My 2023 Christmas Letter

 

                  Season's Greetings                   Christmas 2023

     Since my last Christmas Letter, our world has gone from one major war to two. In the November 28, 2023 issue of The Wall Street Journal, an article led with the sentence, "Moscow holds the advantage on the military, political and economic fronts as Russia's war with Ukraine approaches its third year."  Russian President Putin may be playing the "long game" in hopes that his friend, Donald J. Trump, once again gets into the White House on January 20, 2025. (We do have an interesting election year ahead of us to witness, don’t we?) The second major war, of course, began on October 7, 2023 with the military terrorist group's, Hamas', inhumane slaughter of over a thousand people on Israeli soil. While, of course, nothing can justify this horrendous act by Hamas, hopefully the Israeli government will now see that its goal of "managing the conflict with the Palestinians” has been a failure and will lead to a successful two-state solution, especially given the long-time deplorable living conditions for Palestinians in Gaza.

         Johnathan and his family traveled to London and Paris in April and to Maui, Hawaii, over Thanksgiving week.   Johnathan was hired as an accounting manager at a local company.  He really enjoys the company and its staff.  Carissa is lead ultrasound tech at her campus and trained many students and new hires this year. Hunter and Kennedy played volleyball at the Boys and Girls Club for two seasons.  Carissa coached Kennedy's team both seasons. Hunter and Kennedy are both doing very well in school and enjoy many extracurricular activities.

        Holly has been living in Columbia, MO a little over a year now.  She is still working at Melanie’s preschool, now owned by O2B Kids.  It has been one interesting year for Holly, to say the least…  As spring rolled around, she and the King side of the family were shocked to find out that what was fatiguing Holly’s mother, Mernell, for many months, which was a diagnosis of stage 2/3 pancreatic cancer.   Holly has been by her side (along with Melanie) to help as much as she can.  It is still a waiting game to see whether Mernell will be a candidate for the surgery. Holly’s husband, Dave, moved to Columbia this fall, which has been a great lift off of Holly’s shoulders in support of their daughter and family.  Holly would love to send warm hugs to all that read this Christmas mas letter and to please keep your warm thoughts and wishes coming to her and her mother’s way. It is greatly appreciated!

        My mother is thankful to feel about as well as she did at this time last year. And she enjoys her three generations of children -- near and far. Johnathan, Hunter, Kennedy & Holly and Melanie and I enjoyed seeing Mother in August, with another get-together planned for just before this Christmas. Holly and Melanie and I enjoyed seeing Mother and Angela on Thanksgiving at which time I took my one-month-old Jack-O- Lantern with me to perform my family's ~ 25-year-old annual (silly) tradition of doing the Punkin Pitchin'.  

         In August, Tom & Emily Bowden were kind enough to host my mother and all six of her children (a rare time that all seven of us are together!!!) in what was a small old granary, beside the old windmill, that Tom magically turned into a charming little cottage on the property of my mother's farm childhood home. Tom is still working on restoring the ~100-year-old home of my mother and her three sisters, Bea, Ferne, & Jane. Tom & Emily used the occasion for us to wish our mother an early Happy Birthday, providing us with cake and ice cream.      

     

        As I approach my 70^th birthday next June, I must mention several people whom I knew who passed away in 2023. Three were Soil Conservation Service co-workers: Richard Koenig, 85, a superb design engineer; John J. "Jack" Walker, 96, who did much to facilitate (keep alive) the watershed projects where I lived and worked my ten enjoyable years in Doniphan, MO; and Darlene Edwards, 85, who I enjoyed knowing during my senior year in college as a student trainee in the State Office in Columbia, MO in 1975 - 1976, who would later organize all of the necessary paperwork to approve my disability retirement in 1990. My family was very saddened when my cousin, Gary Magruder, lost his wife, Samra, 66, in March. I only met Samra once, in 2019, but I quickly learned of Samra's kindness, gentleness, and her sense of humor. We lost Tim Murphy, 72, who was my good next-door neighbor when I moved to Hannibal in 1991. One of my best neighbors, Jan Lieurance, on James Road, sadly lost her daughter, Jerica, 42, in February. When Jerica was age 11, she helped me put up my Christmas tree in my first year of living in Hannibal in December, 1991. A good friend of the Jarboe family when he was a Moberly Greyhound (JUCO basketball) over 50 years ago and, later, a Harlem Globetrotter, Larry "Gator" Rivers, passed away at age 73. 

