The Dean Family 2018 Christmas Letter
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Family and Friends— The short version:
Roger is still mostly retired. Actually, almost fully retired; there are only a couple of phone calls he’ll still answer. 1 Daughter Sonja, son-in-law Perry, and granddaughter Alston (aka Cookie, almost three) live just down the road so the Dean restaurant, catering service, and child care center is still in full operation. We like it 2 and the kids get time to work on their house. 3 Our health is still good; so far we have to make only small accommodations for age. 4 However we don’t have nearly enough time to do much more than keep up with general home maintenance. 5 Consequently, this was another summer where we didn’t spend much time on the Harley or kayaking on our bay. But we did make time for two trips worth noting: our once-every-couple-of-years trip to the UK for a reunion of Roger’s cousins and a trip to Colorado to attend Roger’s 50th (!) Air Force Academy reunion. 6 We also still go to the YMCA a few times each week for water aerobics, which also gives Cookie a chance to socialize with other kids. 7 We still have our “closed for the season” winter dining group going strong, seven years and counting. 8 And Roger’s sister and niece from Florida visited us for the first time. 9 Read on if you want the details… The longer version…from footnotes above: 1 Roger is still mostly retired… actually, almost fully retired. But he does have a couple of long-time clients/friends who insist on calling every now and then. This year he had enough hours to add up to about 15 days of work…not much, but enough to pay for hobbies and the occasional(?) bottle of wine. And he already has the promise of a few more days after the new year.Maybe. Just as well because, after losing his bid to be elected to our town council, he has more evening time for his other town responsibilities: He was “volunteered” for the town Budget Committee and is still on the town Buildings and Grounds Committee. As he says, “Someone has to do it and it may as well be me.” It also keeps him abreast of what goes on in the town, something we think is essential when living in a town of only 1700 (give or take) residents. 2 Sonja and Perry have a teenage girl who watches Cookie a couple of mornings each week, but we have her most of the rest of the week. So like the last couple of years, much of our year revolved around Cookie. At almost three she continues to amaze and delight us in that she is remarkably aware of and attentive to what goes on around her, and has a simply astonishing memory. Couple that with a command of the language that seems far more advanced than it should be at her age and it’s easy to see how she comes up with her interesting observations and questions. Fortunately, her enunciation is steadily catching up with her vocabulary so we can now understand her questions and comments. She’s not so facile with numbers or counting yet, but that’s slowly coming along as well. Our “Cookie care” did prompt one unexpected decision for us, and one that Roger still cannot believe he made:We bought another minivan! And that was after talking about maybe giving up the Harley for a Corvette! But we kept the Harley and Christmastime 2018 bought a Honda Odyssey instead; it suits our lifestyle well and is certainly more versatile than any sports car. Interestingly, that decision makes Roger think back to something Carol gave him when they were first dating: a fortune cookie saying “Much of a man can be told by the means of his conveyance.” Neither of us know what Roger’s collection of vehicles says about him now. 3 Sonja and Perry are still working diligently on their house, doing almost all the work themselves. This makes for slow going because Perry, in addition to being meticulous, still has to contend with that four-letter word called “work.” And Sonja has to fit time in between caring for Alston and regular physical therapy sessions necessary thanks their car accident several years ago. But they are making steady progress on the house and what they’ve finished looks great. 4 We’ve both been fortunate in that our brushes with major health issues are largely under control. Roger’s atrial fibrillation is only a minor aggravation thanks to modern medication and, after 15 years, there’s still no sign of any recurrent prostate cancer. He does have a lingering back problem thanks to whatever he did a couple of years ago but it doesn’t slow him down much. Regular exercise and occasional visits to the chiropractor help. Carol is also doing well but is still plagued with the occasional foot pain she’s had seemingly forever. Fortunately, however, it doesn’t seem to bother her as much or as often as it once did. But even though we’ve kept the serious issues at bay, as is typical for people who are routinely around the walking petri dishes that are children, both of us fought colds—some nasty and some not so bad—for a good bit of the year. But all in all, a good health year. 5 Our list of “must get to sometime” home projects has continued to grow this past year, again largely because of Cookie duty. Roger has been more successful at projects than Carol, but what he’s done is mostly just