Updates with cows, math, and fancy food

 Life here in Enoughsville continues to be rich and full.  My tongue seems to be healing up, thank goodnessh!  I'm entering the part of the long corridor of the semester in which I try to mock-complain that "my students keep giving me so much to grade!!!" --- which they do, but nobody seems to feel sorry for me. 

My guy went to be a test subject doing scratch-and-sniff experiments at the Monell Chemical Senses Center this week.  They said he doesn't smell good well, and yet they were so grateful for his help as a guinea pig that he's going to go back in the future.  So cool to be part of science!

Late this week, a new cow entered my life.

This cow comes from a senior at our college, a former student of mine who took Calculus (Cow Class) with me her first year here.  She is one of those people who just makes the whole room brighter, so I loved having her in my class, and I'm touched in a gazillion ways that she's stayed in touch with me even as she moves out of the math world into the environmental studies arena.  Earlier this year, I encountered her when I was climbing trees (she's a much better and more experienced climber than I am), and this semester she's joined a book group I've organized around Your Money or Your Life.  The purpose of her visit to me this week was to share a picture book she'd pulled together from her study abroad experience in Quito and the Galapagos Islands.  It was a beautiful book, as you might imagine.   My touchstone word of the year -- Freudenfreude -- was in full force, let me tell you!  It's good for the soul to pass joy back and forth together.

At any rate, I know it's hard to see from the photograph, but this cow is made of a terra-cotta-like clay, covered with fuzzy wool; it has a slot in the top and a hole in the bottom, so it's a little piggy bank cow, if that's not a contradiction in terms.  My student told me her sister found it in a thrift shop, and she said it reminded her of me (which I do take as a compliment, thank you), and so she got it and has been saving it for me.  I think it's a perfect addition to my collection while we're reading a book on personal finance together. 

This leads me to a very funny comparison between two meals.  On Monday afternoon, I made lunch for the 20 people who attended the book group, and on Thursday evening I went out to dinner with my guy at a trendy little restaurant a block from our home . . . and these two meals were quite a contradiction in styles and mood, I have to say.  My guy loves eating at restaurants, and I suggested a night out to make him happy, but he is also highly attuned to my own responses to things, and he couldn't help asking me for my opinions, and so he was a bit on the edge himself.  I wish I could fake it better!

The restaurant was so loud with talking and music that we kept asking "What??" to each other.  [Him: "It's quieter than places that play loud TVs".  Me, in my head:  "I'm sure it's also quieter than places that explode mortar shells or operate jack hammers, but I don't go to those places.  I can hear you fine when we eat at home."]  The dinner was more expensive for just the two of us than my entire 20-person lunch earlier, and that was even after we caught the error in which they nearly overcharged us by some $30.  And the portions were sparing, unlike the lunch where we'd shared leftovers all around.  The whole restaurant experience -- between me and my guy-- was a weird kind of meta emotional thing, because I was trying to do something sweet for my guy that he liked, but I know he had a hard time enjoying it because he couldn't help seeing the situation through my own particular (and very idiosyncratic) frugal lens.    If nothing else, the next evening when we defrosted Thanksgiving leftovers and ate together at home, he knew I was sincerely delighted with the meal.  

So, students, grading, food, and . . . another cow!  This one is a more temporary blue cow drawn on a chalkboard, after a highly productive mathematical session with Achild.

The "O" (or "#") in Love/L#ve
is courtesy of Bchild, actually.

Here is a real-world arithmetic problem that Achild solved herself.  If grandpa broke 27 bones before marrying Nana, and then he broke 13 bones after marrying her, how many bones has he broken in total?

Note the excellent "carrying" going on here.
Fabulous!

My guy currently has no broken bones, and my tongue is healing, and we have lots of yummy food in the house, so I guess that's the update from our family this week, as we continue to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.  

Four instant pots (but almost zero waste?)