                My Christmas gift from Johnathan last year was treating me to a Cardinals game, along with Holly, Melanie, Hunter, and Kennedy, on August 2, 2023 in the many comforts of the Champions Club in Busch Stadium. Though our Cardinals had one of their poorest seasons in their 142-year history, ( 71 W -- 91 L ;  0.438 ; 21 GB ), we beat the odds and we saw the Cardinals defeat the Minnesota Twins, 7 - 3, with Cardinals batters hitting four home runs, with the rarity of all three Cardinals outfielders hitting a home run in the same inning, the 2nd. And Johnathan paid for our very nice rooms in Embassy Suites in Downtown St. Louis (did I ever have a BIG breakfast the next morning!!). The next day we had fun at the impressive St. Louis Aquarium at Union Station in which there was an interactive show in which a whimsical and joke-cracking swimming otter conversed with Hunter, Kennedy, and Melanie.  On a positive note, the football team of my alma mater, the University of Missouri at Columbia, had one of their best seasons in school history, going 10 - 2, now ranked No. 9, and will meet No. 7 Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl on December 29^th. 

        What began as e -mailing to each other rather sparingly 11 years ago, my friend, Debbie, who lives in Centralia, MO, and I have been regular messaging friends in recent years and we finally met in person for the first time in December, 2022. And three more times this past year, in which we have found that we mutually enjoy each other's company, as friends. Despite our occasional quite distinct "differences in opinions", Debbie has filled a void in my life in an invaluable way.

         On the astronomy front, I used my smartphone to capture a couple of impressive conjunctions in 2023. One of the two bright planets, Venus and Jupiter, in February/March. And a lovely morning conjunction of Venus and a crescent moon in November, both receiving many kudos on Facebook. But a major discovery that I made in June was being able to capture some amazingly detailed photos of the moon, and crude photos of Jupiter and its four Galilean moons, simply by placing the tiny lens of my smartphone up to the eyepiece of my 2 1/2-inch refractor telescope that I got when I was age 10 in 1964. If all goes as planned, I will be traveling down to Doniphan in SE Missouri, where I enjoyed living and working for 10 years during 1979 - 1989, to witness my second total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. Soon after I witnessed the 8/21/2017 total solar eclipse from Columbia, MO, I was shocked to learn that the centerline of this 116-mile-wide path of totality passes just north of Doniphan (and only ¼-mile away from Mernell's and my first home, which we now "affectionately" call our "flood house," because it got flooded 3 times while we were living there), where the duration of totality is at the maximum for SE Missouri at 4 minutes, 12 seconds.

      I have enjoyed messaging with a few women throughout the world: Aysha in Bangladesh; Valerie in Pennsylvania; Ana, Jannah, & Kris in the Philippines; Zofia in Germany; Jiraphat in Thailand, Tia in Abu Dhabi, UAE (originally from Syria); Larysa in Austria (originally from Ukraine); and Ariana in Peru. And a new "snail mail" pen pal, Amelia, from Staten Island, NYC.

      After 10 ½ months of an "off and on" effort on my part, I successfully obtained the autograph of the Downton Abbey actress, Elizabeth McGovern, on two 8" x 10" color prints of her as "Cora" whom she played on this show; one for my former pen pal, Carol Ann of Ohio, and one for myself. This was made possible by Ms. McGovern's Administrator, Shelley Hasseldine, who “picked up the ball” for me when Ms. McGovern's agency (all located in London) failed to do this for me. It was Carol Ann's extravagant and exorbitant lifestyle of being like that of "Cora" that inspired this effort of mine. But for reasons that I will not go into here, after I mailed Carol Ann's autographed photo to her in May, I felt it necessary in July to cease my 8-year "snail mail" pen pal relationship with Carol Ann, though it was often enjoyable for me during the first 7 years.         

        Beginning in June, 2022, I began sending e-mail reports of my local rainfall amounts to an intelligent and cheerful young woman, Whitney Williams, who is one of the meteorologists at a local TV station, WGEM - TV, in Quincy, Illinois. Whitney and I have developed an enjoyable correspondence with each other over the past 18 months, in which I once shared with Whitney a little-known fact in ornithology, the scientific study of birds (this is an inside joke between Whitney and me  🤣 ). But I would learn that Whitney is very good at "dishing it right back" at me. In March, 2023,   I used a graphic from WeatherUnderground.com in an e-mail to Whitney, in which she replied back to me, "I see the forecast picture you attached from Weather Underground.  You are supposed to be getting your forecast information from //WGEM.com/weather.  Haha!! 😂 Just kidding.  But not really. 🙂," which gave me a good laugh!!

I hope that you and your family have a prosperous 2024!    

                                                                    Greg