2009 Year-End Report
El Castillo
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Mail & Street Address
250 E. Alameda, Apt. 608
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
Telecommunications
Apt. 608 / Main Apartment: (505) 455-7107 [Voice] 505) 795-7276 [Fax]
Apt. 422 / David’s Office & Art Space: (505) 795-7277 [Voice] (505) 795-7277 [Fax]
Kenneth Alan Collins or k6a0c8 [Skype]
NOTE! Cell phone inactive – delete previous number
Ken + Ken & David Joint: k6a0c8@cybermesa.com
[NOTE: the “0” after the “a” is a zero, not the letter “O”]
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Year-End Letter December 2009
NOTE: This year-end letter, along with all my past ones (since I began doing them on a computer) can be found on my Web site, http://sites.google.com/site/kensruminations/
Dear Friend,
This seems to have been an amazingly full year, as I look back on it, filled with many activities, changes, and developments, both personal and in the world around me.
The National Scene and Beyond
The year got off with a bang, since I had decided, very shortly after the exciting 2008 election, to be present at the inauguration of Barack Obama. Having moved to New Mexico from Washington, DC, I still had a network of good friends there, so I was able to visit (and very important during this Inauguration, stay with) friends. I did not regret the trip. In all the years I had lived in Washington, I never experienced such a pervasive sense of excitement and positive expectation as I did in January of this year. The air crackled with hope for improvement after, for most of us there, the nightmare of the previous eight years of national government.
As everyone is probably aware, it was bitterly cold (though not record-breaking) but that did not seem to put a damper on the turn-out. I attended the big celebratory concert at the Lincoln Memorial the Sunday before the Inauguration, which set the tone with its broad representation of singing and acting talent. It seemed that virtually every big name in entertainment was present, along with the President-elect and his family; a sea of people as far as the eye could see turned out and it was a thrill to be part of this. The thrill was even greater for the actual Inauguration, for which I had been able to obtain a ticket to stand on the U.S. Capitol lawn – closer than most but still not “close, close.” Nevertheless, despite the cold, there did not seem to be a soul present who was not moved by this unprecedented event.
Ken at Inauguration of Barack Obama (Capitol Lawn) - Cold, cold, cold!
It was hard not to pay particular attention to black Americans and try to feel what they, particularly, were experiencing. I knew this did not mean the end of our long, painful, troubled racial national history, but all the same, I could not help feeling that at long last, we were living up to some of our most inspiring words. Particularly memorable was my train trip up to Washington from Durham, North Carolina (I had begun my visit East with a stay at my brother and sister-in-law’s home in Chapel Hill). I went up the Saturday before the Inauguration, and the train was packed, with a large percentage of the passengers being African-American. To see black families bringing their small children to witness this historic event, to feel the particular excitement in that train car, was to be part of an unforgettable moment. Even though we were held up almost 2 hours at the edge of Washington, because the Obama “Lincoln train” was arriving at the same time into Union Station, no one seemed to mind. It was all in a good cause!
Several larger thoughts were also occurring to me through all this. At the most personal level was the decision to even go to the Inauguration. I was not present at any of the other iconic events of my life that I could have attended – Woodstock (1969) or the March on Washington (1963), to take two prominent examples. Why was I here, then? I suppose I saw it as perhaps the last opportunity in my life to be inspired by great hope and promise, thrown into exaggerated relief by the past eight years perhaps, but all the same, in and of itself, an inspiring event. An African-American President! Some one who could express my hopes for the future in articulate, intelligent English, who could make me believe, perhaps for the last time, that change was really possible. Often it seems that growing old means growing bitter and cynical, and I want to fight that tendency. My presence was my statement to myself that I still had hope and a positive vision, just like a 20-year-old.
However, balancing that, I also knew that reality would set in, and that that short period of hopefulness would not last forever. As indeed it has not, as I look back over the months since that seemingly distant period of January 2009. The partisan divisions, the incredible nastiness, are, if anything, worse than ever before. The compromises, the forgotten promises, pile up. So how do I feel about it all? Two camps battle within me. On the one hand, is the awareness of how infinitely better this national government’s leadership is compared to what preceded it, and I am truly grateful for that. On the other hand, however, I am saddened at the many issues shunted aside, seemingly forgotten or consciously dropped, and all the compromises made. The major issues I am most disappointed about are our role in Afghanistan, reform of the financial system, job creation, restoration of compromised fundamental civil liberties, and lack of vigor in making judicial appointments. The latter does not get much attention but is the sleeper issue, in that judges have a critical impact for decades to come – the Bush Administration, unfortunately, keenly recognized this point, and moved aggressively to make sure judges reflecting its philosophy got appointed.
