It’s been a “interesting” year For everybody… Covid, loss of several good freinds. political unrest, climate… Lots on our minds… But it’s also been a good year for us in many ways.  We got to see Our kids and extended family again…, I retired from work, And we still have our sanity… More or less.… I hope everyone out there is winding up their year with family and friends…. We need those connections now more than ever.

We spent New Year’s Eve in Endicott with our good friends ‘Linda and David. We also went over to see Diane’s brother Joe and his wife Pat (who’s birthday it was) and their son and daughter-in-law Victor and Tina. We originally were going to spend time with them but Joe Tested positive for Covid… So we could only go and see them breifly from across the driveways with masks on…

We then spent the middle part of the day driving up to Corning to see the wonderful glass museum… I’ve been wanting to see it for months because the hall of innovations is very close to what we need to do at data for our visitors. It was really well done museum…

I particularly enjoyed the hall of innovation where they talked about the manufacture of glass and all the innovations along the way… It was full of interactive displays. A real model of an interactive science experience!

 One of the high points was a live hot glass demonstration… We fell in love with watching hot glass on the show “blown away”… This was really fun to watch

We rhen went through some of the historical collections which were nice… But don’t appeal to me as much as the modern stuff

Bck to the contemporary stuff for me !

on the way out we got to see how high the water had come up in 1972 and the place was flooded

From there we drove back to Endicott… I had a very nice and quiet New Year’s Eve… Linda had made a really wonderful crawdad boil which took me right back to New Orleans… And we sit around the campfire that david had made… And eventually wonder back in and try to find a movie to watch. We tried several classics but ended up on “Austin Powers… The The spy who shagged me” to round out the year.

One thing David and I did was to melt some lead weights and poured into a glass to predict what year was like… It’s an old custom I learned when I lived in Austria. Well here’s our year… What do you think?

A few minutes before midnight we found a TV station from Nashville that was broadcasting the time… He managed to get to midnight toasted everyone kissed everyone and then fell asleep… A nice end to a complicated year.

Happy new year everyone!

Nite all, note sam

-me