m looking forward to that journey.

Before that, Barb and I will head to the Inn at Little Washington for two nights starting July 23. I will use the days to visit Jefferson’s Monticello, Madison’s Montpelier, and possibly Monroe’s Highland. I’ll leave Barb to luxuriate at the Inn and have some tea.

We finally got our new weeping cherry tree delivered last week. It’s smaller than I’d wanted but the landscaper was having trouble sourcing any pink weeping cherries. It took several weeks to even find this one so I decided to go ahead with it at a reduced price. The deep promptly started nibbling its leaves. I hope this little baby survives and thrives though it will be quite a while before we have something big enough to pose under for pictures.

Our other plants in the front bed are limping along. They’ve also been nibbled by deer but I’m trying to keep them watered every day and hope they survive for a few years at least.

My new electric lawnmower is working out well. It does a much better, cleaner job cutting the lawn than my previous mower; it’s also much quieter and more fun to drive. It’s got a higher center of gravity which makes it hard to do some of the slopes in our yard, but I’m glad I made the impulsive purchase. I still need to figure out what to do with the old mower, though. For the time being it’s taking up needed space in the garage.

August 7

I seem to have a few minutes to write in advance of going to lunch with Barb and Leslie, an American experience at the EC Diner. We are due to discuss their October drive to Tucson. I’ve outlined the trip and made reservations for them and have a couple of open questions. This is just one of multiple journeys I’m currently planning. There’s also my trip to Spain later this week, our trip to Boston and Portland in September, our journey to Denver for Sara’s wedding in November and our New Zealand/Australia cruise in February. That’s not counting the initial planning I did last month for Ireland in September 2024. I’m spending quite a lot of time and mental energy on these plans and it has kept me from writing or doing much with the website.

In the interim, I met Bill Barnett last week, August 2, at Nationals Park in DC for a baseball game with the Milwaukee Brewers. We had a pleasant though quiet time with each other. Bill is even less talkative than me, and that makes for a lot of long silences. We shared a few sentences on each member of our families. I learned that he has a boy, Kevin who is married and living in Boston, doing lighting for special events, concerts and theater. His two daughters, Carrie and Joanna, are now in Tucson, with Carrie about to deliver her second child. She is a professor at whatever university is in Tucson, having earned her doctorate from Princeton. Bill enjoys being a grandparent. That’s about all I learned, but we had a good time at the game…until the Brewers blew the game on the last play.

In anticipation of meeting Bill, I added Jim Rech’s biography of Susan to Billzpage. We didn’t end up talking about it at all but I like having the bio online as a reference. If nothing else, Susan’s Family chapter let me know the names of Bill’s children. 

October 21

It’s been more than two months since my last journal entry and I did only two entries (other than travel notes) last quarter. It’s fair to say I’ve fallen out of the habit. Still, I feel it’s a useful exercise from time to time. So here goes.

I’ve stayed busy trying to update Billzpage. I’m currently working on mid-2009, specifically our China trip with the Speizmans. There was a lot going on that year in our lives including starting my VISTA service with FIRST. It may still be a while before these posts are done and available, I’m afraid, but I’m plugging away. For the China trip, we have lots of photos and I have a box of memorabilia, but no real notes or planning documents which is odd. I’m finding it pretty easy to reconstruct the days from the photos, but there are gaps I’d like to fill. In general, I’m enjoying reliving the trip. It would be interesting to do some posts that compare and contrast our several trips to China from the 1980s – 2009 but that’s a whole other project.

I’ve reached the point in my timeline where I overlap with my Thunderbird archive of [email protected] emails and will shortly catch up with my [email protected] account and calendar. So I have a much more granular view of my activities, both a boon and a hindrance to my effort to summarize my life. There’s a lot more detail to deal with. I still find it odd that no other software or service makes this process easier.