It's hard to reconcile the "anti-consumerist" side of me with this fact:  I now own four instant pots.

The first Instant Pot acquisition makes frugal sense: it's a super energy efficient way to make a bunch of things that I'd previous used other, more energy-intensive appliances for.  AND it was something I put on a Christmas-wish-list that people who want to buy me stuff could buy, forestalling their buying me things I do *not* want . . . so frugal in that way, too.

The second Instant Pot, also maybe: it was a gift to Nelson back when he was in culinary school, and then when his living situation kept changing, he left it at our home, where we ended up co-opting it and putting it to occasional use alongside Instant Pot number 1.

The third Instant Pot?  We're getting into frivolity territory here.  I'd semi-justified it because it's different than the other two in two key ways: (1) at 8 quarts, it's larger than the other two which are "only" 6 quarts each, and it has an air fryer attachment.   Both features have come in handy at various times, so I have zero regrets, but I also totally admit I'm moving from the realm of sheer practicality into the expanses of luxury.

And the fourth? It matches the first two; I bought it (still in the original box, unused) off of Craigslist, for not-very-much money.  Indeed, it had been sitting around on Craigslist for several months, which makes me think that the market for such appliances is becoming saturated.  And I bought it for a good, but temporary reason, which is that this semester I'm going to be providing several lunches for 20ish people (maybe as many as 30 people sometimes), and I wanted to do it without incurring the usual trash that comes with ordering delivery -- hence, I want to actually make the food myself.  Instant Pots are a fabulous appliance for anyone who wants to set-it-and-forget-it, and so I decided it would be good to have an at-work version of this baby to supplement my three at-home versions.  

My at-work Instant Pot,
with a large can of plates and a basket of cloth napkins.

I am pleased to report a resounding success.  On Monday, I trotted out the three 6-quart instant pots and had a fabulous book discussion group for 20 people.  We ate rice (from one pot) and vegetarian chili (from two other pots).   I had a large bin of pretzels and a gallon jug of pickles on the side, and a bit of local cheese as garnish.

One of the fears I have about being frugal is presenting the way I live as somehow inferior, so I was quite nervous about running out of food or about having people judge the food as plain/boring.  But in fact,  the guests raved about how good the chili was, maybe because I added some cocoa powder, and they loved the brown rice and the shredded cheese that I'd bought in a 7 lb block from a local, organic Amish farmer for half the price of usual store-bought cheese.  And we didn't run out -- just the opposite:  we had gobs of food left over, with many people taking extras home in their own containers (which I'd urged them to bring).  So I got to make people happy and also feel generous, and do it for something like $3/person ($6 per person, if you add in the price of the Craigslist instant pot, although I'll use it for future meals, too, so $3 is more realistic).   So, no trash, and yummy food that people got to take along with them, and yet still it was much cheaper than any restaurant I know near us.  

Yes!

Update, on the tip of my tounge

Life continuesh to be  rich and full here in Enoughshville.  

I often tell any junior colleague in my orbit, any potential mentor-ee, that "When it comes to advice, I'm full of it!".    Well, here's my advice for the week; you know how some people urge you to "Bite your tongue!"?  My advice:  don't do it!  Don't bite your tongue!

Because, dang it, it's uncomfy!  I think I chomped mine during my sleep on Wednesday night, and I'm still feeling it.  In fact, partly because of where the sore spot is, I have a bunch of trouble saying "S"s, and it turnsh out there are a LOT of eshes in the shentenshesh we shpeak!  I also, due to my malady, know a lot more now about what my tongue looks like in the mirror: I can barely see where I hurt it, but I am much more aware that my tongue is much wider than I'd ever thought, and that it looks a lot more like a 1970's shag carpet than I would have thought possible.  

