Heard from Phil a few days ago and was surprised to hear that he was making the post-Christmas trek to Detroit to see the Wildcats. I keep forgetting to check my yahoo e-mail from work, and of course that's what people are using when they check the website, so sometimes there can be a three or four day delay between when a message is sent and when I think to check (can't do it at work any more, thanks to macro virus paranoia they've shut off access to external e-mail).



I watched the Motor City Bowl from the comfort of my living room. Chloe and Justin had new NU shirts courtesy of Aunt Jill, so they put those on and I got down the plastic pompoms from the Alamo Bowl and we cheered for the 'Cats, who took a decisive lead in the first half but managed to cave in in the fourth quarter and lose, although there was moral victory in beating the spread I suppose. The only thing a win would've signified was that we'd actually won a bowl game, which hasn't happened yet now in four tries of the modern era. But I imagine if we had won I would've been sad that I wasn't there to witness it in person. Still waiting for the game post mortem from Nate, but like I said I haven't checked my e-mail in a few days.



Then Saturday afternoon the Patriots were playing their last game of the regular season against the Bills, a fairly meaningless contest as the Pats were already in with a first round bye and the Bills were already talking about who was going to be traded away in the off season. For once, the Pats won in commanding fashion, by the exact same score as their first-game drubbing at the hands of the supposedly same Bills, 31-0. So now it's on to the playoffs, and, bizarrely for a Boston team, everyone outside of NE expects them to win it all.



The Year in Review



So it's New Years Eve and there's not much going on at work plus I've managed to get a cold again for about the third time in three months, so I don't really feel like doing much anyway. Time to look back and reflect on the year that's about to end.



In spite of a snowy winter we managed to get away from the kids for two whole nights in a row and go to New York in February to commemorate my 40th birthday. Beth left it up to me to make the NY arrangements, but she lined up a friend of hers to babysit with the agreement that we'd babysit for their two rugrats at some later date under similar circumstances. As it turned out, the days they picked for us to return the favor fell right in the middle of when I was in Maui for Scott's wedding, so Beth did not two but five nights all by herself with four kids. But in February she didn't know that was going to happen and we were both brimming with exuberance over the thought of being alone for the first time in five years. Since it was my itinerary to plan, we went to Carnegie Hall one night and the NY Philharmonic the next night (never been either place before), and in between saw Thoroughly Modern Millie and ate at a wide variety of places and tried not to freeze to death. Hope to do a similar trip this winter, although Beth says this one will be less classically oriented.



In April Mom came to visit for a week during the kids' school vacation, and who should decide to make an appearance at the same time but the longlost Lee & Nancy, whom we hadn't seen for a while. Nancy was doing a whirlwind tour of NE friends and relatives (obviously inspired by me), and they stayed one night at our house, where the kids all got along great and the elder Kevins were relegated to the living room floor for the night. But we fed them well (except Lee had to go out foraging for coffee the next morning) so they seemed satisfied. Things appeared to be going well for them job-wise and they were doing some work on their house in NJ, so we got lots of visiting in, while Kyra and Russel had fun torturing the cat (after Chloe and Justin showed them how).



Since there was no particular week to zero in on for the annual pilgrimage to Chicago, we ended up going with the default, the week of the fourth of July. After a few days in Springfield and the usual whirlwind tour of the relatives, we all congregated in Bartlett, Scott brought some illicit fireworks and a bunch of us went to Taste of Chicago and ate a lot in the heat and the crowds. The last day we were there we finally made the drive out to Granger and saw the Stonehills in their natural abode for the first time since they lived in Memphis. Karen grilled up spherical hamburgers, since Bill was at the hospital up to his elbows in someone's gonads, but he returned in time for lunch and after several hours of visiting grilled up some steaks for dinner. In between we checked out his prized media room (I was going to bring the Monty video (not the capital of Uruguay, the one of him on Jeopardy) to see what it would look like on the widescreen with stereo sound, but I forgot, which maybe is just as well). The kids ran around in the sprinklers in the backyard for about five minutes until it started pouring, with lightning to boot. I played a few tunes on Karen's graduation present Bosendorfer (they nearly had to pay me to stop). As it was the end of the holiday weekend, between the traffic and the weather it took forever to get back to Jill's house, but it was well worth it.



After an overnighter in NY in August to check out the bike race, we headed for Toronto a few weeks later so I could attend the Worldcon. The convention was good, if a bit disorganized at first, and the city was as non-descript as you would think it would be. Beth managed to find enough in the surrounding area to keep the kids entertained for four days, and we ate at a variety of ethnic restaurants. They've got some weird anti-smoking law there now that if you want to allow smoking in your restaurant you have to call it a bar and you can't admit anyone under 21, which limited some of our restaurant choices, but we made do. Saw Niagara Falls on the way there, then hauled ass back on Labor Day as I had to be on a plane in Providence the next morning to fly to Maui.



