December 22, 2024

 

Dear Everyone,

We’ve been home for over three weeks now, and we will be meeting up with some other family members for a Club Med vacation in Ixtapa next week, so this is the last letter of the year.  In spite of the infamous results of the November election, it’s been a pretty good year for us, with the highlight almost one year ago of our Galapagos trip, or do I mean the marriage of Jasper and Vivian?  We saw the two of them twice recently.  Last week they came over and I made homemade pasta (which I learnt how to do in Lecce) with a Korean inspired Bolognese (i.e. gochujang and ginger instead of tomato based - - perhaps I got the idea from watching Culinary Class Wars on Netflix).  We also went out to dinner with them Friday at Chinatown’s BBQ King, where we had the usual duck dinner for four, with the addition of stir-fried pea leaves.  I also got a holiday present of a variety pack of Lakrids Danish Licorice.  I also should mention that Vivian is now a new contractor for Sandstorm Design.  We’re hoping that her TikTok stock will be worth something someday.

We were glad to have the two of them over last week, because Cindy and I finally broke down and purchased two new computers. Our old desk top was a dozen years old and the laptop close to ten, and although still usable, they were getting slow to respond.  It had been so long since we updated our machines that setting them up was a real pain, especially with hardware compatibility.  For instance, our monitor did not have an HDMI slot, so we had to go out and buy a new monitor from Best Buy later. (I was still using a computer with a CRT monitor upstairs).  We almost had to buy a new printer because the drivers for ours were not available to download. Luckily, I had an external CD drive we connected to the new CPU and were able to load them from a disc that came with the printer. Our old external microphone failed to connect to the new laptop, but seems to work with the CPU. Even Vivian couldn’t get a headset/microphone set (Cindy’s present to me) to interface correctly on the new laptop, but we finally figured out a work around (after some frustrating hours). Everything seems to be in working order now, but I am not sure something else won’t crop up with some software snafu.

Other social events included a dinner with Jami and Carolyn Walloch, and Jami’s sister Jacie and her husband Tom at Barrel and Vine in Lemont about 10 days ago.  Tom is a retired Tesla executive - -he was a bigwig in their European office.  Now the two of them live in Lake Forest. We all gathered at the Walloch house so we could see their over-the-top Christmas decorations.  They have several blow-up figures in their front yard, lights everywhere, and at least five decorated trees inside. Jami also gifted me with a digeridoo (we had been watching some clips of digeridoo players while working our previously).  It’s fun, but I don’t know how to do circular breathing, let alone play the thing.  You can come on over and give it a blow.

This week I went to a Christmas meal at Christ.  I picked up Aimee Kwak and Ritu Ghai at Christ, and we drove a bit east from the hospital to Barraco’s, where we had a catered meal of relatively indifferent Italian-American food.  Everyone else there was a lab tech (instead of a surgical pathology tech), so I didn’t really know anyone else to talk to (the pathologists run this party in three shifts – lunch, midafternoon and dinner to accommodate the different shifts of the technicians).  Aimee’s large new large house in Hinsdale is almost done with construction, and the move in date presently is sometime in March.

Besides watching cooking shows on Netflix, Cindy and I enjoyed watching A Man On The Inside with Ted Danson.  Danson plays a retired engineering professor whose wife recently died of dementia related causes.  He’s bored and answers an ad from a private detective to be her “man on the inside” at a retirement home.  It was pretty cute, and only eight 30-minute episodes.  It has been renewed for a second season.  I also saw Gladiator II with Andy - - my advice is to skip it.  The special effects were good but not fantastic, and the acting, script and plot were wooden and unsurprising.  There were a lot of anachronisms also, which also always irritates me.

I have read some interesting book lately! Nothing great to write about on the fiction side, but first on the non-fiction list is Van Gogh and the End of Nature.  This is a very well written and documented interpretation of Van Gogh as an artist concerned with the industrialization of the landscape.  It was like going to a series of well-done art history lectures. Next is The Wager by David Grann (author of Killers of the Flower Moon).  The Wager is about a 1740s shipwreck around Cape Horn.  The lives of sailors has always been hard, and Grann has  a way of making it quite visceral (have you ever visited the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor - - it’s hard to believe how the sailors lived).  The privations of the survivors of the wreck were quite extreme. A good book for fans of Patrick O’Brien.  I also read Survival of the Friendliest by two Duke University dog and human cognition scientists.  They have an interesting argument for self-domestication of humans that leads to our cooperation, socialization, and our creation of large ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups, for good and ill.  It’s a good bookend to Harari’s Sapiens.  Like Sapiens, I think there is a lot of cherry picking in their argument, but its quite thought provoking.  I actually got this book out because I was listening to an interview of the authors on a podcast about dog behavior!

Catch you next year!

Love, H.