I read 57 books in 2019.  Thanx to Tyler Cowan, who taught me to discard with abandon books I start but end up not enjoying.  Read only what makes you really excited to get back to your book, and you’ll make the time to get back to your book.  And have a better time when you do.

Best fiction discovery: Lionel Shriver.  I discovered her starting with The Mandibles and ended up reading four more, my favorite probably being We Need to Talk About Kevin for its sheer staying power, closely followed by the Post-Birthday World.  I really love parallel universes.  So Much for All That would have been another favorite were it contained to the main plot, and had it discarded with the subplot.

Best non-fiction discovery: Meghan Daum.  She writes essays that just talk out of my own brain.  See: the Unspeakable; this year’s Problem with Everything.  Some of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House also resonated.  She has also written a novel, the Quality of Life Report, which I read years ago before I knew she was herself.

What happened in my life this year that didn’t take place on my couch under the reading lamp?  I turned 50, obviously, and got some clean medical screenings.  My spouse and I greatly enjoyed 2 weeks in coastal Maine.  A new mudroom was completed on the back of our house.  All of this could have been predicted; the real wild dominoes fell at my job.  My manager experienced a life-changing injury in late February; and [the product that I work on] experienced a 6-hour outage on April Fool’s Day.  As a result, one of my best work-pals is now my boss, and we haven’t done any meaningful work since April.  You just never know.

I can almost feel my brain atrophy here in North Carolina with my in-laws.

I want to go home and never leave.

 

Goals 2020:

• Make a fleet of yarn
• Read a library of 5-star books
• Produce a parade of home-cooked meals
• Review a city block of new restaurants
• Sample a case of new brews
• Bedazzle the world with inimitable joie de vivre

 

Things not part of my mission in life:

• Making other people happy
• Looking good
• Being thin

We enjoy ourselves in one of the one of the most exceptionally charming downtowns in the U.S.

“Don’t compromise yourself.  That’s all you’ve got.”  – J. J.

 

A kitty kat named Sammy that I take care of sometimes when his people are away.

 

I passed the test!

A newly certified AWS Cloud Practitioner sits in the Northern University of Vermont library after her exam.

 

In 1989, Alice was in her late 50s and a successful author of children’s books.  Her brother had encouraged her to try this new service called Prodigy, which provided “online” news, features, and electronic mail or “e-mail”.  It proved to be a good resource for keeping up with her siblings and their families.  There were also “message boards” on various topics, including one for writers.  Alice began participating in this message board; and she posted to it looking for advice when she found herself wanting to write some scenes into her next book about Dungeons & Dragons, about which she knew next to nothing.

Cut to the headquarters of Prodigy in White Plains, New York.  A 20-year-old college student works there in a part-time job as a tester.  She has a lot of downtime, and she spends it reading the message boards, basically all of them, since there aren’t that many.  She sees this author’s query about D&D.  She’s played it maybe twice, didn’t like it.  But since she’s got downtime, and she’s got opinions, she responds.

When this story unfolded into legend, Alice would tell everyone that my response was simultaneously utterly charming and utterly unhelpful.  But that response quickly blossomed into a daily correspondence, or daily meaning every day that I was at work, since that’s where the “e-mail” was.  We easily chatted every day I was at work, sometimes several times per day.  I told her all my problems.  Alice was interested in people and interested in helping, so she advised me.  I had no one to look up to in my life, so I listened.

So there was a period where I was away from work, probably some holiday period, for a longer time than usual.  Alice said that her husband Larry found her at the computer looking a bit listless and forlorn.  He rubbed her shoulders and said jokingly, “You miss her, don’t you – your ‘daughter’.”  When I returned and Alice told me about the exchange, she said that Larry was right, she had missed her ‘daughter’; but since we looked way too dissimilar to ever pass as mother-daughter, we should perhaps adopt each other as aunt-niece.  That’s how she became my Aunt Alice.

 

Aunt Alice and me when we met in 1990.

Alice lived a live filled with travel and adventure; and everywhere she went, she managed to meet the most remarkable people.  Some were no doubt truly remarkable; others had remarkableness thrust upon them by Alice herself.  It will forever have been my great fortune to have been one of those people – in the latter camp, of course.  I was not and am not remarkable; but in her eyes, I was.  I will never quite understand why she chose me; but she did, she chose me to love and adopt as her niece, and it changed my life forever and for better.

Aunt Alice passed away yesterday after several years of living with dementia.  I think it was early 2015 when I received my last email from her, her correspondence having already started to become confused and rambling.  I’ve missed her these years.