And then there’s the matter of who is my audience and why am I doing this. I don’t think Laurie or Allie are reading regularly anymore, if they ever did. Barb has not asked to log on yet, and I’m not sure what she will think if/when she does. I am the primary audience, I admit, which makes this an aggressively solipsistic exercise. But I enjoy it and still find it useful. And I hold out hope that someday others will find it useful. 

Barb is now four months into retirement and is still adapting to new routines or lack thereof. She still has a busy schedule of lunches with various friends, she does a weekly mall walk with her friend Sheila, still does aerobics weekly, and has started playing pickleball now and then. Note that we don’t do any of these things together. We’ve tried playing pickleball together but haven’t found the time, place or partners to do it regularly. We still eat dinners together and watch some TV shows together, but we largely operate in our own orbits for the time being. She is starting to nose around volunteer opportunities but so far has only found a food bank operation that does one day each month, so that hardly counts. Otherwise, she’s reading a lot (mostly “trashy novels” as she calls them, though she has come to terms with ebooks, sort of, which is an accomplishment), doing jigsaw puzzles, and discovering the joys of afternoon naps.

Barb is also a couple of weeks in recovery from her road trip with Leslie, which was a saga of its own. I haven’t come to grips with how much of it to document; she kept her own journal and took a bunch of photos so I’m sure I’ll tackle it one way or another. But I think I’ll let the dust settle for a bit. It was an ordeal for her, for Leslie, for Piper, and for me, in descending order, I believe.

We’re getting ready to go to Colorado for Sara’s wedding in early November. It looks to be a fairly busy week of shuffling here and there, getting to activities and meeting various friends. I hope it will be fun and not too dramatic. Shortly after that, Allie will come home for Thanksgiving. She’ll bring Perri and stay for a week, which is longer than she wanted but that’s the way the flights worked out once we finally got around to booking them. She will come back for Christmas, too, but probably not for as long. January will be quiet then in February we head off to New Zealand and Australia which is still the tall pole in the tent of our calendar. After that, who knows? We are planning for Ireland in September with Dan and David, and lately started noodling about a trip to California maybe in May or June.

As for myself, I mostly stay busy with Billzpage and feeding myself. I take walks on days I don’t play tennis or pickleball; I’m trying to do two days/week of tennis or pickleball (I’m happy to have found regular indoor drop-in games at the Glenwood center and Supreme Sports in Columbia that mostly fit my schedule). I’m doing more than my share of (ostensibly) brain games including Wordle, Connections, Letter Boxed and various crosswords which gobble up nearly an hour each day. I run errands and try to keep our house, lawn and finances in proper operating order. The days float by quickly. I’m rarely bored and keep a list of things I ought to be doing or will get around to someday. Unfortunately, I’m not reading very much. It feels problematic that I find the word games more attractive and distracting than actual reading but that hasn’t made me change my habits (or is it addictions?). I also spend more time than I should doomscrolling through the news of the day. 

Speaking of which, there’s a new war in Gaza and Israel to worry about, no less than four different Trump trials to keep track of, and the usual flow of minutia that make up history flooding by. I don’t have many original thoughts about it all, but I try to keep up with most of it. 

There have been some articles I found interesting and worth pondering further. One was a NY Times article, “The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next?”. I hadn’t paid attention over the past several years as various studies predicted world population growth to peak and start to decline within this century. The predicted declines are much more precipitous than I thought and carry vast implications for humanity’s future as soon as the 22nd century. Why isn’t this a broader topic of discussion and understanding? How will humanity cope with the demographic and economic implications of a shrinking population base? What’s more, these are predictions based on pretty solid demographic trends, not some environmental, nuclear or tech apocalyptic disaster that are the more common but much less predictable or likely worries one typically sees. 

