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?

Christmas is now over and in its aftermath the kids are going through the living room looking for the stuff they had time to play with yesterday and discovering all over again the stuff that they didn't even get around to opening yesterday. Justin is old enough now that a lot of his toys are ones I want to play with.



For Christmas eve dinner, since I had a couple of days off and hadn't been inspired to do anything for Thanksgiving, I took it upon myself to whip up a Christmas dinner with a rib roast and some carrots and potatoes and red onions and lobster corn chowder and a peanut butter cheesecake. The kids of course ate almost nothing of it, but there was plenty for Beth and myself, and her brother came over and joined in too since he was otherwise unattached on Christmas eve. There was enough left over to do it again tonight, since the kids won't eat it, not that I particularly expected them to. Chloe at least will try different things now, she ate some of the chowder, but the meat was "chewy" (because it wasn't hamburger, I guess). This made two holiday meals in a row that Beth's mother wasn't in attendance, so it was truly a magical Christmas.



Last night for Christmas dinner we all assembled at Chef Orient in Framingham for teppanyaki, something we started doing last Christmas and it seemed to go even better this year, maybe because we weren't worried about impending snow this time. Sue was there for this one, recently out of the hospital with a mild case of pneumonia and now in the rehabilitative wing of the local nursing home since she's not sick enough for the hospital but not well enough to live on her own. Beth spent most of the last week getting all that going, so that cut way into her Christmas preparation time, but she still managed to get everything done, although it required one near all-nighter to get the kids presents sorted out and ready.



The kids made a good haul from Santa, Chloe got her third American Girl doll along with a bunch of outfits for it, Justin got some new Dino Thunder Power Rangers and some giant Go-Bot thing he was all excited about. Beth's big present from me was a new tv for the "desk room", although I have no idea where we'll put it. She got me some Dover editions of piano music of Grieg, Satie and Beethoven, plus an SD card for my PDA and the DVD's of Life of Brian and Life of Python. Mom got me a new portable CD player that also will play MP3's. Jill got me and the kids some new NU gear.



Today was both trash day and recycling day, so a lot of empty boxes and a lot of garbage bags went out on the curb this morning. The house is getting kind of full, to the point that we really should observe a conservation of mass law, where for every new non-consumable item that comes into the house, something else of equal volume should leave. Beth thinks we need a bigger house, I think we just need less stuff. I'm not helping matters with my 6000+ comics and a couple thousand books and several hundred CD's, but their uniformity of size allows them to occupy a relatively small amount of space. Now every Christmas the number of cubic inches left to move around in inside the house decreases a bit, but it's only because we're all, including the kids, interested in different areas, a diverse array of things, and having an interest means having some collection of tangible artifacts of that interest around you, and, if the alternative is to be interested in nothing and just watch tv all day, then I'd say that a relative lack of breathable space is a small price to pay. Here's looking forward to more (and more diverse) pursuits in the years to come. God bless us every one.

People are starting to check in. Heard from Jim, Doug, Nina, Jennifer, and Dawn in the last few days, only one of whom appears to have moved on me. Trying to spiff up the content on the northwestern page (which can be accessed directly at northwestern.markbartlett.net if you want to bypass all this other fluff). The list of everyone's current whereabouts is part factual and part tongue in cheek. Still have a photo column to fill in, but since I don't have recent pictures of most of them I would expect there will be some substitutions made along the way. Still need to re-scan the old pictures from the former web site, too.



Last week I was watching Planet of the Daleks, which I got for Christmas probably two years ago, but was just getting to now because I've been watching the Pertwee episodes in order and reading the novelizations in between and what with everything else there is to watch like the Tour de France or read like the Hugo nominees, it's taken a while to get this far. Anyway, the only reason to point it out at all, as its not exactly the greatest of episodes, is that the video contains Episode 3, which was never shown on PBS because it exists only in black and white. I probably watched the thing five times over the years on tv before I realized there was a whole episode missing (plus actually the first few minutes of episode 4 so that the cliffhanger is not picked up in the middle). And the only reason to point this is out is that I believe this makes the last extant episode of Doctor Who that I had never seen (although parts of the Mutants didn't look very familiar either). So unless they dig up some more missing episodes in Ghana or Hong Kong or someplace, every DW episode from now on will be a rerun for me. Not counting the new ones when they finally appear, but they won't really be Doctor Who, just like the Battlestar Galactica miniseries a few weeks ago wasn't really Battlestar Galactica.