Aside from the chomped tongue, I'm doing great.  [Although, really, it's astounding how much a sore tongue keeps intruding on my consciousness and my mood, so saying that I'm doing great otherwise is saying a lot.]  Classes started this week, and I am very much enjoying the students in my class.  I was supposed to cap the class at 20, but I let in two more of my favorite students, so it's a large class -- at least by our standards for a writing-intensive math course -- and this means I'll have lots of grading to keep me occupied all spring.  And fortunately for me, it's a large class of students who are, so far, seeming to throw themselves into the joy of working together and wrestling out loud with tricky geometrical concepts.  

I got to spend some time doing math this week with my eldest grandchild, Achild; it's fun thinking about counting by 10s and counting backwards, and we got to use my chalkboards together.  I'm hoping we can do more of this!

I'm also in the early throes of training for a half-marathon that a couple of my friends decided to do together at the end of March.  Today, I'm appreciating resting up after a long training run.  We'd let ourselves dial back our runs over the past year, and none of us had run more than 4-ish miles at a time for several months, but this morning we did a 6-mile training run that somehow got an extra 2 miles tacked on at the end, and I'm very, very content to just sit here and type updates right now.  

In a different realm of sports, Nelson's middle school team won their recent basketball game, an emotionally important one that he described as "a revenge game".  Playoffs are in two weeks; he says he's going to miss the kids on the team so much after they move onto high school. As I'm his mom, I encouraged him to take advantage of the chances his group home gives him to sign up for other programs to get involved with; making friends in different friend-groups is so important.  (I might have geeked out a bit and explained it as "diversify your social portfolio"; sorry about that, Nelson!)  But really, things are going well, and his new living situation already means that he's eating well, and he's appropriately proud that his blood sugars are "in the green" these days.  Whoop!

OfSnough is likewise doing well, although now that we have a new senator, he's a bit at odds-and-ends on Tuesdays, and he'll have to find his own new social group, or a new way to protest, or some such.   The two of us came very close to visiting Jason; this would have been the first time we've seen him since Christmas 2019, but at the last minute, he waved us off because of needing space to deal with a break-up.  In his case, breaking up also means finding a new place to live, and so it'll take a little while to sort that out.   But in the meanwhile, I've done a bunch of back-and-forth texting with him, and OfSnough has helped him sort out some financial stuff.  

Jason: " An maaaan I got such great parents thank you"

Me: "Yes, you are right -- you DO have great parents! "

So, even though it's hard times, I'm glad that it gave us a way to be back in touch and helpful (because, when it comes to advice, I'm full of it!)

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yoursh be shimilarly proshperoush.

Perhaps I am very bad at retiring

I began thinking about the idea of retirement even before I turned 30. I was starting my first job, and I didn't know anything at all about personal finance, so I read all sorts of books.  One of the books that reached out, grabbed me, and wrestled me to the ground was Your Money or Your Life.   I wasn't particularly swayed by the first part of the book – about how much our jobs suck, and how much they suck out of us – I happened to love the place I was working (really, I totally loved my job) and the people I work with – but the middle parts of the book did a total philosophical/financial makeover in my head. I glommed onto the parts about how money is what we trade our life energy for; I love the "fulfillment curve" graphs with the peak at "enough" (love it so much that I named this blog for the high point of that curve), and I was blown away by the idea of the "crossover point", which is the point at which the interest (or dividends or such) from your savings are higher than your spending, at which point you become Financially Independent.

So, even before I turned 30, I had decided I'd point my head and giddyap my horses toward that crossover point.  When I turned 30, I married a guy who came with rather massive (to me) financial obligations, but fortunately we are a really good team at loving each other where we are.  I read Your Money or Your Life aloud to him (we read lots of books to each other, so this wasn't like a preachy thing), which had minor effects in altering his ways of spending and was hugely helpful in giving us a common vocabulary for money-related topics.  Meanwhile, I continued loving my job . . . whereas my husband had many ups and downs with his, so I decided the goal would be to have HIM retire early.  That way, I could do the whole crossover point thing, which had been a life goal (like running a marathon or visiting all the continents is for other people), but I could do the crossover point thing for someone who never thought he could retire early and whose job actually did kind of suck him dry at times.  