I keep wondering whether leadership commensurate with the thrilling oratory of the campaign is present. One does think a lot about what truly great leadership means. In retrospect, Lincoln had it, as did Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The jury is very much out whether Obama has it – I see some very positive elements but some very troubling signs as well.
I find the divide between the real world, as experienced by most of us, and “reality” as portrayed by politicians, is greater than ever before. Why, I ask myself, when we vote these people in, do they go so far astray from the interests of ordinary people? If I can ascribe it to any one factor, it is the role of big money in campaign financing. I truly think it is destroying our democracy and our ability to govern. On some very basic issues (e.g., health care) we are further and further out-of-step with some of the most basic advances made in the rest of the world. The American people often are supportive of intelligent, positive change, but they don’t pay the bills, and the ones who need help the most tend to vote in low numbers, so their voices are not heard.
The health reform debate is a perfect example of how big money – for lobbying and campaign financing – have to a great degree destroyed the concept of democratic government. In a sense, the banks and the health care industry “own” the Congress, and despite widespread popular support for many critical changes, it is unclear how many of them will be part of the changes. Economists who have studied our health system in depth for years are clear on what must change, and many of those were part of the initial proposals. Many of them have gone down in flames, and we will end with a system that will likely be even more costly than the dysfunctional one we have and will solve little. I have come to believe that until absolute and total catastrophe hits, we will be unable to use the resources and intelligence we possess to make necessary change. Much the same can be said for the financial industry – the problems that brought the country and world low are known, and nothing has been done to address them. In fact, the system is re-assembling itself in such a way that the next crash is likely to be even worse. I some times wonder if any of the “big boys” (and girls) give a damn about what is good for the country. But we as a people do not get off scot-free. We want so much but are simply not willing to pay for it.
After the role of big money in threatening the very core of our democracy, I would next put the superficiality of television and most radio news – while Americans seem to have more exposure to 27/7 news broadcasting, the overwhelming percentage is superficial and concentrates on sensationalism, ad nauseum. Combined with the decline of the great newspapers and investigative reporting, we are moving towards a poorly informed constituency that is unprepared to make wise choices. It is all very worrying.
This is affecting us because the U.S. seems unable to move forward on any number of critical issues. I see more and more areas where leadership for the big problems of the day is occurring elsewhere: health care and public health, crime, prison and correctional policies, environmental matters, financial markets and credit card regulatory reform, privacy, gay issues, educational achievement, support for science, climate change, mass adoption of new technologies. We simply cannot succeed as a country when so many political leaders at the national level have chosen to make stupidity their highest value. The only hope I am seeing for leadership these days is at the state level – in selected states, some interesting, innovative and forward looking experiments are going on and may get picked up, at least in other states that generally take a progressive approach towards the welfare of their citizens.
The other way of looking at things, it seems to me, is as follows: compared to the wild hopes I entertained on election day, the sense of being young again with all possibilities before us (as Wordsworth felt about the French Revolution), this year has been sobering, as reality and compromise have set in, and the inevitable sense of disappointment. But viewed another way, compared to the last Administration, the improvement is so dramatic, on so many fronts and in so many ways, that I remain guardedly positive. The ability to juggle two such different perspectives at once, I like to think, is a sign of slowly achieved maturity.
On a related note, I am greatly saddened that one of our two great political parties, namely the Republicans, no longer has a diversity of political beliefs and positions. It has always been one of the strengths (although a pain in you know what) that the two political parties were not ideologically pure, but encompassed a range of interests within a broad sweep of the political spectrum. While this remains true of the Democrats, the Republicans have almost no moderates but have become virtually a pure ideological party. Their positions on important issues like economic stimulation, climate change, health care and health financing reform, in my view, are so out of touch with any kind of reality as to be laughable. They seem committed to extreme and absurd ideological positions that are the equivalent of 2+2 = 5 and The Earth is flat. What will not be laughable, for the country at large, is if they take over the national government once more, though obviously, it is entirely possible.
Well, enough of all that…. Life for most of us continues, regardless of doings in the national and state capitols.