For the same reason, there's still a couple of seasons (probably 50 episodes worth) of MST3K that I haven't seen yet, and I'm in no rush to acquire them all and watch them in a big hurry, because once I get to the last one then I'll have seen them all. Not that you can't go back and watch them again and again, but there's something about being able to watch it for the first time. It's not just tv either, usually at the first rehearsal for a new concert with the Chorale, Allen would ask for a show of hands of how many people had never sung the piece before, and I think he and many others are in some ways envious of those who are coming to some of the biggies like the Verdi Requiem or Brahms Requiem for the first time.



It's really only that first time watching a movie or tv show or hearing a particular piece of music or reading a particular story or book that you can have the chance to be blown away or have some sort of life-changing experience as a result of it. After that other things present themselves, you can find more in it, things you didn't catch the first time, which make re-watching or -listening or -reading just as valid. But that "first contact" is what has the most potential to have something special about it. In case anyone's keeping score, with Planet of the Daleks episode three, there was no life-changing experience to be had by waiting until the age of 40 to see it. But you never know.

Just reading in the new Planetary Society magazine that they submitted all the members names to be included on a CD that will be part of a spacecraft that will intercept comet Tempel I in 2005. Kinda cool, still not too late to add names to the list at http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/sendyourname/.



This Mars thing that's coming up in a couple of weeks sounds cool, too. Geoff Landis gave a talk at Boskone a year or two ago about a previous mission and showed a short video of what the whole landing process looks like with the spacecraft going through some elaborate and split-second deployments of heatshields and parachutes and thrusters and airbags in order for it to land safely. The fact they can get something there in one piece is almost more impressive than what it's supposed to do once it's there.



It even sounds like there's some modicum of renewed interest in manned space exploration since the Columbia disaster in February. Much like how we chose to rebuild the World Trade Center into the world's tallest middle finger pointing straight at bin Laden, I think it's equally appropriate to respond to losing seven astronauts in space by concocting a multi-decade, multi-billion dollar program to do more of the same. It's ironic that defeat is what seems to motivate government to move forward quickly in both cases, but, much like the cold war in the '60's, it doesn't matter what the motivation is so long as it does the job. I was too young to truly appreciate the Apollo program as it was happening, so I'm all for working towards a manned mission to Mars to galvanize us jaded humans now in the 21st century. Heck, it can't cost more than the Big Dig, and look how excited everyone is about that now that it's finally almost done.

So the Christmas cards are in the mail, containing the first inkling that this website actually exists, so we'll see what comes of that. There's always a sense of anticipation around sending out Christmas cards, because you never know over the next few weeks which ones will come back marked "forwarding order expired". Just about everyone has done it to me at one time or another, but I'm not that easily dissuaded. The missing persons list currently consists of Messrs. Lauro and Frankenstein, but I have a cunning plan in both cases. Tony has no excuse other than sheer laziness, yet once you track him down it's like he never disappeared to begin with. Jeff on the other hand seems to be waging a campaign not to be found, such that if it were anyone but Jeff I'd start to feel paranoid that there was some grievous wrong I'd done him that I was being punished for. The only reason that makes sense is that there's some manipulative girlfriend calling the shots. Even the gored by a rhino excuse I made up a few years ago would've expired by now.



One would think e-mail would make this easier to do, but that hasn't proven to be the case. I get e-mail from people, and a month or so later I send something to them, and the e-mail bounces back undelivered. WTF? I've been able to track down Tony, Nina and a few others in the past by trawling the internet for information, but it doesn't work all the time, particularly with more common names. The Current Whereabouts page off the northwestern subdomain has a link for each person on the list, but most of them are other people with the same names. You'd think now that we're all 40-something we'd have made enough of a splash to be on a webpage somewhere in the world, even if its one's own, but sadly not.