My original hope was to have him retire the year our youngest daughters graduated from high school.  That didn't quite work out, partly because he took a detour, reenlisting in the military and was serving in Iraq that year, having a blast flying around in helicopters and writing articles. Actually maybe writing "having a blast" is the wrong expression, because fortunately he was far away from almost all of the fighting. He came back from his tour overseas, became a civilian again, and we (I) started working on his early retirement plans yet again.

I still remember a long walk that he and I had where he fretted about the idea of retiring. What would this mean to him? What would it mean about his identity; what would it mean about his friendship circles? There were things that were really hard about his job, but of course there were also things he really loved about it – especially the people he got to hang out with and gossip with.  Nonetheless, about eight years ago, we pulled the plug, and he retired, and he has been so happy – so, so happy – ever since. He's managed to retain all of his friendships, even to the point of his old job contacts inviting him all over the world to help with trade shows. He gets to go hang out and gossip with people he likes, but he doesn't have to wake up before six, and he doesn't have deadlines, and he gets to spend so much more time with me and the kids. It's beautiful; it's everything I hoped it would be, and for him, it's like a magic trick that he never would've believed could be possible.  I love being part of this magic act!

So what about me?

For some reason, I got it into my head that I was going to retire at age 52.  I *think* that's because at that point, I would have worked at my current place of employment half my life.  It might have also had something to do with our college's annual celebrations of people who are either retiring or who have worked here 25 years, so those things got closely connected in my mind (and 26 is close to 25).   I was fixated enough on this that some of my financial user I.D.s have the number "52" in them (not the passwords, though, so I'm not giving away super secrets here).  

When my college decided that it needed to revise how it supports medical insurance benefits for retirees, I spent a half a day leafing through brochures and websites trying to figure out what that would mean for the eventually 52-year-old me, and I kept metaphorically running into blank walls and dead-end streets, so I broke down and had an actual conversation with our head of HR:

Me:  I can't figure out the medical insurance benefits for retirees before they turn 55.  I can see the [minimal] benefits for people 55 to 65, and also [more substantial] benefits for people 65+, but nothing for younger people.

HR: You can't retire before age 55.

Me:  What?  Wait, I don't understand,  What if someone wants to retire then?

HR:  You can resign before 55, but you have to be 55 to retire.

Me:  Those sound kind of the same: what's the difference?

HR:  [Lists a bunch of financial things that don't matter to me, like tuition benefits or life insurance, which don't mean as much to someone whose kids are grown and who has enough money to live off comfortably without extra help.]. . . 

Me: . . . okay . . . 

HR: Oh, and email/library/facilities access. And institutional affiliation.

That last line was the difference.  I don't want to cut myself off from the community that comes with my college; I want to keep coming to holiday events, to bump into friends in the library, and to use my college affiliation as I publish papers or apply for grants.  I had the money to retire (probably) by 52, but I wanted to make sure I had the people as well.  So then and there, I revised my retirement date to 55.

Just so you know how completely I planned this all out, when I was 45 years old, I drew up a 10-year plan.  It had cool stuff about my kids' ages and grades.  It described when we'd look for and buy a new home, when I'd finish writing my book, when I'd apply for my next NSF grant.   And just about every single one of those items on that 10-year plan dropped into place, clink-clink-clink, right on schedule, just like I'd mapped it out.  Heck, the book was finished almost before I'd said it would be.  At the end of that 10-year plan was the three-way-stop sign: "retire/sabbatical/become a dean", and I arrived there having to make a choice: which of those three would it be?  