I’m reminded of the concept of seven-generation thinking which I wrote about in my Family Matters post (one of the best things I’ve written, if I say so myself). The concept goes back to the Iroquois (and coincidentally came up in Ken Burns’ latest documentary, The American Buffalo which I just watched). It posits that “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” That 180-year perspective reaches into the 23rd century. What are we doing to consciously shape the world in a better direction, taking into account the changes we can readily predict on our horizon? In the past I’ve put some stock in The Singularity, an event horizon beyond which we are incapable of comprehending. I find my thoughts shifting to a ground where, even though much of the future is unpredictable, there is much we can predict and have the responsibility to prepare for. I’m not prepared yet, but I’m feeling the responsibility to do a better job in the time I have left.

December 2

How did the whole month of November slip by? Oh yes, we went to Colorado for Sara’s wedding and then Allie came home for more than a week (with Perri) for Thanksgiving. Both were very welcome and enjoyable events, but they put a dent in my journaling and working on Billzpage. 

I did get some things done, but I’ve also been having problems accessing and working on the site for the past few weeks. It’s been getting progressively more annoying. At the moment, I am waiting for 40-50 minutes for some host-side caches to clear, thanks to the efforts of a Blue Host tech I reached by chat. I’m able to access the site from my home desktop but not from my main laptop. It’s rather bizarre to me but the Blue Host tech seemed to recognize the issue. I hope he’s right and the problem will be resolved in an hour [spoiler alert: it wasn’t].

In general, I’m going to have to get some tune up work done on the site. I need to track down the Word Press consultants I found in Rockville or Gaithersburg (It was Mosaic Data Services and my contact was Josh Martin). I need to fix issues with backups, photo downloads, the Where in the World map, my family trees, and strategize on breaking the site into multiple ones. I think it’s just gotten too big.

December 6

A couple of days have passed. I decided to go ahead and get in touch with Mosaic. Let’s say discussions are ongoing. I find it most odd that I have trouble accessing billzpage from my laptop (and my phone) – it works fine from the desktop or Barb’s computer. If Mosaic can’t help with this particular problem I may have to call on Geek Squad. ‘Tis puzzling.

I’ve also been making headway on travel plans, including selecting excursion and dinner reservations for the cruise. At Barb’s behest I sent a note to Amy Hunsberger with our Sydney plans and then got a slapback through Barb that I should have contacted them before I made our reservations. But that was more than six months ago while Barb was still working and it didn’t seem appropriate to me. And also, I’m not necessarily looking for a friends and family discount or upgrade from them. I’d just like to know if they have any suggestions or connections for us in Sydney.

Likewise, I’ve made good progress in the last couple of weeks with Ireland trip planning. While we were in Colorado we got good input from Frances (who just did a Rick Steves tour of Ireland) and Deanna and Patrick McVeigh who have been to Ireland several times. Deanna and Patrick have done the large tour group, the solo driving expedition, and most recently a private guide/driver tour through Walter’s Way Tours. I’ve been trading itinerary ideas with the folks at Walter’s Way and I think we’ve settled on a good 14-day tour around Southern Ireland. I need to get Barb to sign off and let Allie and Dan know our plans. There’s a small chance Dan might join for some of the tour. We want to end the tour by returning to Boston on Oct. 3 and stay in town for Allie’s birthday, if she approves.

Barb is in the midst of a flurry of lunches and other holiday activities, including volunteering at our community center’s Holiday Book Fair. Barb has also started taking courses to become a coxswain for Chris Bailey’s rowing team. We had dinner with the Baileys at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse as a payback for several nice dinners they’ve provided us. It was nice being with them but the service at the restaurant was interminable and the food only so-so, making the hefty tab for the dinner all the more annoying. I hope it earns us future Brownie points and a closer relationship with the Baileys who seem to like to eat…or at least Charles does.

December 9

I’m very happy to report that the folks at Mosaic were able to sort out some Cloudflare issues which caused several of the problems I was experiencing. I can now access Billzpage from any computer and it cleared up the problem of only some photos loading and my Jetpack backups (I think). It even sort of fixed the problem with the travel map. I have a path to try to fix the problem with my family trees once I spend some time with it. 

