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As usual, we have included one of our traditional “Big Tree” photo. We also have some cartoons appropriate to the year.
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Our family has been lucky, again, to have weathered the year with good health and sanity mostly intact.
Our project in Philo, an ADU for us combined with a music and game room for everyone else, first reported on last year, is proceeding apace. Once again, Pournelle's Law, still holds. "Everything takes longer and costs more."
A more elaborate version is Hofstadter's law, which says that it takes longer even if you include the effect of Hofstadter's law in the estimate.
Jim is already buying items for his "perfect kitchen."
Turns out we were ahead of the masses again as this story in the NY Times shows.
As Jim relates in the Travels Page, we went on three birding trips on 2022.
Hope you have a wonderful 2023. Drop us a line if you are so inclined.
Side note: The first of these reports went our as a Christmas Letter in 1977 or something like that. So we have documented about 45 years of 20th and 21th centuries' history or a bit more than 16831 days, meaning that we have long ago eclipsed Pepys, whose diary covers only a decade. I don't know how many more of these reports I have in me. It's getting harder each year as the number of photos explodes and the software quits working in places. For example, The KDay calculator suddenly quit working, requiring several exchanges with tech support. (And you thought I was tech support.) But, we'll keep soldiering on for a few more years.
This was a year in which we pretended that everything was back to normal and resumed out travels with the trips postponed in 2020.
Fully Vaxed and wearing masks no matter what other idiots thought about it, we visited Costa Rica, Spain, and Bolivia.
See our Travels Page for more.
Back in (we think) September, 1980, I wrote a letter to my grandmother, Mamaw, for her birthday. My cousin, Kem Hargrove, found it and sent it to me. I have reproduced it here. It's short, and I still like it.
We have tons of photos this year, a tribute to the advances in photographic equipment more than any inherent talent. Each photo has a short description on the (i) panel. See A complete list of albums
Back in 2010, I wrote a novel (unpublished) about rebuilding civilization after a pandemic that wiped out most of the world's population. COVID forced a few revisions. Linda suggested that I spend my time during lockdown working on a sequel. That done, I had some further ideas and put them into a third book in the series. I have put PDF versions on the web in case you want to offer some critiques. A fourth book is rattling around in my head.
Linda is a big supporter of E.O. Wilson's Half-Earth project. So, we decided to use one of his quotes this year. Hope you like it.
