Friends —

May you find joy as we remember Christ’s coming to us both in this season and throughout the coming year! The picture above comes thanks to our parish’s decision to generate a photo directory on the 100^th anniversary of the dedication of the church.

My mother has settled into Emilie Court, her assisted living facility.  She has regular companions for meals and has found a few bridge players for games on Saturdays, though not to the level that she would prefer.  For the rest she gets around by taxi for medical appointments when I’m tied up with my day job — because of where she’s living, they’re all less than a mile away.  I tend to share Saturday mid-day meals with her — the major daily meal at Emilie Court.  Now that the Lourdes choir is singing for the 11am Mass I can’t join her on Sunday till 12:30 or 1pm.

As for me, the big item would be an injury.  Last winter was a grueling one with lots of snow and ice.  My sister, Anne, came to Spokane for the Christmas gathering 30 December, arriving late in the evening.  My car slid back down the rather steep driveway up to my condo and got stuck at the bottom.  In trying to get it out, I slipped on the ice onto my backside — and in the process lost the use of my right upper arm.  While X-rays came back normal, an MRI showed that two muscles were torn with complete separation and another had some tearing.  I saw the same orthopedic surgeon that had done both total knee replacements, but he declined to give me a frequent-patient discount.  Between difficulties scheduling with him and my developing a small infection on the right elbow (only inches away from the operation site), the surgery didn’t happen until the early March.  By then it was not possible to reconnect the two separated muscles.  I’ve recovered fairly well, but will perpetually be a bit weak working over my head on the right side.

Nothing much else happened this past year.  I did get my Medicare Part A card last April, passing the magic 65 years.  I continue working, so I didn’t have to worry about Part B or the mess that is Part D.  My year (1943) is the first one in which one is only fully vested for Social Security at age 66, so I haven’t retired.  For that matter, I hadn’t planned on retiring after this year either — and that before the current financial mess.  I enjoy what I’m doing and will be in the Spokane area as long as my mother is here, so I might as well keep working.  It is also to the advantage of the Computer Science Department.  With drastic budget cuts in this state for state-assisted (not state-supported) higher education, there’s a good chance that if I were to retire my position would not be filled.

Summer was a lazy one.  I found that I can still swim and even use the crawl stroke, so I did laps most week-day morning at 6am.  Then I got down to Oregon several times, and got in a couple of visits to the Oregon coast.  For the rest I played with some things to worked into my classes this Fall, and also a conference presentation and a pair of articles.

Every October the “Consortium for Computer Sciences in Colleges” (CCSC) has a regional meeting predominantly of Washington, Oregon, and northern California smaller colleges.  Last Spring there was a desperate call for papers for the October 2008 conference.  I had a light weight one working up to send elsewhere so I shipped it off, expecting to help with the rejection ratio — just as I had the previous year.  The only problem was that they went and accepted it, so I spent some of the summer extending the work for the conference presentation.  Then there was the presentation itself.  In addition, November is the regional International Collegiate Programming Contest, for which I’d sketched out several problems during the past year, and so I had to spend time getting them into proper shape.  In the end, it has been a very busy Fall quarter.  I’m glad to see it over.

Again, may you find joy in Christ's coming.