That still leaves the overall issue that the site is already exceedingly large and I still have lots more to add to it. I really do need to step back and assess my directions with the site. I can easily justify spending a few hundred dollars a year to operate it, but that won’t be possible if the price tag jumps to hundreds of dollars a month or thousands per year as it might if BlueHost ever wises up. Mosaic has offered to do an audit and make recommendations but even that will likely cost $1,000 or more. I’m thinking about it.

I started to dip my toe into investigating online alternatives for a family website or personal timeline, which I haven’t done in several years. I found a pretty good article on How to Create a Beautiful Family History Website. That led to The Best Family Tree Websites Compared: Where to Build Your Tree. The Top 100 Family Genealogy Websites page offered some useful tips and led me to Forever.com which offers to store photos and stories for 100 years (not quite forever, but a start). It’s the tip of an iceberg but it seems there are some other people beginning to wrestle with the same type of challenges I’m encountering. In the meantime, Billzpage seems to be operational enough that I will keep dumping content into it for the time being…until I can figure out something better.

December 15

Today represents a mid-month breather in the Christmas season. We are mostly ready for the festivities, and mostly looking forward to Allie arriving on Christmas Eve.  

I had a somewhat rough week, having various odd health maladies prompting me yesterday to go to our new urgent care facility on Route 40. They determined that I have a urinary tract infection, just like a cat. I’m now taking an antibiotic and already things seem to be improving. I have a follow up visit scheduled with my doctor next week but I expect to be in the clear well before then. I’m pleased to report that my new level of health insurance with Medicare and BCBS seems to be working great. So far, the only out-of-pocket expense I’ve had was $5 for the antibiotics. Also, I’m somewhat pleased with myself for recognizing that this was some sort of internal infection rather than Covid or the flu, though it took some days to get to that conclusion. The symptoms started to remind me of when I had the infected fistula a few years ago; this time I headed to the doctor much earlier in the cycle, so chalk something up to a little learned wisdom. And to top it all, I’ve now lost the 10 pounds I gained in November, so hooray for being sick!

Speaking of weight and insurance, just before getting sick I had a good annual checkup with my doctor. My various medical numbers are within tolerance and generally moving in a positive direction. With my new insurance status my doctor advised I check on eligibility for Wegovy, the weight loss drug. After a few confusing calls and clarifications it seems that I am, as long as I get the drug through BCBS Mail Order (or is it CVS CareMark? Still very confusing branding). My order is in process but I’ve asked to defer starting it until mid-March once we return from our NZ-Australia vacation. I hope to see positive results over the rest of this year and beyond, and I’m glad it will be much more affordable, about $400 annually. I’m convinced losing weight is the healthiest thing I can do for myself but I haven’t been able to do it on my own. I’m OK with taking this medication at that price point indefinitely if it works…though I’ll be happier when they make it a pill rather than a jab.

I haven’t made headway yet determining my directions with Billzpage. For the moment I’m mainly happy the site is working properly enough. I need to pick up where I left off with our 2009 China trip and then finish that year…it would be an accomplishment if I can do that before we leave for New Zealand. I know I will take several months to digest the NZ-Australia vacation, no matter what level of notes I actually take on the trip.  

In the midst of my minor medical dramas we had a nice end of year lunch with Jeremy and Deanie Wu. We returned to Lao Sze Chuan in Rockville but I think it will be the last time we go there. Though it’s nice, and nicely quiet for a conversation, it’s quite expensive and the food is not really worth it…not unlike our recent dinner with the Baileys at Ruth’s Chris. But Jeremy generously paid as a retirement tribute to Barb. They are headed off on a Viking river cruise in Portugal. We will meet up with them after our cruise to compare notes. I hope they can give a good report on Portugal to Barb…she didn’t even know there was a river.

December 16

With a little more time available to ruminate, let me tackle a few other topics on my mind.