I applied for the associate dean job with minor trepidation.  Becoming a dean was another thing I'd eyeballed since grad school for the very superficial reason that the grad school dean had a huge desk and I was kind of jealous/impressed.  My trepidation was mostly about my boss, who I had concerns about, but I figured that I'd bring such good stuff to the position that it might work out well in spite those concerns.  I applied for the position and got it, and I got a contract stating that --- because I was postponing my sabbatical to take this job on --- after my next sabbatical, the college would waive the usual rule that I come back to teach for a year after that.  So the new plan became: be an associate dean for three years, take a year-long sabbatical, and retire at age 59.

But then, it turns out that the whole boss/me thing really really didn't work out well.  I won't say more about that, except to say that I resigned from the position after one year, and then two weeks after I resigned, my boss's boss let the campus know that my boss was leaving the college to spend time with family.  So my resignation had the effect I wanted, but I am still sad that it worked out that way, because I actually liked doing the administration thing.  I thought I was good at it, too, although I'm well aware that people can delude themselves, so, who knows about that?  At any rate, the new plan became that I return to the faculty for one year (which is what I'm doing right now), and then go on sabbatical, and then retire at age 58.

Except this* week, we just got an email about a new admin position opening up, which would be a two-year position, and I am glancing at that thinking, "ooooh, fun" and also that I'd be good at it, and it would have a lot of the community-building aspects associated with it that I'd like.  So I'm trying to decide whether to throw my hat in that particular ring, which -- if it worked out -- would mean two more years of work, followed by a sabbatical, followed by retirement at age 60.  I dunno if that's what I want to do (and of course I don't know if I'd get chosen for this job, even if I did want to do it), but that's the big question rattling around in my head right now.

* "This week" = a few weeks ago.  I've since talked with a couple of people at my college, and I get the sense that another very awesome person might be applying for this position.  So for that reason, and a few others, my hat is not in the admin-position-ring, and I'm back on Plan B or Plan D or whichever one has me heading into retirement in 18 months.  For now.

Enoughing it in the New Year

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  The new year kicked in, and I decided that for me, the word of the year is "freudenfreude" -- the act of taking delight in other people's joys.  I am learning that it is a skill, a practice, and an art to be able to hear the joy in what people are saying and magnify it back to them and to myself.  

I'm also thinking of freudenfreude as a kind of a medicine for a kind of sickness; in 2022 there were things at work that shoved a bunch of people I love (including myself) into the territory of saying, "I don't like to think of myself as a bitter person, but because of [X] I can't keep myself from feeling and acting bitter."  Indeed, in addition to the front-porch collection of cows I keep, I've started a collection in my address book of contact info for really, really cool people who left my college.  One of the big reasons for the unhappiness seems to have altered significantly, so I'm crossing my fingers that those of us who remain will start to feel better . . . and any of those sparks of happiness and contentment I see are like little flames among wet wood; I'm going to give them oxygen so they can grow.  Freudenfreude, 2023.  Here I come.

Of course, one of the most wonderful combinations of things possible in the entire world is Travel + Friends + Math, and so I've been super happy to kick off the year with exactly that combination.  On Wednesday early in the morning, I boarded a train headed for Boston, where I got to do/breathe/live/discuss math with 5000 of my closest friends.  

The funniest part of the trip for me is that we were in a section of hotels and convention center that were connected by glass tunnels reminding me of hamster tubes, that ran through a very swanky mall.  I felt like I was traveling abroad, to a foreign (to me) country.

Learning the local vocabulary.

How the locals dress.

It can be overwhelming, 
but stick with it.

(Okay, that was very silly, but it did tickle me to walk daily past these stores with my very geeky, practical, and dowdy math friends, and I felt I had to document the moment).  

I took advantage of the trip and reached out to a bunch of other Boston-area friends of mine, which include several of my former students.  