David and Me
This January will represent a milestone, 25 years that David and I have known each other and been a couple. An interesting article that appeared on October 3, 2009, is very relevant. It is titled The High Cost of Being a Gay Couple. In great depth, it details all the ways that it costs a gay couple far more (e.g., health insurance, social security, estate taxes, spousal IRA, pensions, income taxes, etc.), over a lifetime, compared to a straight couple, as a result of Federal and state law. It is sobering reading, and can be found at:
Life in El Castillo Retirement Residences continues to be very comfortable for us and overall, and excellent choice. There is an aspect that is a bit difficult for me, though. I try to stay abreast of environmental issues and incorporate improved living recommendations into my own life. Being at a place like El Castillo leaves very limited opportunities to do so. For example, we have no control over the sourcing of the food we eat in the dining room, and I am sure that the food, particularly meat, fish, and produce, is representative of the agro-industrial complex. Similarly with energy efficiency – we are in an older set of structures and the upgrades that have been and continue to be made are quite modest. (On the other hand, simply by giving up a large, stand-alone house in the country and moving downtown, we have almost certainly made a significant reduction in our greenhouse gases footprint in a number of ways!)
Over the years David has written poems on and off – meditative, triggered by an event or a trip we’ve made somewhere, or totally out-of-the blue. His Collected Poems (my name, not his) have now been posted on my Web site. I think they are very good, and this from a person who is usually impervious to most poetry.
Travels and the Outdoors
Although we weren’t away from home quite as much in 2009 as we were in 2008, we did do a fair number of trips, although overall of a less exotic nature. Shortly after the first trip of the year, namely my trip east to North Carolina and Washington, DC for the Inauguration, we went to southern Arizona to visit a friend in the beautiful foothills south of Tucson, near the Mexican border, and then went on to camp in Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, a beautiful area with lots of birdlife, though we realized we were on the direct trail from Mexico for illegal migrants and drug smuggling. Obviously, we are still here to tell the tale. The trip included stops at some very lovely mission towns such as Tumacacori, Tubac, and San Xavier del Bac.
With airfares very low at the height of the Great Recession, we made a spot decision to book yet another trip to Rome (our 3rd in 4 years!), and were there for the 2nd half of March, a beautiful time of the year to be there, as spring in all its glory has begun. Despite exploring Rome intensely on the previous two trips, if anything, this time around was even more of a revelation, as we discovered countless beautiful places we had not encountered before. We also focused on inexpensive or moderate family-run restaurants and ate fabulously, particularly concentrating early spring vegetables. It seems you can virtually never go wrong with simple Roman (or Italian, in general) cooking. Part of the fun of this trip was going back to some favorite places – particularly churches – but seeking out parts of town we had never been in before, such as the Parco degli Aquedotti (a huge park in a working class district, where three of the great Roman aqueducts cross, and E.U.R., the great Fascist exposition center ordered up by Mussolini, but for which some very fine Italian architects of the 30’s designed the buildings. What particularly impressed us this time was the wealth of ancient Rome that pops up virtually everywhere – not just the famous places like the Colosseum and the Forum, but everywhere you go in Rome, down the most forgotten alleys. In fact, on Nov. 21, I gave a photo lecture at our local travel bookstore on Finding Ancient Rome in the Rome of Today. I also have created detailed notes and pictures of recommendations for anyone going to Rome.
Typical view in Rome (Trastevere neighborhood)
Shortly after that trip, we were off on a two-week camping trip to southwestern Utah, kicked off by “winning the lottery” held online by the Bureau of Land Management, to visit a place highly sought after by those in the know, called “The Wave” (technically, Coyote Buttes North) which is right on the Utah-Arizona line. We wound up winning, and what it is you win is the right to go into this place on a specific date. We built a whole trip around this, and were not disappointed to see “The Wave” which is a hallucinogenic formation of curving rocks with wavy, multicolor lines throughout it – it is like being within the folding space of an illustration in a geometry textbook. The trip included, besides the Paria Canyon area (where “The Wave” is located), hiking and camping at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Red Canyon, Bryce Canyon National Park, and Capitol Reef National Park. Mid-April can still be chilly but overall, we had brilliant weather.
