Martha says:

I've cut back on my volunteer time at the New England Quilt Museum to have enough time at home for the kids, etc.  I now go every Tuesday and only once a month on Thursdays.  I've recruited several new library volunteers and am delegating more responsibility to them which is hard for me but necessary. 

We get Ben's kids for at least part of Saturday or Sunday each weekend.  Since this has been the winter that arrived late, we were able to take them to a playground most weeks.  That avoids conflicts between Gabe 4 1/2 and Ezra 16 months over toys at home. The only challenge is that Ezra has no sense of fear and had to be restrained with a harness at the top of the slide to prevent him from launching himself down head first.  Bob stayed at the bottom to catch him and I followed him up and down getting lots of exercise. Gabe is much more cautious so I demonstrated all the more challenging climbing options and he's learning to tackle them with more confidence.  It's amazing how different 2 brother's personalities can be.

Elijah is now 3 months old.  We hosted his bris at our house. We babysit for him every Monday, picking him up at 8am (easy since he's just around the corner) and keeping him here as long as possible so Jon can get as many uninterrupted hours of work as possible at home while Larissa is at work in Cambridge.  He comes with me to the grocery, takes a relaxing bath in our big bathtub, plays on the quilt I made when I was pregnant with Ben 40 years ago, etc.  He's an easy baby and we have fun.  He goes to a small home day care in Concord 3 days a week as well.

Bob’s sister Lee moved from her condo in Amherst, MA to an apartment in Woburn to be closer to family.  She’s anxious that her condo hasn’t sold but is staying healthier and less isolated now.  A highlight of my summer was getting a season pass to rent kayaks on the lake near Ben’s house and taking Lee with me several times.

As 2015 closes, I have many quilting projects going at once. Elijah's medieval embroidered quilt is ready for hand quilting since I finish putting ivy leaves on the vines around the border.  I'm working with a team of temple members to make a quilt for the congregation to use on plain pine coffins for funerals.  I'm finishing 2 or 3 quilts left unfinished by a friend who died last year. I've offered to make a small quilt as a fund-raiser again for Ben's mother-in-law's charity in Poughkeepsie to support breast cancer patients.  Use this link to see quilts I finished recently.

After many years, I've finally had the cracked vinyl tiles on our basement playroom floor replaced with new sheet vinyl. The cement floor was sealed this time which will prevent the damage caused by mineral crystals forming under the tiles from moisture under the floor.  In January, I'll be going to Rochester for my mother's cousin's 104th birthday followed a week later by a bat mitzvah for a cousin on my dad's side of the family.  The day after Elijah's bris, I was able to attend my 50th high school reunion in Rochester and saw lots of old friends.  Thank you Elijah for being born just in time!  I'm now in charge of the database that keeps track of the class with their photos and contact info.

If enough snow ever comes, Jon and I want to go downhill skiing in New Hampshire. I also would like to do some cross country skiing here in Carlisle.  I got some used skis for free at the transfer station last year and found boots that fit perfectly also for free there last spring.  Bob, Ben and Gabriel all tease me about shopping for toys when I take the recycling each week.  You can’t beat the price!

Bob says:

This was the year of a momentous transition: I retired after more than 50 years in the computer industry. Simply enough, it was time. While I enjoyed the social and technical aspects of work, the management and travel requirements were increasingly burdensome. The next time I go overseas, it will be on my own terms, for pleasure and not for business.

I'm constantly asked, "Do you enjoy being retired?" The answer, unequivocally, is yes. There's a serious backlog of things I've wanted or needed to do. Now I can do them. No more complicated than that.

Top priority was fixing up the house, which hadn't had enough maintenance in the last 35 years. For the four months starting in the spring, there were contractors here more or less non-stop, remediating rot and insect damage, replacing the roof, replacing the windows, sprucing up the electrical wiring, and so on. I've learned more about the construction of wooden houses that I ever knew before or want to learn again. We're not quite done, although the advent of winter means no more outside work.

Retirement has also meant more time for grandchildren, just in time to help with Elijah, our third, as well as Gabriel and Ezra. I've been trying to get into better shape to cope with them, walking three or four miles on most days to build up my endurance. Still, chasing the grandchildren around a playground seems to be a far more comprehensive workout, particularly because Ezra hasn't met a death-defying stunt that he doesn't immediately want to try.

I've been doing a lot of work on anime as well, mostly on older shows that were ignored or neglected. Some of them are really good (I recommend Polar Bear's Cafe for anyone with a funnybone), and some of them are really terrible, but most fall in between. I can now do more of the process, in particular typesetting of signs, but I can't translate. I don't know if I can learn a language as complex as Japanese at my age.

I'm starting to work my way back into simulation. I gave up control of the simulator project seven years ago and have hardly looked at it since, but there's a large backlog of systems needing my attention. As with anime, I tend to be drawn to the ignored and the neglected, but that's because much of the history of computing consists of experiments that didn't go right the first time. Failures can be as valuable as successes in pointing the way forward.

And there's still more to do. My old record collection needs to be digitized - many of my favorite folk albums never made it to CD. I want to resume my writing on computing for laypersons, like the blog I wrote at my last job. And I want to travel for fun. I haven't been scuba diving in seven years, for example. But tearing myself away from Gabriel, Ezra, and Elijah will not be easy.

Jonathan says: 2015 has been a mostly good year to us. We both continue to work in jobs we enjoy in the "programming of shiny things" fields. Funkitron has been doing well with Cascade, available for free in the iOS app store. We are most pleased to welcome our newest member of the family, Elijah Max Supnik. He seems to like looking at people and grinning, mostly, though he also enjoys being fed in a timely fashion and babbling adorably. Needless to say, his arrival has turned our lives upside down in the best possible way. Sadly, it can't all be good news. Our cat Mara died from complications from cancer in December. The other pets are holding together, though all of them are starting to show their age a bit.