Three of my former students and me, in Boston

In fact, I got to meet up with one of my very first-ever students, who I'll call "Amy" (not her real name).  She was a student in a calculus class that I was a TA for when I was in grad school, and she shaped a lot about how I think about struggling students.  She used to ask so many questions (SO many questions), and they were mostly of the roll-your-eyes variety that showed she'd had a really weak background.  This was a large class, and the other 100ish students would kinda sigh.   After the first of two midterms, the professor of the class (a guy I really liked and respected) asked me how Amy had done, and I said she'd barely passed.  He surprised me by saying "Oh, too bad!" (implying he'd hoped she'd have failed the test).  He followed up by saying, "She's not going to pass the class, but now she'll think she has a chance, and so it's going to be heartbreaking."

Amy kept going, kept showing up to all my office hours, kept asking lots of questions in class.  But her questions got more and more sophisticated.  Shortly before the second midterm, the prof asked me how Amy was coming along, and I said, "Actually, I'm impressed.  She's explaining related rates [a notoriously hard topic] to other students in my office hours."  And on that second midterm, she ended up getting a 97.  She went on to get an A- overall in the class, went to med school, became a doctor, and after finding that not intellectually stimulating enough, moved from there into clinical research, where she's been part of a team finding successful treatments for cystic fibrosis.  

Amy and me, friends for three-and-a-half decades.

Amy was one of the first people to babysit my birth daughter, and in turn I babysat her three kids:  I became a dinosaur with two pillows for "bread" and made Little Boy Sandwiches that I gobbled up with gusto.   The sandwiches were loud with laughter.  Now those Little Boy Sandwiches have gone on to get their own graduate degrees in math and science; it was good to catch up with their mother again.  Hugs, Amy!

Speaking of boys who have grown up, Nelson is very much enjoying his volunteer work, coaching a middle school basketball team.  When Nelson was young, I told him and his brother Jason that I taught Barack Obama how to play basketball, and if you believe that, you will correspondingly believe that I taught Nelson everything he knows about basketball, too.   I must have been a great teacher, clearly, and it passes along to new generations, as Nelson's team won their most recent game.  Way to go, team!

Look at them go!

And OfSnough, while I was away, he consoled my dog Prewash as best he could, and also attended the very last Tuesdays With Toomey protest.  

That's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures. May you and yours be similarly prosperous, whether you're celebrating the New Year with fancy clothes,  . . . 

Gosling and Colin rock it, 80's style

Inkling finished her new sweater!

. . . with Batman binges . . . 

Inkling's annual New Year's tradition

. . . with freudenfreude, or otherwise.  

Good at Geometry, not so much at Geography

Achild is learning about Egypt, my daughter tells me.  I responded, "Cool!"  That's the country that gave us some amazingly influential math, winding its way from the African continent, around the Mediterranean, into (eventually) Greece. 

Achild made a Phaoroh hat and a water clock, and so I offered her some math that comes from one of my favorite theorems, Thales theorem, named after Thales of Miletus.  (But then, I realized "oh heck, Miletus was in Ionia, not Egypt".  I got Thales confused with Ahmes, the scribe from 1555 BC who wrote what we now call the Rhind Papyrus but which we ought to call the Ahmes Papyrus because Rhind is just the European dude who bought it off of crooks who illegally dug it up.  A whole other story, there).  

At any rate, here's Thales Theorem in action.  (And by the way, thank you for asking, YES it is fun to try to think of a way to explain it to a seven-year old who is great with art but who doesn't do algebra or other fancy formal math yet).  Make a circle.  Fold it in half, so that you get a semicircle. Then make two more folds so you get a triangle with one side along the flat edge of the semicircle, and the other two sides meeting at a corner anywhere along the arc of that semicircle.   

Voila, says Thales.

What Thales says is that that last corner -- where the last two sides meet -- has to be a right angle, same as the corner of a regular piece of paper, no matter where along the arc of the circle you put it.  It's a cool little theorem, that has all sorts of fascinating consequences.

By the way, the word "geometry" is derived from the Greek, meaning "earth (geo) measure (metry)".  As such, it's related to "geography" (earth picture).  But not closely related enough that I remember the difference between Miletus and Africa. sigh.