"The Wave" (Coyote Buttes North)
This summer we did a second almost 5-week road trip through the Mid-West, going a bit north of last year’s August-September 5-week trip. This time we went from mid-July to mid-August, the timing set by the birth of my second grandchild, Shifra Malka, in the Twin Cities area. Again, this was a trip that combined seeing family and friends, along with camping and visiting beautiful natural areas, city explorations (Chicago, Twin Cities, Milwaukee, Toronto, Buffalo), historic and new architecture, and cultural festivals. A high point, in addition to seeing my two granddaughters, was an 8-day stay in the cottage of a friend located in the charming, historic town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, which allowed us to indulge in the Shaw Festival, one of the great theatre festivals in North America. The trip also included a stop at the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival, another of the great North American theatre festivals. If you wish, you can read all about the trip by going to:
http://sites.google.com/site/kensruminations/Home/trip-reports/2009-mid-west-road-tlrip
Woodbury County Courthouse, Sioux City Iowa
Purcell & Elmslie, 1916-1918
September was mostly spent in Massachusetts, where David arranged for a cottage rental, for two weeks, in Wellfleet, on the “outer Cape” of Cape Cod, about 12 miles before Provincetown. It’s a lovely time of the year to be there – generally great weather, the crowds are gone, the roads are easy to navigate, and all beach parking fees (which can be steep) are finished with. We did lots of exploring of Cape Cod National Seashore, of the towns of the outer Cape, and relaxing on the many varied but always beautiful beaches, ocean and bay side. And for us, perhaps the greatest treat was buying locally caught fish and seafood and cooking it ourselves for some of the tastiest eating I can recall in a long time. We filled the trip out with explorations, both before and after our cottage rental, of the Massachusetts north shore, Providence, Rhode Island, and Boston. The richness and density of American history in that area is incomparable and we dipped into that wealth to make some entirely new discoveries – even David, who lived in Boston for a number of years, made some new discoveries, such as Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area.
The year was filled out with lots of day hikes in the Santa Fe area and a few fall 4-day camping trips, particularly to the Gila Wilderness in southwestern New Mexico and to Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle.. Because we were away so much during the warm weather season, I did not get in as much biking as I had hoped, but I did do some strenuous rides and continue to use my bike to get around Santa Fe. David finished out the year with a trip to New York right after Thanksgiving, just as the cultural season was hitting its fabulous high point.
I also discovered a wonderful bike-riding group, the Santa Fe Seniors on Bikes (SOBs), which does rides at various levels every Thursday morning. If you want to see a large group of buff folks over 55, come to the meeting place some Thursday morning and you’ll discover that you can age and remain physically trim and slim. It’s quite a sight! I hope to do much more with the group next year.
In short, we seem to be keeping up the pace!
Volunteer activities
This was the year that volunteering began to settle in to being a more central part of my retired life, although I think there is always more one can do. Here is just a brief run-down of some of the on-going activities I took on:
§ Chair of the Buildings & Grounds Committee at El Castillo, where we live. This is one of the two most important resident committees – the other being Finance, which David chairs – and I tried to make the Committee much more open to residents in its activities and much more activist in terms of making action items and issues move to completion or resolution.
§ The Food Depot – this is the major central receiving and warehouse distribution center for food banks serving the needy throughout the 7 counties of northern New Mexico. I go in one morning a week to set out some of the food (mainly breads and baked goods) that come in. The quantities of unsold “stuff” donated by local supermarkets (the biggest seemingly being Trader Joe’s) is phenomenal, but I learned that the stores intentionally overstock because they get a handsome tax write-off for their donations!
§ Santa Fe Conservation Trust – this is one of our local land trusts, and I designed a template for organizing their records and have begun working with them to actually put their records and documentation into order according to the structure. I also did some monitoring visits to properties they have conservation easements on – the whole land trust concept is a wonderful way to preserve land that has significant environmental values from sprawl and development.
§ Santa Fe Film Festival – I have volunteered for years for this event, increasingly spending my efforts as one of the managers of the Box Office, but have always been frustrated by its organizational dysfunctionality. In the last year, a new Operations Manager was hired who has had excellent experience at some major film festivals (like Sundance) and she is really shaking up the place. This has given me the chance to do more in a much more structured setting, but it will also involve more commitment to the Box Office, which for the first time will be doing on-line sales.
§ Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) – this is a volunteer network with (now) 9,000 reporting stations (mine being one of them) that submits precipitation data – ideally daily (whether there is any precipitation or not) - via a Web form. The data collection is quite fantastic, and anyone can view the “real time” reporting for virtually anywhere in the U.S., drilling down to individual counties and cities. If you are interested, take a look at: www.cocorahs.org.