keep up with the routine maintenance familiar to any home owner. Despite having put a lot of time into designing a low maintenance house, things still wear out. And then there are the occasional trees that increasingly-frequent wind storms snap off or uproot. This year Roger had to clean up seven trees, including a couple of 50-footers. They are all conifers—almost no deciduous trees on our part of the coast—but, properly dried, they are free firewood and the branches make for good landscaping material once run through a wood chipper. The wind has also given us some problems at the shoreline: Wind and water patterns have shifted enough so that our shoreline is eroding faster in a couple of places than in past years. One problem is serious enough that we can foresee the possibility of losing part of our driveway within the next decade. 6 How did we ever find time for hobbies or travel before retirement? Today, there seem to be so many priorities that there’s little time for much else. Carol never got to tending her gardens…. at least not all of them and not to the extent they needed. (Roger thought they looked great nonetheless.) Our Harley and kayak also spent much of the summer in the barn. We only took one motorcycle ride—to Kingsbrae Gardens, a wonderful botanical garden in New Brunswick—and that was just a day ride. The rest of the only 1500-or-so miles we put on the bike was done in local rides or Roger using the bike in lieu of driving a car for errands. And we only were out on the bay in our kayak maybe twice all summer. Hopefully next year will be different. We did manage to make time for two longer trips out of state: In May we took our every-couple-of-years trip to the UK for the Liquorish family cousins reunion, and October had us going out to Colorado for Roger’s 50th(!) USAFA reunion. This year’s England trip was little less of a reunion than in past because cousin Stephen, who lives in Kent, wasn’t well enough to drive the 300± miles to Newquay. Too bad. But we still had a good time, even though we limited the family visiting to only a couple of days so that we could fit in touristing to other parts of the UK. After the family visit we drove up the west coast of the UK, going from Newquay in Cornwall, throughWales, to the Isle of Skye in Scotland, and then into Glasgow for the trip home.We covered 2000 miles in 10 days and had a great time. Joining the UK’s National Trust meant we didn’t have to wait in line for entry into various gardens, museums, and other attractions. We also really liked the Welsh and Scottish countrysides. Amazingly, in ten days we only had one afternoon where rain kept us from doing what we wanted. The rest of the time it was mostly bright and sunny, or just a little cloudy. Roger even came back with a bit of a tan, which caused our friends to wonder if he went to a different UK than they were familiar with. And Roger quickly adapted to driving on the left side of the road… that is after a couple of round-about mistakes that meant we drove past the same landmark several times before Roger remembered to stay in the middle lane entering multi-lane round-abouts. As for our Colorado trip for Roger’s reunion, it’s hard for both of us to grasp that he really is almost 72 and that it’s been five decades since he graduated. Our trip was just a week long as both of us wanted to get back to Maine for what we consider the nicest time of the year. But in that one week Roger visited with old friends and we had a chance to drive through some of the Colorado front range’s more scenic areas, along with an overnight trip to CheyenneWY…just to see what the town was like. 7 As much as we complain about getting out of the house by 7:30 am a couple of mornings each week, we know that our regular water exercise class does us a world of good. Cookie likes it too…other than the getting up early part. She gets a chance to play with other kids for a couple hours each week while we make a passable attempt at staying somewhat fit. Then after our class, we usually bring her into the pool with us to work on teaching her to swim. She really loves the water! 8 Our dinner group is still going strong after seven years, although we are now down to a dinner at someone’s home about once every three weeks. But we make up for that by trying to have some sort of group outing once each month or so.We all know that these semi-regular get-togethers are essential for sanitywhen you live in a sparsely populated area near the edge of civilization. 9 Roger’s sister Sherry and niece Ivy visited for a week in the summer. First time here for both of them and we all had a good visit. Sherry had lived in NH years ago and is familiar with rural New England but for Ivy, who has lived in Florida all her life, the combination of local scenery, sparse population, and abundant wildlife was a whole new experience. It was nice to see them both, especially since we didn’t have to travel to Florida. (Not our favorite place to visit.) That’s it for the Deans in 2018. A very busy year, indeed, but no complaints. We hope the past year treated you kindly and that 2019 does so as well. Merry Christmas
and Happy New Year from Downeast Maine! |
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