Enough of 2022; happy new year!

Life is rich and full here in Enoughsville, and this past week has been a precious bubble of time with family and friends, and also of time utterly and completely to myself.  I am very much aware of all the empirical studies that say that our deepest source of happiness rests on our relationships with others, and I also know how much I default to sitting by myself whenever I get the chance to do so, so this time of year is a bit of forced magic for my psyche.

One advantage of having so many different family members in so many places is that the celebrations of Christmas last for many days, instead of being the single focused day I remember from my childhood days.  I got to start the week with my dad, his wife, my sister and her husband, my guy, and Inkling.  

One of these people is good at turning
a "selfie" into an "us-ie". 

After a lovely Fitness Blender on Christmas morning with my sister followed by a warm shower, Inkling told me that my hair looked like a bird's nest, and she was absolutely correct, so I nabbed some birds from the nearby tree and added them to my head.  

There was an old gal with wet hair
who said, "it is just what I wear:
Two owls and a hen,
four larks and a wren
have all made their nest in my hair."
[apologies to Edward Lear]

Because I can, that's why.

After the time with my dad (et al) was over, we drove home and had another day or two of time with Gosling and her boyfriend Colin and his son.  I didn't take photos, but we constructed a kick-butt gingerbread house and had more good conversations . . . I really like the people my children have become as adults, I have to say.   

(I missed getting to see Kinderling and her kids; they've been beset by one illness after another recently, and I ache for them.  And my sons are both so, so far away: I got to have good conversations by phone or text with them, but I hope to find a way to visit with each of them in person in the coming month.)

In the days following Christmas -- in which the people of my church celebrate the long-ago birth of a man who walked on water -- I got to spend a bit of water-walking time with my young friend, the son of my colleague who passed away a year ago.  We found a depression in the park that had gotten first soggy, and then turned glassy when the cold front froze the ground and water that had collected there.  I called this spot "Lake George", but then my friend said it was too small for a lake, so we called it "Pond George" and spent a happy hour sliding back and forth, spinning, shuffling.  My sister and her husband are learning to skate (like, with real ice skates), so this made me think of the two of them, too, but really we were just goofing off and trying to get out some of the energy that needs to be burned off when you're 7 years old.  

Skating on Pond George.

Then my guy and Inkling went to New York, and left me alone [yayyyyyyyyyyyy]. Aside from skating on Pond George, I basically stayed home all by myself reading a book called "Mastering Community", and reveling in the paradox of what that sentence just said. The reason I tossed "basically" in there is because my running buddy June discovered how I was spending my days and balked: she urged me to go out to lunch with her and her family. Part of me wanted to stay home by myself, but I of course am well away of empirical studies that say don't-the-heck-stay-home-by-yourself-when-a-friend-wants-to-drag-you-into-society, so I obeyed. And then, after lunch, I went back home and read my book all by myself, and it was just a lovely, lovely set of days.

I am in a family of people who fanatically keep numerical track of things they've done over the year, and so here are some stats on what 2022 looked like for my fam.  First of all, Inkling is giddy with happiness about all the theater she's seen this year. 

51 distinct live shows (+ 4 virtual)
+ 18 repeats = 71 live performances.

Where some people go for quantity, I go for the opposite, so I'm very happy about the most recent record (for us) low entry on our Garbage Can Graph:

We put our garbage can at the curb 2 times in 2022.

Another happy set of low numbers:  I was in my car exactly 36 times this year, for a total of 1216 miles driven.  I am grateful for being in a place where I can walk and bike to almost everything!

I asked OfSnough what numbers he thought were most remarkable to him (he tracks books read, broken bones, countries traveled to, and more).  He said that what surprised him most is that this past year --- and probably the year before that, too --- his walking mileage was higher than his bike mileage:  2830 miles walked and only 2113 miles biked.  Go figure.

And that's a bit of a wrap up of the week and of the year in our neck of the woods, where we continue to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.