"Annual report"

To round out the year, here is the email greeting I fired off into cyberspace 10 days or so ago, to scattered friends around the world; it sums up my long-winded posts throughout 2011 --

 This year has been quiet, compared to the past 55 eventful years.  My children have been looking after me very well. Rebecca and Richard have consistently provided at least one meal every week at their place or mine; if at their place, Jonathan drives me out there. David phones almost every day from Kingston or Toronto (or wherever else in the world he happens to be; this week he's in Botswana). Just about every day I see and chat briefly to one or more neighbours in the condominium where I live. Even so, I get terribly lonely living here on my own. I miss Janet Wendy more than it’s possible to express in words. I have photos of her strategically located in several rooms in my apartment, and sometimes when I’m alone I talk to these photos. I’ve done very little traveling: over to Waterloo to talk to the new intake of MPH students, to Hamilton to stay with Karen and Pradeep Kumar and see a couple of plays at the annual Shaw Festival in Niagara on the Lake; and in August I flew to Edinburgh to attend the World Congress of Epidemiology, where I saw and shook hands with many old friends and made some new ones, and at times felt a bit like the Eiffel Tower because so many people wanted their photos taken standing next to me: I still seem to be famous among my fellow epidemiologists, get asked to give talks and write papers that purport to be learned. I flex my literary muscles with posts on my blog, originally a convenient venue for progress reports on Wendy’s condition, now a repository for whatever thoughts are uppermost in my mind at the time.  It’s a form of occupational therapy. When I reread my posts they strike me as boring and turgid, but to my surprise my blog has 20-30 regular readers and has had over 8,000 “hits” since I started it in February 2010. No doubt this includes shadowy spooks from secretive government agencies, but I don’t let that thought deter me from expressing my outrage and disgust at some of the actions of our current crop of elected leaders. It’s no consolation that they didn’t get my vote. 

I hope you have had a good year and that you are looking forward to a happy future. There are occasional photos posted on my blog if you can be bothered to scroll through all the verbiage.

My love and warmest best wishes to you all. 

David and Desre got safely back from Botswana and South Africa yesterday, so we'll have a family reunion, celebration of Rebecca's birthday, and belated seasonal gift exchange on New Year's Eve.