§ Railyard Park Stewards – this is an undertaking to provide volunteer gardening support for the city’s newest, and very unusual park, the Railyard Park, in our most exciting new downtown district, The Railyard, where some of the top art galleries have relocated, along with our Farmers’ Market, and a number of commercial enterprises, like REI, along with a number of other interesting activitiesa. There are weekly sessions to do whatever gardening or park maintenance support is needed at the time.
§ Community Gardens – In addition to maintaining, improving, and expanding the El Castillo Resident Garden, for which I am the lead person, I became a member of the city’s first community garden, at Frenchy’s Field Park, about 3.5 miles from El Castillo. This first year was difficult, because Frenchy’s Field is the home of an extensive (and assiduously protected) prairie dog “town” and the prairie dogs love to eat all kinds of vegetables. But we, as a community garden, have learned a lot and have already made plans for major improvements for year two, which we hope will lead to more encouraging results.
§ Various one-shot annual activities such as being a docent for the annual garden tours of the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, volunteering for one of Santa Fe’s most fabulous festivals, the International Folk Art Market (which I did miss this year because of our Mid-West road trip), some occasional outreach effort (staffing tables at various events and conferences) for the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, and some work sessions to improve the Santa Fe River conducted by the Santa Fe Watershed Association.
Books read
While I thought retirement would mean lots of time to read, especially some of the classics I had either never read (e.g., Proust’s In Search of Lost Time) or some of the great ones I had read but that richly deserve re-reading later in life (e.g., almost any of Shakespeare’s plays or Don Quixote), the sad truth is I seem to have less “free” time than when I was working and can barely keep up with the newspaper or magazine subscriptions. All the same, trips away from home are often an excellent opportunity to do some real reading, that is books, and a few I read stand out. Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma is a terrifically written book on the food we Americans eat and its relationship to the “agro-industrial complex” along with some investigations into radically different alternate approaches that are far more in touch with how human beings have historically viewed, acquired, and eaten food. The book is full of specific insights and a general kind of wisdom and I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
On a chance citation in an article in the New York Review of Books, I read American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business, and the End of White Culture by Leon Wynter. This book focuses on the extent, in the last 40 – 50 years, that our culture has become not simply diverse, with infusions into mainstream culture of African-American and Hispanic (and other) elements, but how, in fact, the mainstream culture (particularly youth culture) has completely flipped over to a “minority” sensibility, particularly black, and what a startling development this is. It is brilliantly traced. My reaction, as a person who grew up and matured through the period discussed was one of those deep shocks of recognition of how brilliantly true it all is and how amazing such a development is. Perhaps it is one of the true strengths of our national character, despite our terrible history of racism and ethnic cleansing. I will also briefly mention Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich, which we heard as an audiobook on our Mid-West road trip. It is a real eye-opener about what a rough life minimum wage workers have in contemporary America. These are people who tend to have low voting turn-out, so they aren’t represented in Congress and thus little is done to protect them from many terrible and on-going abuses.
I did finally get around to reading one great novel I had always wanted to read, The Leopard, by Count Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. This slow-paced (but short) novel of a Prince in Sicily during the Risorgimento and subsequent Italian unification is a marvelous meditation on change and life with a deep consciousness of the inevitability of death. It is beautifully written, and the translation has captured its rich poetic character. I realized, once I read this novel, that it cannot really be appreciated until one is older. It is not for a twenty-something, but for someone who has begun to experience aging and the approach of death. In fact, one of the pleasures of aging (perhaps one of the few) is the much deeper understanding and appreciation of many classics – be they movies, plays, or books – that I revisit after countless decades. I think it takes a lifetime of happiness and sadness and all the experiences in between to fully get the measure of many of the great works that have survived over time.
Movies seen
We remain dedicated movie watchers, though a major shift took place late this year, namely, joining Netflix and largely giving up on commercial movie going. The relentless assault of commercials, if you arrive at a theatre early to secure a seat, the endless number of trailers played at high volume, has led to a certain mental exhaustion combined with anger at being treated this way by the time we get to the main feature. We’ve decided a three-month wait for the film to become available on Netflix (plus the rich back inventory of older material) combined with ease of use, lower cost, and no need to drive, has its attractions.
All the same, we saw a lot of good films, with two being memorable and worthy of being called out. The Hurt Locker is probably the best film we’ve seen about being an American soldier in Iraq. It did not have any perceptible axe to grind that we could tell, but really made us feel as close to getting inside the terrible experience of being in a mystifying world trying to survive as one can get through a movie. Very different, and very inspiring, was Every Little Step, a documentary about auditioning for the Broadway revival of A Chorus Line. This true story of aspiring actors / dancers who turn up, set their life’s dream on being selected, and have to face the ruthless elimination process, with insights from those involved at every level, made for riveting, real-life drama. One is amazed at all the first-rate talent out there amongst the younger generation, willing to subject themselves to this brutal process. I don’t know anyone who saw this and wasn’t completely moved by it.