The country’s political climate is still a mess with Trump riding high in the polls despite all the manifest charges against him. The Republican Party still cowers in the face of his base’s strident support, even though they have no actual agenda beyond grievance and a desire to crush the Democrats, liberals, elites, Deep State, immigrants, or whomever they decide is against them. Joe Biden totters along, quietly presiding over a resilient economy, booming stock market, and trying to keep the wars in Ukraine and Gaza from getting out of hand, at least. The Democrats are far from perfect, but they are governing. The Republicans are a farce. And yet, we roll into election season with a very uncertain future.

While I am so deeply enmeshed in my own vacations, consumerism and self absorption, I recognize I’m doing nothing to contribute to solving any of the biggest issues of my day. I’m not taking a stand for a political party or candidate, social justice, climate change or any other hot topic issue. I feel like my nearly ten years in the robotics world was in large part a “give back” to national and community service, but I’m now five years beyond that service and I haven’t really done anything useful other than survive a pandemic. I look forward over the next 5, 10, 15 years and feel like I can make a contribution somewhere, but I’m not at all sure where to focus and haven’t really made any effort to look. It’s time to at least start raising my antennae. It’s another excuse to plunge around the internet and try not to get sucked into any scams or black holes. Good luck to me.

As for Billzpage, with the fixes Mosaic recently did for me, I can totter along for some indefinite time adding content as I’ve been doing. But ultimately I need a new direction, platform or technology. What do I want to achieve with this project? Priorities for me are to: 

1. Build a comprehensive digital, searchable repository of family photos (and video/audio media), chronologically arranged with enough descriptive text to give them context. 
2. Build a timeline of my life so I can correlate personal life stages, vacations, career milestones, cultural and political events…and not rely on my fuzzy memory. I’ve constructed the website with a timeline paradigm in mind, but it’s not obvious – I’m the only one that can see it, and even I cannot really navigate or tie it together the way I’d really like.
   1. I’d like to find a friendly, robust timeline tool/widget/platform.
3. Take the time to analyze and reflect on those life changes, lessons learned and areas of growth in hopes of making better choices, be more efficient in managing my remaining time, and offer some guidance to others.
4. Flesh out our family history and make it available to my extended family. I’m not at heart a genealogist or that interested in becoming one, but I want to capture and digitize the research that has been done and make it more accessible within the family for the times when others may have interest. The family/genealogy portion of Billzpage could probably happily exist as a smaller standalone site.
   1. I need to rebuild/fix the family trees
5. The journaling aspect of the website is useful to me, personally, but probably can be accommodated well enough through GoogleDocs, perhaps with links to/from the site. The journal is useful, however, as a backbone structure to slot in ongoing photos and events. And it is an interesting artifact to show how we perpetually fail to see the forest for the trees…but every now and then glimpse the larger moment in which we live.
6. I want this website to exist and grow for the remaining decades of my life, at minimum. I view it as my ongoing vocation to add to it as long as my story continues. I want to fund/endow it to exist for another century (or few) after my death so others within and potentially beyond the family can see it as a record of a life lived, and as a (flawed) model of how to capture and manage the digital detritus of a life.
   1. That said, this project is only viable for me at a cost of maybe a few hundred dollars per year. If it becomes much more than that, it’s not really practical…so then what?
   2. I maintain that someone will make a billion dollars from developing a platform to more automatically generate this kind of record of a person’s life…and be able to share/compare life stages with others in a curated, non-invasive way.

Shifting gears, now that Barb is reaching the six month milestone of her retirement, I think we are nearing the end of the transition phase, as predicted by so many. It indeed takes about six months for the dust to settle and new routines to develop. 

