What’s new, 2023?

It’s been just over a year since my last quasi-annual update, and – wow! – has it been a year! Like last year, I’ve mostly kept up with you by LinkedIn and Signal, I’m still writing blogs from my cellphone, and everything has been a total blur. Read on for a peek into what’s been going on in our lives.

A lot of people who read these posts are most concerned about how my awesome daughters are doing, so I’ll start with that. They are doing well and still growing like weeds! The biggest loves school, the littlest loves everything her sister doesn’t, and they both like hugs, snuggles, and the ocean. Watching them grow has become a constant source of laughs for me, and even in their most ornery moments, I often find something humorous. President Obama said in an interview with Dave Letterman that he once read that having children is like wearing your heart outside your chest. I couldn’t agree more.

The biggest piece of news is that we’ve moved. After 18 years in Knoxville and Oak Ridge, my wife and I packed up our family and memories to return home to Virginia. We hitched up our wagons, so to say, and moved back to the Blue Ridge mountains and the Shenandoah River! East TN was good for us, with what was supposed to be only a five-year stop for grad school turning into staying for most of our adult lives. We’ve missed Virginia for many years, and it is nice to be back. (If you know of anyone looking for a 5 bedroom, 4 bath house in Oak Ridge, ours will be on the market soon.)

Last year I mentioned that we were building a house in Virginia, but we decided to buy a house to meet our timeline and save money. And I must say the place we bought is pretty great! It is conveniently located near town but out in the county with a few acres of land. The most common pedestrians are chickens, and there are kids around the neighborhood running their own ice cream and lemonade stands. The town nearby is quaint, walkable, and just big enough. It feels like home even after only a few months. We still own our forest too, and it is a great retreat when we require some tree therapy.

There is no doubt a small contingent of readers who are wondering what I have planned for all this land, given my love of gardening and my 55HP tractor. I can provide only this for an immediate update: I have already ordered apple trees. I need to build a small bridge. I think I have enough corn seed for next year. I am building eight large raised beds, and my wife has assigned me to future bug removal duty for the veggies.

You might have read my recent article about my father. He passed away in January at 93 after a long struggle with dementia. Being without him is hard because we were very close. Some days I’m OK, and other days I’m not. I hope to write a series of articles about him, describing his fight with dementia and how it impacted our family. I have two goals in writing these articles. First, it makes me feel good to remember him in prose. Second, I hope that someone reads the posts and finds any piece of them helpful or informative.

I don’t have a lot of news to share about work, and no news is good news. I’m still working at Amazon in Amazon Transportation Services as a Principal Engineer. I like it, and I’m excited about the future in this space. I have a lot of thoughts about RTO, but it is enough to say that I have always preferred a hybrid model like what is common in Physics departments at Universities.

It is hard to have hobbies with small children, and I’ve found that the easiest to maintain are those that can be done with portable devices and which require little commitment. This year I primarily nurtured three such interests: reading, practicing French and a few other languages on Duolingo, and playing through RPGs on my Nintendo Switch and mobile. I have read books every day for 418 days straight on my Kindle, and I take this as a spectacular accomplishment in the age of social media and streaming video. I mostly focused on fiction this year because the few non-fiction books I read were very serious and exhausting. Some days I would read less than a page, and some days I would read two hundred pages, depending on the book, my availability, and how I felt. I may write a blog article on this experience just to share more details because it has really been wonderful.

While I didn’t post much this year, I did write a lot. I don’t know how that aligns with my resolution to write more last year, but I’m going to take it as a step in the right direction. The improvements in mobile productivity tools make it a lot easier and faster to develop rough text that can be polished later in a desktop environment with help from tools like Grammarly. (I love Grammarly.) I didn’t post most of what I wrote because I picked subjects that I later found narratively intractable, so I abandoned them, or subjects that will require another year or two to document. For example, I decided after a long hiatus in genealogy to start writing about Richard Billings, my great-great-grandfather. The article that I wrote about his son, William Billings, took two years to research and write. I expect the article on Richard to take just as long.

I drafted this post while also enjoying our first family vacation in four years. After moving to Northern Virginia, we promptly hopped in our cars and headed to Cape Charles on Virginia’s Eastern Shore for two weeks swimming in the Chesapeake Bay. We really needed a break because of all the happenings of the last few years on top of being travel-restricted due to SARS-COV-2. We’re a family of beach bums, so as soon as it made sense, we headed back to the water. I went sailing for the first time, too, on the Schooner Windsong.

Cape Charles is really nice because it is small and friendly, with an extremely large public beach. The beach is great for families because the water is shallow with very small waves. Families can dig for shells and shellfish or play in the fine sand. There are a couple surf shops in town that can outfit you with a tent or other gear, but more specialized supplies like wagons and air pumps have to be ordered or picked up on the mainland, which is connected to the Cape by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel. Depending on where you’re looking, warships, Coast Guard cutters, container ships, fishing boats, crabbers, and schooners stretch along the horizon.

And that’s about it. Well, not really, but if you actually made it this far, I’ll buy you a donut.

Fall is fast approaching, and in the hustle and bustle of it all, I hope you find rest, relaxation, comfort, and pumpkin pie. This day and always, may the Lord bless you and keep you, my dear friends! Until next time!