It's not like I don't have anything better to do, but I do it anyway. In the end, most are generally glad I did, but it doesn't stop them from doing it again (and again and again in Tony's case). I'm inclined to think anyone else would've given up by now. But I refuse to take the hint.

Last Friday I did the pitch at the Messiah Sing for the first time in two years. After being somewhat indignant about not being asked last year (even though I couldn't do it anyway as I had a conflict, plus I was two-plus years into my three-month sabbatical and people were starting to forget me), they asked me to do it this go around as though I'd never stopped. As it turned out, Lydia finally explained ot me that last year there was some new board member from outside the chorale who really wanted to do it, so they let him, but now he's not on the board any more, but whether the two events are related or not I don't know.



Anyway this year I actually got a microphone for the first time, so finally people could hear the whole thing. The take that night was a bit thin, but again whether the two things are related or not I'm not sure. It's almost like the basket-passers missed a section or something. Didn't hear how Keivan did Saturday night so I have no basis for comparison. We had a fruit delivery Saturday so Ted asked me to bring it along so I could perform it again for the nordic truckers, which I did.



This is the fourth time I've done this one, sort of based on the Night Before Christmas, but with a heavy influence of Dr. Seuss. Here's the text, although unless you're a regular attendee some of the references will be a bit obscure. Ted, whose opinion I value in this sort of thing, thought it was a classic, but some of the regurgitated stuff from previous editions didn't do as well ( the "nothing rhymes with 'amen'" usually gets more of a reponse, for instance). The new stuff about our assistant conductor, who was filling in for Allen for the first time, did pretty well, so maybe even after a four-year gap people remember enough of it that it's not as funny anymore? Hard to believe it's that memorable. I should put up the other ones for historical purposes sometime, too, I suppose.

Christmas cards are going out tomorrow, so better get some content out here pronto.



Here's Laura's summation of last week's reading group:

This month's discussion was about "Fathers and Sons" by Turgenev. We spent a large portion of the time talking about the character of Bazarov, both in terms of some of his specific actions in the book and his larger role as a seminal nihilist character in Russian literature. One specific action of his we discussed was whether his infecting himself at the end was intentional or not...we agreed it was not, although some thought it was sheer carelessness because of a youthful weakness of thinking ahead to the consequences of one's actions and others thought it was more of a casual disregard for everything, including his own life, which he only regrets later when he's suffering the consequences. We also discussed whether his choice to participate in the duel was out of character or whether it made him more real and less of just a "character" and how well he handled the whole duel situation.



Another major discussion point centered around the title of the book - why was it called "Fathers and Sons"? Interestingly, the original Russian title more accurately translates to "Fathers and Children" which served to add even more fuel to that part of the conversation...was it really mostly about fathers and sons or were some of the women in the book key to the themes as well? On an unrelated note, one member observed that he felt that the characters were not entirely complete on their own and only reached true depth as he (the reader) brought his own thoughts and experiences and interpretations to the character. Overall, most people in the group had enjoyed the book, although a few were lukewarm about it (no one actively disliked it).

There's a lot going on in this book, but not much of it is that obvious, Turgenev has a good knack for seeming to stand back from the proceedings and letting events and ideas speak for themselves. The whole nihilism thing as it is espoused by Bazarov seems kind of silly in this day and age, but was quite controversial back then, yet Turgenev neither supports it nor pokes fun at it. According to the sticker on the back of my copy, I read this book around 1986, when I was about the same age as Arkady is in the book. Reading it again now, where I'm more at the father end than the son end, made for an interesting contrast of perspective. Arkady's youthful exuberance is but a memory, and when recently out of college I still knew people like Bazarov who were full of opinions but never did anything about any of them. It's either Nikolai or Pavel who says that sons are like falcons, they fly off for a while and come back only occasionally, where the fathers are like mushrooms, stuck to one place.