Investigating new technologies
One of the things I’ve tried to commit myself to is to stay, at least to a very basic degree, abreast of where the world is going – in cultural trends, historical developments, and the mainstreaming of new technologies. To some extent, this is superficial, but at least it gives me an idea of how the world is changing from the one I grew up in. I don’t want to simply get old and curse all change as negative compared to how things were when I was in my prime. So, I try to check out and look into some of the major developments. This past year, three areas I tried out and actually use (though to a limited degree) are Internet telephoning, social networking, and building my own Web site. I set up a Skype account for Internet phoning, and use it once in a while, particularly to occasionally call a friend overseas, as Skype-to-Skype calls are completely free. I created a Facebook page, and though I don’t go to it very often, I have “friended” a few people, looked up a few lost people, and gotten a faint glimmer of what all the hoopla is about. Perhaps most successfully, using Google Sites (free) software, I built my own Web page, where I posted all my past year-end reports (like this one), trip reports, David’s trip reports, miscellaneous musings, our picks of the best of Santa Fe, and a small photo gallery. Since the site is not an independent one, it can’t be located by doing a Web search, but if you ever want to check it out, you can find it at:
http://sites.google.com/site/kensruminations/
What I am increasingly realizing is that however much I try to keep up, at a deep level, the baton has been handed off to a younger generation, and I feel more like I am peering into a changed world than that I am fully a part of it. I thought I could keep up, I want to be open to new ideas, but I realize that just as when I bike, despite my most committed efforts, I get overtaken by someone my junior, this is just the way it is. I may use the new technologies and get a sense of them, but they are not in my bones the way they are for those who now own the world. I use these new technologies in very traditional ways, based on my own history, not in the thoroughly integrated, novel ways that just come naturally to those who follow me. Ah well, it is an age-old story.
On-line lifelong learning
One relatively new development I discovered this year is that various top-tier universities are putting some of their best courses, taught by their most eminent professors, on the Web. It all began when I started “taking” the Harvard course Justice taught by Michael Sandel – it is, supposedly, the most popular course ever taught at Harvard. Harvard has created a special Web site, where you can view the lectures, as given in the lecture hall, via YouTube, and the course readings for each lecture are posted as well. It then occurred to me to do some searching and I discovered that other highly regarded universities, such as Yale, have done the same thing with a variety of interesting courses. What a fascinating development! At my own pace, and in my own home, I can “take” a course, absolutely free of charge (of course, there is no credit involved, but do I care?). The main negative is that I can’t ask questions (and I usually have many) but still, that one can even have access to this world of lifelong learning is a tremendous positive step in my opinion. Similarly, interesting programs put on by The Library of Congress and other institutions are now available as Webcasts, opening them up to the world at large.
Another fascinating development I recently learned of is the World Digital Library, an international effort, including UNESCO, the Library of Congress and other national libraries, to post the world’s literary and historical treasures. The ability to open up previously closed or hard to access resources gets easier and easier with each passing day. (Take a look: go to http://www.wdl.org/en/).
In sum
Shortly into 2010 we have two important upcoming events. David’s on-going performance, with other musicians, of his series on the Enduring American Popular Song, will take place on January 31, with the proceeds donated to Recursos de Santa Fe. Then, from mid-February to the end of March, we are doing one of those “trips of a lifetime” – a six-week exploration of all three of New Zealand’s main islands (North Island, South Island, Stewart Island), all planned through a travel agency that specializes exclusively in trips to New Zealand.
I’ve created another calendar for 2010, this year’s being a selection of “best” photos of 2009 from our various trips, outings, and hikes this year. If you are scratching your head for presents, let me know – these calendars come out quite nicely using Apple’s iPhoto software.
In short, on a personal level, it has been a year of no dramatic developments, but lots of activity, and despite the difficult state of the world and the country – everything from foreclosures, joblessness, swine flu, the uncertainty of health care and financial industry and climate change reform and widespread violence - David and I have been exceedingly fortunate and try to stay mindful of our good fortune.
We hope that it has been a good year for you and wish you a good year ahead.
Love,
Ken