• The Christmas holiday and then our NZ-Australia vacation loom large in the immediate future, but after that it seems we will sail into a period where we can take stock and set out on what will really be our retirement years together. 
• Travel will still be an important component, but not an overwhelming one if I can resist the temptation. There are not that many places on our mutual bucket lists, and I can’t see myself succumbing to the allure of an endless round of cruises and tours.
• We seem to be staying well within bounds of the financial model I put together 18 months ago; that path is reasonably clear for the next decade and beyond, even if Barb still has no idea of it. Kudos to the stock market for rising 10% in the last few months. That always brightens my outlook, but we were doing alright all along.
• We seem to be over the hump of sorting out our medical insurance transition to Medicare; that future seems set until we bump into the need for personal home care.
• Barb and I will seek out opportunities for volunteering or engagement beyond lazy consumerism, I hope and expect. 
• Allie will continue her adventures and we hope to stay a part of them.
• We will likely stay in this house for another decade or so until the urge to downsize or possibly be closer to Allie becomes undeniable. 
• I’m not sure what holds in store for our broader family as our siblings age, but I can safely bet that Barb won’t let me get too involved in any of it.

Thus, the road ahead looks manageable and enjoyable as long as Trump or someone like him doesn’t come along and run the nation and world off a cliff. So it would be worthwhile for me to see what I can do to help prevent that. Also, I need to finish this year’s Holiday Letter, Barb reminds me.

December 30

We wrapped up 2023 with a nice holiday visit from Allie and Perri. They flew down on Christmas Eve and I just tucked them onto their flight back to Boston today. We had a good evening with the Diamonds/O’Neills on Christmas Eve, then had a quiet Christmas on our own, including a roast beef dinner. On Boxing Day, the three of us went to see The Boys in the Boat, Barb’s inspiration for becoming a coxswain. After the movie we did some shopping then later Allie had dinner with her GCS school friends Jordan, Jeff and Evan. On Wednesday, Frances and Dave unexpectedly came to spend the night, having called the day before. We had a good meal together at The Collective Offshore; Barb and Frances chatted nonstop for 24 hours (with 8 hours of sleep) while Allie and I tried to figure out what to speak with Dave about. They headed off on Thursday after we vacated the house for The Maids and had a final lunch at the EC Diner. We spent a good chunk of the afternoon worried about Perri who was hiding in the basement, traumatized by the vacuum cleaners, no doubt. We had a low-key Friday capped off with dinner at Shin Chon. It was a very pleasant week with Allie, with too many cookies and a surplus of good meals.

So now we have a couple of days of rest before we plunge into 2024 and whatever it will bring. Barb is gearing up to do some filing and is starting to pester me about doing the same and to do some tidying in my study. I agree it needs it. I need to chase down our solar and battery backup situation – we have a proposal for a new battery system from Fred Banner but I also want to get an idea of what we can do to expand our solar array. Fred was supposed to get us a quote but he’s been silent for most of December. I also want to start Mosaic Data on an assessment of what to do with Billzpage so I have a viable strategy for the coming decade or two. Those are both substantial (and expensive) projects I will pick up in January, even if the solutions stretch out much longer.

Our New Zealand/Australia vacation in February looms large, chewing up a lot of psychic energy as I worry about this or that. I’m really not enjoying the ramp up in anticipation of this trip. It’s too large an indulgence, especially the airfare and the cruise. I’m 95% sure everything will be lovely and we will have a great time, but I’m inordinately worried about the small chances for disruption of flights or sickness or world events. I really don’t see us doing this kind of big trip very often, which is a change in my retirement outlook and budget, somewhat…largely for the better, I suspect.

Beyond our down under cruise, we look forward to 2024 events like a total eclipse and a trip back to Punta Cana with Allie in April, a new baseball season where hopefully the O’s can still be competitive, the Paris Summer Olympics in July-August, our September trip to Ireland and more. We fretfully await the unfolding political scene as we plunge toward November and what we can only hope is a repudiation of Trump and the crackpot collection of Republicans that support him. Through it all will be a string of legal battles and courtroom dramas that likely will raise much noise and fury with little actual resolution. We enter this year with more trepidation and foreboding than usual but I resolve to remain optimistic, that the Republic will hold, and that we can breathe a sigh of relief by this time next year. I haven’t made much headway in the past few weeks, however, in figuring out what I can do to help make sure we can reach that stage of relief.