A Trickle of Random Thoughts

Merry Christmas 2024!

It’s a good start for Christmas when you get all four of us home. Towards the end of the Spring Semester, our son John decided that he would spend a semester “away from home.” He’s a master of understatement – he spent the fall semester at Kansai Gaidai in Hirakata Japan (Gaidai is “Foreign Language University”). We dropped him off at the St. Louis airport on August 19 and he returned to us on December 18. His classes were mostly taught in English, but he’s become fluent enough in Japanese to get along in the countryside and to travel on his own. The rest of us lived vicariously through his trips to Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We loved having him exposed to new cultures, but it will be nice never to have him 15 time zones away again.

Although just now (Friday afternoon the 20^th) he’s on the phone with Illinois State University trying to get his housing and financial aid arrangements completed. He’s got almost all his General Education classes out of the way and is ready to dig into his pre-law studies. He’ll be heading back to school in just 3 weeks, so we’re enjoying having him with us. As an echo to his semester overseas, he’ll be living this spring with an exchange student at ISU.

Joshua has had a great first semester at Lincoln Land Community College, where he’s studying Culinary Arts. He was very busy this semester, with 18 ½ credit hours. Some of his classes involved catering events that had him busy extra hours. He’s very pleased with himself, and his mother and I are also.

Joshua’s highlights for the year (as if graduating High School and starting college weren’t highlight enough) included participating in the Special Olympics “Polar Plunge” on March 2, serving as a Judge of Election with his dad on November 5 and winning a competition at the college for “Garde Manger” students. His team of 3 students had the best “Grazing Board” with hors d’oeuvres including homemade crackers and bread by Joshua. Joshua was featured twice in the local paper as part of the culinary program. He’s very excited about the spring semester, which will feature “Café Production and Management” – which involves running the “Bistro Verde” restaurant on campus at LLCC.

Karen’s year was even more dramatic than we expected. She started her year with a Lumbar Puncture on January 2, and things went downhill from there. By July, her recurring migraines and problems related to Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension required her to decide that it was time to set aside her career to focus on her health. In late November the government agreed with her and approved her disability allowance. Rest and a lessening of stress have helped, along with medications – but she’s still frequently exhausted and is still having migraines more often than we would like.

Patrick continues to focus on Disaster Recovery and IT Planning at the Illinois Department of Transportation. But with the slow pace of hiring to replace retirees, he’s now returning to direct software support of IDOT’s payroll system. When he started at IDOT, there were 16 people on his team, and at the moment there are 4 – with a new employee starting January 2, and four more being interviewed. His big highlight was a surprise promotion on January 2, 2024. (How much of a surprise? The promotion was announced in May, and was retroactive to reflect extra work that had been taken on over the last several years – his new title is “Lead Software Analyst”)

The four of us managed to travel more this year. Our highlights included a long weekend in Chicago for Spring Break (John was able to join us part of the time), a long week driving from home to Mackinac Michigan for a Provart Family reunion and then homeward by way of Sault Ste. Marie Michigan and a drive across the Trans-Canada Highway to Niagara Falls Ontario, and then home along the south shores of the Great Lakes. Karen and Patrick got to take a long weekend in the fall to visit the Shawnee National Forrest and a few wineries.

As a treat for those of you who’ve read this far – the annual pictures: