In April, I also went down to DC with a group from our Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction to lobby members of Congress to support legislation to reduce the dangers of nuclear weapons.  I'm not sure we had much of an impact, but we tried.  The day before lobbying began, Martin Wolf, a Markey staffer and former applicant for a faculty position in our department, offered to show us around the Capitol.  This is the door where the President-Elect goes outside to be sworn in on Jan. 20.  Statuary Hall actually has at least one scientist, Norman Borlaug.  On the pedestal it says, "The father of the Green Revolution" and "The man who saved a billion lives."  We actually got to spend a half hour with Congressman Jim McGovern from Massachusetts, one of the few who is very concerned about nuclear weapons.  We also went to my senator's office, where we talked to staffers and talked to a staffer from Sen. Johnson from Wisconsin.  He was very friendly, but I'm not sure the Senator was responsive to our message.  There is a Calder stabile in the Hart Office Building called Mountains, but the Clouds portion is missing.  Capitol Hill has nice flowers and fountains in front of the Russell Senate Office Building and the Supreme Court.  I saluted my union, whose headquarters was just next to our hotel.

     On May 1, I had carpal tunnel surgery on my left wrist.  It worked very well, just like the first one.  The day I got my stiches out on May 15 I attended a one-day meeting at the pretentious American Academy of Arts and Letters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  They have walls of letters from people they have inducted, including Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Alexander Calder, and Alan Alda, but the meeting I attended was under the Chatham House Rule, so I can't tell you about it.

     In June, we took the entire family on a Road Scholar trip to Japan.  They had many activities for all ages to participate in, including sushi-making, manga drawing, bracelet braiding, tubular cake making, taiko drumming, cookie making, and making octupus balls.  We visited many iconic sites, including the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, a Ninja Museum (too violent for my taste), the Todaiji Temple in Nara, the world's largest wooden building with a giant Buddha inside and deer wandering around outside, in Kyoto the Ginkakuji (silver pavilion) Temple, Nishiki Market, Gion, the city’s best-known geisha district, and the Kinkakuji Temple (golden pavilion), and Hiroshima and Miyajima.  There are far too many photos and details to include here, so I will just mention a few.  They had Godzilla and Spiderman climbing the walls.  Our sushi-making class led to to accomplishments and certificates.  At the Meiji shrine we saw a traditional wedding.  We then walked down a shopping street that saw us and Bon Jovi, and led to treats for the kids.  At teamLab Planets we walked in water with colored moving fish images, walked through a hanging garden, and saw strange silver blobs, among other things.  We then went to a manga drawing lesson where Sherri and I were not the best students and Nakano Broadway, where Vivi got some beautiful, but not tasty, cupcakes and we resisted buying Pee-wee Herman and Alfred E. Newman dolls.  I saw these strangely dressed girls on the way back to hotel, where two more let us take pictures with them.  One night we had dinner with Kiyomi and her family, and Danny enjoyed their massage chair.  The next night we ate with Kiyomi and Madoka and their families.

    The next day, all aboard the Shinkanzen for a trip to a ryokan in Misugi.  Along the way, our guide Paul Deckret showed us a poster for another of his activities, Ninja trail running.  But first we stopped at a Ninja museum, where they demonstrated fighting and let the Danny and Vivi throw weapons.  Peace, man.  We also had a lesson in braiding.  This is my setup and the result.  Sherri had a little more trouble, but Vivi enjoyed it.  At the ryokan, they greated us with an American flag.  Here is our room, but we found some more cushions and made our futons thicker.  We went to a town where they used indigo for dyeing and made cloth.  We went to a tea ceremony, which we made Danny do.  One day for lunch we cooked our own curry, and the kids had to peel the vegetables.  Vivi added the curry and Danny helped make the rice.  Then we learned how to make tubular cake by dripping batter on a hot pipe and turning it.  Then it had to be cooled, and when done, it was slipped off the pipe.  You could see through it, but it did not taste that great.  That night we had a traditional kaiseki dinner featuring seasonal and regional produce.  I thought it was great.  Here are several of us and Brian.

   Next we went to Kyoto, with a stop at the Todaiji Temple in Nara.  The town's symbol combines a buddha and deer antlers, but the real Buddha and the real deer were much better.  You could feed them if you bought special food.  Every toilet in Japan, including the public ones as well as those in the hotels, had fancy sprays and heaters, but in Nara they must have had some people who had no idea how to use even a standard toilet, as I saw these instruction there.  Before we left, Danny climbed a hill for a better look at the town and deer.  At the Nishiki Market in Kyoto, they had shrimp, fish, and sparrow, among many other things.  The Daniels had their own restaurant.  Not all the views in Japan were beautiful like this lotus flower.  We walked in the Gion district where we saw four girls dressed up as geishas and four real geishas.  When we got back from the Golden Temple, Vivi discovered that her phone was missing.  It had fallen out of Brian's pocket in the taxi.  But he had no receipt and we had no way to contact the taxi.  I tried calling the phone, but there was no answer.  Finally someone answered in Japanese, and I had someone in the hotel talk to them.  It turns out it was a police station a half hour away where the cabbie had turned in the phone.  So Sherri and I took a taxi there and convinced them it was our phone by showing them a picture of us on the phone.  Here is the phone.  There was a lot of shopping in Kyoto, and so we bought two suitcases there, one to replace one of ours that broke and one to carry back all the stuff they bought.  And to treat ourselves we bought Krispy Kreme.  They also took us to taiko drumming.

   Our last stop was in Hiroshima.  After driving through modern Hiroshima and after seeing a new stadium, we went to Peace Park.  This is the Atom Dome, the remains of a trade exhibition hall that was under the bomb when it dropped.  It survived because it had a lot of windows that blew out and relieved the pressure on the structure.  A hibakusha told us about how she survived the bombing.  There is a bell that people ring, and the hammer hits an atomic symbol.  There is a flame burning outside that will only be extinguished once there are no more nuclear weapons.  I tried to blow it out.  Sadako was a girl who survived the bombing but later got cancer.  She folded 1000 origami cranes, as a legend said it would help.  It did not, but those cranes have become an anti-nuclear symbol.  When President Obama visited Hiroshima, he folded a crane as a gesture of solidarity.  Many other visitors also bring cranes.  A traditional Hiroshima food is okonomiyaki.  We watched it being made in front of us from noodles, eggs, ham, scallions, and sauce.  I liked it. 

    The next day we took a ferry to Miyajima.  It has a famous Torii gate in front of the Itsukushima Shrine.  Here are Sherri, all of us, and Sherri and me in front of it.  It was low tide, so we could walk right up to it.   We walked up the hill past little Buddhas to a Buddhist temple.  Here is a picture Danny took in the mist.  Then we made some cookies with chocolate in them.  Again, it was interesting, but the Japanese just don't know how to make baked goods.

    The last day we drove to Osaka to fly home.  But on the way, we stopped at the Kokoen Gardens at the foot of Himeji Castle. They had two kinds of bamboo, lotus flowers, goldfish, and a little waterfall.  We stopped for a cherished Osaka street food, takoyaki, for lunch.  It is balls with different things inside, including octopus.  It was sort of fun to make, but did not taste that good.  That night we saw dragons in downtown Osaka.  The next day we flew home.  Here's a view of San Francisco as we took off, and here is a nice sunset.

    In July we had our 14th annual GeoMIP workshop at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.  Oliver Morton gave an invited talk about Carl Sagan, who was a professor there, and his work on geoengineering, and reminded us that Carl was buried in Ithaca.  So the next morning I drove over to the cemetery.  (His grave is on Google Maps.)  There is a nice view down the hill.  His grave has many mementos left by admirers.  And his parents are buried next to him.  I miss him and his gift for communicating science, particularly the dangers of nuclear weapons.  

     In October I went to Boulder for the annual UCAR meeting.  The reception was held at the spectacular Mesa Lab.  Gera and Tanya are back from Saudi Arabia and met us for dinner in Princeton with Kathy and Tim.  I had some of my group over for Thanksgiving, where I prepared the turkey.  Before dinner we visited the windy beach.

    At the annual AGU Meeting in December, this time in DC, I was on a plenary panel about geoengineering (climate intervention) where I presented my list of risks and concerns. My newly graduated student, Dr. Brendan Clark, presented a poster.  And I saw many friends, including Pasha Groisman and his wife Nina.

    Our solar panels (photovoltaic, shown here with our electric car and hybrid) continue to work well.  Here is an updated graph of our electric bill for the past few years.  It is still easy to see when we turned the solar panels on.  SRECs are $0.23 per kWh plus we get the electricity, worth another $0.14 per kWh.  The figure explicitly takes account of the SRECs and annual settling of the bill by the electric company.  All negative values are payments to us.  Since we earn about $2000 per year from SRECs, plus get about $2000 worth of electricity, the solar panels make an annual $4000 profit.  But since we have had the solar panels for 15 years, the SRECs are no longer available, but we'll still keep getting the free electricity.

    We saw Don McLean at Monmouth University on May 4 and very much enjoyed it.  He ended with American Pie, which led us to watch a great documentary The Day The Music Died: The Story of Don McLean's "American Pie" on Amazon Prime. I did not get to my 50th Bob Dylan concert this year, but we saw A Complete Unknown on Dec. 24, which was fabulous.

   I did not cut the grass this year in my "lawn" and just let nature do its thing, with the addition of a few native plants, which had nice flowers.  None of the neighbors complained, except for my nearest and dearest one, my wife.  The same day I took pictures of the flowers, I saw chemtrails in the sky.

   Some people bought the old house next door and tore it down last year, in anticipation of building a new house.  But somehow that never happened and the lot is now for sale.  The real estate agent used a drone to take pictures of the lot, which they put on their website, and so now we have nice aerial views of our house.  Here are a low view, a higher view, and a higher view a little to the south with the Manasquan River, Barnegat Bay, and ocean in the distance, and the Glimmer Glass on the left.

   A few days ago, Santa rode by our house on fire engine. 

   The Badgers had a terrible season and will not make it to a bowl game for the first time in 23 years, reminding me of the team when I was in college.  But it would cost $40,000,000 to fire the coach.

Sherri:  

    My Pi Phi sisters have continued to zoom every couple of months, and it’s nice to share memories (though many of us have forgotten them!), to talk about our families and grandchildren and our travels.  I’ve also kept in touch with my Liberal Ladies, a small group that has lunch several times a year, and we’ve had plenty to talk about this year, for sure!  My friends from Brookdale also get together to hear about teaching nowadays, and I recently docented at the Holocaust Center at the college, where I led a group discussing the Rwandan Genocide.  I stay busy delivering meals, doing exercise, and generally walking 2 miles or more each day.  And, as you've already seen, have had some wonderful travels. The kids came this summer for about a month, and we spent a lot of time at the pool, celebrated Brian's 48th birthday, and Vivi and I got a mani-pedi, among other fun things.  In October I visited my Virginia family which also included my counsin Mark, who now lives in Tennessee, celebrating his birthday and Butch and wife Astrid, who live near Charlottesville, and brother Tom and sisters, Jeffy, and Gina and boyfriend Steve.  Then on to New Orleans and a visit with the kids for a week.

    The kids are doing well, arriving on Christmas night and leaving on January 4^th.  Brian, now 48, continues to work as a CGI artist remotely, currently working on the next Star Wars game; son Danny is 14, loves soccer and playing various Roblox games, as does his sister, Genevieve (Vivi), who is now 12, on her soccer team at school and on her screen a lot as well.  So, I’ve been busy cooking for them and bought them some gift cards for the places they like, like the local Sundae’s Ice Cream shop, Jersey Mikes subs, and Squan Pizza. And we've sampled them all since their arrival 4 days ago!  They both love soccer, and have been playing outdoors at nearby parks, and both Brian and Dan have been able to see their friends, and we may go into NYC to a museum and walk the streets.  We 've also shown them old slides of Brian and Dan when we visited London and Paris in 1989, plan to play Monopoly, and Uno, and let them help me with The Grandparent Book, which is a keepsake journal that has way too many questions about childhood, teen years, and our lives, but it’s nice to know about your family, too.

   Best to all of you and enjoy the next year.