Category: Family

I know I’ve mentioned this one before.  But the morning after tomorrow, my youngest moves away.  So tonight playing a game of Dominion with Tim was extra-special.

I do love playing games with my kids!  I’ve gotten to do a whole lot of that in my life — and one more time tonight.

I am blessed.

I’m going to California tonight!  My niece is getting married on Friday.  I’ll get to spend time with many of my 13 siblings and see several nieces and nephews and spend time with my dear friend Ruth.

This feels like a bonus trip, since I went to see family in Oregon in May — because I was interviewing for a job out there.  Normally, I wouldn’t have spent the money for two trips, but that was a good excuse.

I have an overwhelmingly large family.  There are some good things about living on the other side of the country where the only Hatch most people know is me.

But it is also a huge treat to get to spend time with them.  This is going to be a lovely trip.

Last night I got to hear my Dad speak and see him receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Chappell Natural Philosophy Society!

It worked out great — they were supposed to start dinner at 6:00, which was when I got off work, about an hour away.  It turned out they started dinner at more like 7:30 — so I was right on time.  I got to have some food and hear my Dad speak.

This is a group for “dissident scientists.”  They encourage critical thinking and no hero worship.  My Dad by no means agrees with all of them, but they listen to him, and some do good work.

In his talk, he presented why his own theory is a much better fit with GPS data than Einstein’s Special and General Relativity Theory.

He is currently calling his theory TESLA — The Elastic Solid Lorentzian Aether.  It’s catchier, and I can finally remember it!

His theory explains the data better (and my Dad knows GPS data) and resolves paradoxes.  In this theory, alas for fiction writers, time travel is not even theoretically possible.

Lately, on my Sonderjourneys blog, I’ve been posting Project 52 — 52 weeks of posts covering the 52 years of my life.

I had run out of pictures — and this weekend, my Dad scanned in pictures for me of when I was 4 to 6 years old.

And they are so much fun to look at!  So many things I’d forgotten came flooding back — down to details of clothes I wore and toys I loved to play with.  Many of the memories I had no idea went back that far — because when you’re 4 years old you don’t think about the date a lot.  But my Mom carefully noted the month on each picture, so now I know, for example, that we found our cat Zenie when I was 3 years old.

And I’d forgotten all about that toy camera I found so very fascinating!  I was ready to take an abundance of pictures even then.

A quiet Christmas today.  We stayed home — my youngest son and me.

And it’s probably the last Christmas when he’ll live here.

And we played a game all afternoon — It happened to be a game I’d given him a couple years ago at Christmas and we hadn’t opened until now.  And we had a lot of fun playing it.  (He won.)

And we had a nice meal together, which I prepared yesterday.

And we opened gifts.

And we played Christmas music.

And we both did some reading.

And I was together with someone I love dearly.