Year End Wrap Up.
Makes it sounds like a last-minute christmas present, doesn’t it?
Well, perhaps in a way, it is. A final revisit before starting another cycle. I am with Stephen Jay Gould on calendars. While tied to natural cycles, they are otherwise artificial. I mean, the naming of days, months, years, as if they mean something other than a convenient sort of book-keeping.There is nothing innately special about January 1st, only what we say about it. Same with Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and so forth. We use calendars for convenience.
But that doesn’t make them meaningless. On the contrary, because we assign relevance, they are quite meaningful. We just have to keep in mind there’s nothing cosmic about those meanings.
So. 2025 has come to an end. Wow.
Donna retired. End of June. (There’s a date of relevance to us.) One of the things we said we intended to do once she was no longer required to go to a dayjob was travel. Well, we started that before her retirement by going to Kansas City for the SFWA Nebula Awards. We had a good excuse. Our friend Nicola Griffith was named Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers Association, so we got spend the weekend with her and Kelley Eskridge, her partner, and Brooks Caruthers, who also attended Clarion with us back in 1988. It was a fine weekend. I got a new hat and we spent a lot of money at Prydes (kitchen stuff) and did other cool and nifty things.
(The hat…yeah, I may have mentioned this before. I have a lot of hats. Most of them I have acquired at Donna’s behest. She likes hats, just not wearing them. So she gets them for me so she can see them. It works out.)
After that, summer came on too strong to go anywhere, but in September we took off in earnest for a Schultz Family Reunion. We met her brother and his wife, Kimberly, beforehand and drove into Kansas City for some good food and touristy stuff and then wandered down to the Lake of Ozarks for the family stuff. Good trip.
And then in October we went to Pittsburgh for a reboot of Tim & Bernadette’s Passage Party.
Visiting Tim & Bernadette is always a pleasure. Their Passage Parties have been occasions of great fun among terrific people, and we always discover another piece of Pittsburgh, which is a great city to visit.
From there we drove south to take a tour of another Frank Lloyd Wright house, Kentuck Knob, which is also near Fort Necessity Park. We were up in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. Beautiful country.
This was just a taste of what we intend to do a great deal of in the coming months and years. Hit the road and see what’s Over There. We already have two major planned trips for this spring, a couple of less planned ideas, and…
For this we have acquired a new car. That wasn’t the plan. But last month a deer struck Donna’s car. It was a 2009 Corolla. Beautiful car, Donna was very fond of it, but it was totaled. Hence, new vehicle. After shopping around, test driving a few (something we haven’t done in 35 years) we settled on a RAV 4. Yes, another Toyota. This is our fifth one. But this will be ideal for extended road trips. Took a bite outta savings, but hey, we intend driving it for the next 15 or 20 years, so it works out to not much per year. Perspective.
But this has been six months of experiment and trial. We get along well enough, but anyone could find themselves having difficulty adapting to a radical change like this. The good news so far is, we still like each other. It may be too soon to tell just how adaptable we are.
In the meantime, schedules have shifted, priorities changed.
The year has been taken up with figuring logistics, arrangements, budgets. Having to buy a new car kind of wrecked the budget, but it’s fine, we planned. Not specifically for that, but for something expensive.
We also did not expect the political shitshow we’re currently living in. Maybe we should have. If one thing has taken a serious hit the last decade it is our understanding of our own polity. Neither of us expected our fellow citizens to be…
Well, I’ve written enough about that. Go back several posts and you’ll get a sense of where I’m at with all this. It has brought us to the point of having to decide on our priorities. More on that another time.
Mid-year, Donna left the nine-to-five life and we are now trying to find a new equilibrium. With a couple of hiccups, we’re finding it. For myself, the writing is still top of the to-do list, but I’m beginning to imagine the rest of my interests. I want to do more with my photography. I’ve even taken a stab at drawing again and perhaps a bit of painting is in the future. And, of course, music, but let’s be realistic. The amount of work necessary to do all these things at the level I want…there just isn’t enough time. So compromises will be necessary. First and foremost, though, whatever else I do it must be for fun. I am aware that more of my life is behind me than ahead. I need to jettison the crap and embrace the joy.
I generally eschew New Year’s resolutions (see above re Gould and calendars), but I’m not above setting goals around preferences. Donna feels the same and we’ve both said for years what we wanted to do when we no longer had to punch a clock.
Travel. Whatever that entails. Yesterday we just took off for a hundred-plus mile drive. Just to move, to see, to sample new flavors. There will be more of that.
In the meantime, in between, more stories to write.
Have a safe, meaningful 2026.