My quadrennial sabbatical from work has come and gone, leaving many pretty pictures in my mind and even more on my digital film roll--a selection of the latter, above. A few details for the curious, and for me as I plan my next one:
I took separate vacations with each boy and with Talia and that was exactly the right thing to do. Dan and I also had our first overland adventure. These trips were mostly mixes of the same key ingredients--camping, seafood, and good company--and I loved every moment of them. I saw friends who live far away but relatively little of those who are nearby. I apologize to the locals, but I trust this prioritization makes sense to you as it did to me.
Brekkie readers will not be surprised to learn that I began sabbatical with an aspirational To Do list. The number of items that were completed is not large, but I made good progress on many more. As important, I fixed the problems--cluttered garage space, broken table saw, no personal computer--that were roadblocks to my productivity generally. I face the remaining items with confidence, numerous though they still are. Also a confidence builder, the great if not always real expertise of GPT 5: between that, Youtube, and Amazon I'm now prepared to tackle anything.
I read, of course, though only one book really made me think: Huber's Climate Change as Class War (see here for last sabbatical's reading list). We are, obviously, in the midst of both climate change and class war, and we're losing both, badly. Huber shows that the two are really the same fight against that tiny horrible cadre that runs our current economic system.
I'm back at work now, watching workers finish our new driveway while attempting to reframe my job and trying to get useful results from our enterprise version of ChatGPT. No sawing is required, and I miss it.
Some ask, "where did all the time go?" I ask, "what happened to all those great shirts?" In memory of some that clothing, and of a marriage that's just getting going, a photo album:
Felix's high school held its annual "Last Chapter" event the week before last, in which graduating seniors invite those who raised them to celebrate this milestone with a dinner and a bit of ceremony. Talia was in LA on her second AIDS Ride so I went with Felix. After dinner and a few speeches we were all invited to circle up with our Senior for their reading of an obligatory Thank You note, scribbled, in Felix's case, in the library some hours earlier. His note is reliably summarized, and not greatly shortened, by these bullet points:
I think we can all agree that I mostly raised myself.
You, my parents, are due some credit for having the wisdom not to interfere in that process too much.
Peace out.
The note, being brief, left Felix and I time to walk about before the closing class slideshow. As we did, we passed other Seniors who, it seems, needed more time to read the notes they had prepared. Their bullet points, caught in passing, ran along these lines:
I can't begin to tell you how much I love you
I can't ever repay you for all you have done
Everything I have I owe to you
And so forth.
I am not writing this as an offended parent who feels underserved by my child's plaudits. If, in fact, Felix is sui generis (look it up, Felix), then good for us for letting that unfold as it has: the results, as detailed elsewhere, are excellent. However, as a trained historian I cannot let this gross misreading of the historical record go unchallenged. The truth is we taught you a lot, Felix, and here's proof:
We taught you to eat
We taught you to walk
We taught you to read
We taught you to ride
We taught you to slide
We taught you to travel
We taught you to dress yourself
We taught you to sing
We taught you to exercise, or tried to
We taught you to sleep, and believe you me, that took some doing
And on and on and on. The fact that you have elevated and built upon these and the many, many, many other skills we taught you should not lead to a misevaluation of the importance, and difficulty, of establishing a base for them in the first place.
In writing a history that is complete as well as accurate, I must record that Felix did offer additional public feedback on and to his parents during his high school graduation ceremonies the week after. There, with the eyes of the world upon him (photo above and 11m into this video), Felix declared that he loves his mother and father. OK, he said it in Dutch, but trust me, he said it. We houden ook van jou, Felix, maar dat weet je al.
I don't often write about you, Felix, because you make me intensely
proud and I find pride embarrassing. Also, it doesn't make for good copy:
you have a 4-and-then-some GPA, you're a captain of the MTB team, you’re
handsome and well-spoken and have rizz…but see here we’ve fallen into
boasting, and besides, Brekkie readers know these things
already, surely? I’ll have to dig deeper. And what’s deeper than pride?
Respect.
I respect your adventurousness. You throw yourself out of
bed before dawn to go rampaging across the fog-bound coastlands, spend summer weeks battling deadly thistle, think nothing of a 50
mile bike ride or a 10 foot ski jump. You've gutted wild boar, gavelled unruly Fairfax residents into submission, attended private school socials on boats in the Bay. Your mud-spattered face, your (formerly mine)
wrecked outdoor gear, your often (not that I look often) surprising location on Find My: it
all speaks so well of you.
I respect your resilience. You face challenges squarely and with great determination. In the face of
adversity you turn quickly to solutions or to other matters altogether where something is broken that you can’t fix. You've long since learned not to add to your own troubles with worry or
self-incrimination or even, your brother excepted, with blame. You do not dwell: you spring back, move on, find a way around.
I respect your entrepreneurial spirit. You've created your own tutoring and bike instruction businesses, plotted your own path through high school and our local community college. From your early "like this is around?" attempts to dress yourself to yesterday's "off skiing, see you," you scoff at obstacles and for the most part that's because for you they really are not there.
I respect your social presence. You show care for your peers, accept roles of responsibility and mentorship willingly, and have a light-handed ability
to influence and lead others. You are appreciated by adults and kids alike and are a social fixture even at high schools you don't attend. You know how to have a good time and are yourself quite fun. I would be happy to have you as a friend.Finally, and not least, I enormously respect your ability to skip stones. Really, you are amazingly good at it.
