Skip to main content

Merry Christmas!

Christmas is my favorite time of year, by a long shot.  Like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, it’s a time for looking backward, forward and at the present.  It’s a time of bonding with family and friends.  And for me the mystery of salvation is uplifting and humbling. 

Donna and I are spending lots of time with our kids.  Jack flew in from Los Angeles Friday evening with Klondike, his five-month-old toy American Eskimo.  Kate and Eileen and Eileen’s husband Andrew live nearby.  Everyone was over yesterday for our annual trim-the-tree party.  We also had an adventurous meeting between Klondike, who weighs seven pounds, and Eileen’s and Andrew’s pit bull/Rhodesian ridgeback mix.

2013 has been a challenging year for me and Donna.  The biggest setback was that I lost my job in a corporate reorganization.  Yet we both are healthy, we have many, many blessings to be thankful for and look forward to a fulfilling 2014.  We wish you the same.  Merry Christmas!


Copyright © 2013.  All rights reserved.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Afri-freaking-ca!

Donna and I recently took the trip of a lifetime, a safari in Tanzania on Africa’s central east coast. We visited Tarangire National Park, with multiple herds of elephants; Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which features the renowned Ngorongoro crater; and Serengeti National Park. Serengeti, like Ngorongoro, is a UNESCO World Heritage site; it is home to some 1.5 million migratory wildebeest, 400,000 zebra, 3,000 lions, and many other herbivores and predators. After much research, we booked our 10-day excursion through Micato Safaris . It was a great choice. We were pampered with luxurious accommodations, incredibly up-close animal sightings, and vast amounts of fascinating information. It was a life-changing experience that greatly exceeded our most optimistic hopes. We arrived in Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro International Airport after a 10,000-mile, 26-hour journey, and were greeted by our remarkable tour director, Joseph Mushi, and a driver. We hopped into the rugged Toyota Land Cruiser,
Post a Comment
Read more

Getting Lost in a Good Book (or 21)

I’ve always been a reader, from my childhood on, and the allure of getting lost in a good book has never released its grip on me. Since my retirement in June 2022, I’ve been reading a lot. Here are some of my favorite books from the past year; let me know your thoughts about these or others! Fiction 100 Years of Solitude , Gabriel García Márquez – Márquez’s fantastical epic about the Colombian Buendia family is one of the greatest books I’ve read. Cold Mountain , Charles Frazier – Outstanding literary novel about a wounded Civil War soldier’s desertion and return to home. Beautifully written prose. Age of Vice , Deepti Kapoor – Great fictional account of a poor Indian boy’s introduction to the Indian mafia, his rise and fall within, and his ultimate redemption. The Slope of Memory ,  Jos é  Geraldo Vieira – A cerebral tale of a Brazilian writer that is like a mashup of a D.H. Laurence novel and the philosophical dialectic of Plato’s Republic (but much more entertaining than I’m
Post a Comment
Read more

OBX

In recent years we’ve rented houses on New Jersey’s Long Beach Island for a week and hosted our kids and their families. This year, we decided to try something new: Donna and I rented a house on North Carolina’s Outer Banks for a week to kick off summer with our children and their families. It was one of the best family vacations we’ve had. The weather was fantastic the entire week. The ocean water was so warm that even Donna got in. The beach was composed of soft, powdery sand and the waves were mostly calm. Skittish ghost crabs, with their pincers up and their eyes atop periscope-like stalks, would partially emerge from their hiding holes in the sand, cautiously sidestep a couple feet, then dart to another hole. Patrols of pelicans, rarely seen at LBI, were ubiquitous, and we saw dolphins arching just past the breakers nearly every day. The house Donna had found – she has a knack for finding great vacation houses – was perfect. Oceanfront with private beach access. Pool. Seven be
Post a Comment
Read more