Finally got to cash in some of those frequent flier miles to see my brother get married, since for some reason they decided that Hawaii would be the most romantic and least convenient place to tie the knot. But hey, it's their wedding, they can do whatever they want, it was certainly more picturesque than Columbus where they live. Mom brought her friend Shirley, Jill and Bob brought the whole family, but I came alone as school was starting and the kids were already missing a couple of days because of the Toronto trip, which had been in the works a lot longer than the wedding. Maybe some kids could miss two straight weeks of school with no ill effects, but not mine! Never been to Hawaii before, and of course it was spectacular, and I called Beth from the pool while sipping a Mai Tai, just like I told her I would (remember she was chasing after four kids during much of this). It's a dangerous place because the longer you're there the less you want to leave. It had been a total rat race at work all summer as the managers brandished whips and chairs to get us developers to finish the next release of our software, so it was great to be able to not think about work for a while. Maybe opening up a comic book store in Maui would be the way to go? There must be some trick to it, of course, otherwise everyone would be doing it. A box of cereal is seven dollars, for a start. Pineapples are cheap, but not much else. And the football games are on tape delay, but nobody seems to mind. Scott just sent along at Christmas some prints from the official photographer at the wedding, and Chloe looked at one of the whole wedding party and said, "Daddy looks funny". Beth chimed in, "That's because he's relaxed", but really it was just because I was tan. That didn't last long, sad to say, a few weeks later it was back to the receiving end of the whips and chairs and back to my usual pasty New England look.



Speaking of Chloe, she's in the second grade now and doing very well at school. She had a dud of a teacher for the better part of first grade and had some catching up to do this fall, with reading particularly, but seems to be doing much better now. Still trying to get her to read Doctor Who novelizations, but she can handle the occasional 60's or 70's comics I pick up at the shows for them. Justin is in his last year of preschool, although his birthday is in August and he technically could have started kindergarten this fall, no one was in any rush, and this gives him an extra year to work with his battery of specialists (speech, PT and OT) in the preschool system, where they're more readily available, and it gives me an extra year to put off saving for college. His progress on speech has been great in the last six months, no longer dropping consonants off the beginnings of words, so now they work on "fluency". He's got plenty to say, what with his wide-ranging interests in Rescue Heroes, Power Rangers, Hot Wheels, etc. Beth is keeping busy, too, getting everybody where they need to go and being a Girl Scout leader for Chloe's brownie troop, which not only involves selling cookies but camping trips and all manner of other events.



As for me, last winter I joined a group called the Boston Piano Amateurs, who are mostly a bunch of middle-aged types like myself who get together every month or two and play for each other. Some of them are pretty good, too. This gives me a reason to practice other than to drive the kids out of the living room. And this fall I rejoined the Masterworks Chorale after a three year absence, the pain of being treasurer finally having dissipated. I made it through most of the Pertwee DW episodes, all of season 4 of MST3K, and am as we speak recording the Twilight Zone marathon on Scifi channel. Read all the Hugo nominees and am working on the BSFA nominees, made it to the classics reading group several times. Ran in 3 5K's including one on Thanksgiving, and my first 8K in Elgin with Bob and Scott. Not getting the least bit faster, but can do five or six miles routinely on the weekend. Chloe finally mastered the "two-wheeler" early this spring so we got her a real bike, but I'm still not on mine as much as I'd like. Found Marlborough's rail trail, though, which is a neat place to go either running or biking, and still relatively unknown locally. Work didn't send me anywhere for the first time since 1994 (we all have to cut back so that the chairman can still get his whopping bonus), but they won't get away with it next year. The cat died at the end of June, while Beth was at Storyland with the kids and a bunch of friends. fortunately I was blameless. In April we bid farewell to the CRX after 160,000 miles and plunked down for a Honda Odyssey. Beth lets me drive it once in a while.



This Crave/Douche thing seems to touch a nerve with some people, so I'll dispense with it this time around, plus I wasn't trying very hard to keep in contact with people myself, so I can hardly be casting asparagus on anyone else. This website is meant to do several things, primarily to get me to write stuff, and also to have a place for pictures for family and friends to check out. It also serves in lieu of a Christmas letter, so if you're not on the internet you're SOL. It's been 18 years since the first of us graduated, and its gotten to the point where Jennifer can look at a picture of some random Steve Creighton I found on the web and linked to my page and she thinks that's our Steve. But she has three kids now and, like many of us, only so many brain cells to go around. So people can use these pages, if they want, in lieu of any actual longterm memories of their own as it relates to the NU crowd. And if I replace a picture of Steve Creighton with a picture of what we'd like to think Steve would be, who's going to know the difference?