Felix, you are a top student, a gifted athlete, friend
to many, and as best I can tell a sought-after candidate boyfriend. You are
kind to animals and small people and to yourself. You love learning, are deeply curious about the
world, and have great intellectual capacity. You are charismatic and, in that
overused college application phrase, a born leader. You have direction and
ambition and you, and I, have every reason to think you will be able to achieve your lofty goals. Most important, from my selfish point of view, you are a good son and brother. All of which is a great puzzle to me for I was hardly any of
these things at your age and am not many of them even now. Respect.
Ho ho Hawaii! This year's Family Xmas Letter is coming to you from Kauai, the most gorgeous of all the Pacific islands according to your author who has only seen this one and that just once before in...oh gee, 2011. At the time, Gideon wasn't even crawling but used his magical combination of alluring and sticky to catch a lizard (maybe more than one, in which case, not unlikely, he ate the others before we found out). Felix, then almost four years old, was up for any adventure, land or sea, and crashed his kayak as a direct result of overconfidence (possibly not his overconfidence--details, details). In retrospect, our boys are little changed.
Anyway, we're here, avoiding the deadly surf all day and staying up listening to dog riots all night, but damn it looks good (see vacation photos, below). As for the rest of 2024, it was another one of those skibidi years in which we moved, lived in various flavors of chaos, watched our finances go haywire, and yet somehow got great things done individually and as a team but mostly individually. Read on!
QUBIT
Qubit, sock hunter
A dog doesn't change much from year to year, but fortunately for desperate Letter writers dog science runs ahead, sniffing out exciting new findings. This year, the discovery (thank you alma mater) that canis lupus familiaris process olfactory inputs using the vision centers in their woofy brains: those deep snuffles of mystery spots on the ground are the equivalent of you or I standing enraptured in front of Wheatfield with Crows...and then peeing on it. When not vandalizing priceless art you will find Qubit running back and forth in the yard in fruitless pursuit of squirrels and raccoons, the latter of which she has somehow never before noticed. I guess some dog things do change and that's it.
TALIA
Open wide!
Talia, aka "low-key funny joke mom" (reference lost, sorry, it's probably something about how she says "I get jokes" when she doesn't get a joke but who knows), spent most of the year managing our house rebuild which, from the outside, looked like a lot of back and forth to Home Depot. A tough job, it also required trips to tile shops as far afield as Lisbon. At several points along the way Talia recharged by indulging in extreme exertion, including a week riding to LA, many days hiking the Grand Canyon, and the most miserable hour of her life getting a parking pass for the Nāpali Coast (seriously, much, much harder than the trek itself). After all this she is still afraid of riding her bike downhill but has gotten well used to writing checks with a lot of zeroes.
FELIX
Air pushups
Felix, in a largely successful attempt to get us accustomed to a home without him, has been increasingly absent these past many months. Indeed, weeks go by when you'd never know he existed if it weren't for the near-continuous stream of tardy notifications sent from the high school attendance office. Still, we've managed to pick up a point here and there, mostly while picking up laundry from his floor. We know you snort-laughed back in 2020 when we commented that Felix was majoring in Bed Wars, a reference to his at-the-time-and-ever-since-then-also excessive gaming. This year he's gone pro, having been invited to take on the role of alpha tester for the ski simulator Grand Mountain Adventure. It took some effort to convince him not to include this "achievement" in his college applications, especially given the nearly unbelievable amount of other activities he had to write about, many of which these parents at least had never heard of. Happily, all (?) that work is now done and we expect to hear back from colleges shortly before it's time to write the 2025 Family Xmas Letter.
GIDEON
Arrest me
Last year we blushingly reported on Felix's first appearance in a newspaper, and this year Gideon tops that with two such appearances! Unfortunately--and here is where the blushing really comes in handy--both were in police logs. Gid, in his rap persona as "Lil' Jit," has twice now committed trespass in a quest for the perfect album cover shot. The latter instance ended with him being escorted off the Richmond Bridge by the CHP, which would have done wonders for his street cred if only someone had gotten a photo of it. Gideon is no longer allowed to dress like a terrorist but we treasure the picture above as one of the rare ones in which his clothes fit. In non-perp news, Gideon graduated middle school this year and, not to be difficult or anything, decided to go to the other high school, you know, the one that is a thirty minute bike ride away rather than just around the corner. This new school may or may not be the better choice academically; either way it doubles the amount of parental email we have to ignore. To break up his commute, Gideon got a job at a high end importer of balsamico condimento located between home and school (the more you order the harder he has to work, so go for it!) and is now making big cheese. We imagine this work will at some point find its way into his music, assuming he can find a rhyme for "vinegar."
AIEC
In paradise you never run out of grapefruit
Sick of being called "Mr. Shuldiner" by police officers and other unwelcome callers, Alec renamed himself AIec and got a new phone, both of which turned out to be gimmicks lacking any noteworthy AI features. In a major compromise, he made himself a new pair of cutoffs that are marginally longer than the pair shown above. Having more pants feels like progress, but in general he finds everything else goes very slowly. AIec is still employed but had an excellent tanning season despite this, again, as shown above.
THE HOUSE
Not done
Is done if you are willing to use cardboard as carpeting and plywood for kitchen counters which we are so again, officially, it is done. For details, consult the relevant blog posts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 to be written.
THE VACATIONS
As mentioned above, we ran off to Kauai for vacation, a transparent and not-so-cheap
attempt to win the best annual photo album contest in which we are all
competing all the time. Below, our entry for the year, with an occasional shot of construction so you know what it was we were vacationing from.
That's all from 2024, a year in which politicians reached new lows while
atmospheric carbon levels reached new highs. We'll see you in 2025
which, we confidently predict, will again be a year in which politicians reach new lows while atmospheric carbon levels reach new highs. Stay sane, stay safe, and stay sane!
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