Christmas 2025

Greetings, friends and family,

We had a pretty good year in 2025, doing some travel, some concert-going, a bit of drone flying, some art, and helping out with a number of different jobs and activities at our church. We attended a number of local concerts during the year, and thought it might be fun to document five of those below! The national news was somewhat disturbing, and on a personal level Tim lost two cousins during the year.

In late January we attended a concert by a friend's band Broken Daisies at a local tavern in Somerville. Check them out if you can, because they're not just colorful they're pretty good!

In February we went to Florida for a week with our kids, which hasn't happened for a while. We tried to get a picture of moonrise out of the ocean, but unfortunately the clouds were not optimally positioned! The picture shows what we did capture; clouds and the famous damaged pier at Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. The red is reflection from the nearby lights of town. (The night-sight mode on the phone doesn't always result in a sharp picture.)

In March we caught a concert by the Bevis Frond, who hadn't been to the US for something like 20 years. Good concert, but at the Crystal Ballroom in Somerville you can dance or stand but there are no seats; something to keep in mind! I guess they figure so many people stand up at concerts maybe they'd just dispense with the seats.

We often walk to Great Meadows Wildlife Refuge, and in April we got an unexpected sight: a pileated woodpecker was breaking up an old dead white pine. He didn't seem bothered by us. The video was shot in 4K vertical with 5x optical zoom and converted to HD.

Laura continued with her art, such as this batik of our neighbor gardening. She exhibits and sells her stuff at Gallery Twist in Lexington, a pretty interesting place. Check it out sometime if you're in town and they're having a show.

In June we saw Todd Rundgren and band in Lexington, MA. He's a prolific musical genius, and did all new stuff until the encores for which he rolled out a couple of the old hits!

In July we went to Cape Cod for a couple of weeks as usual, although we didn't have quite as much family around this year. We usually see some great sunsets, but things look a little odd in the picture! Yes, we were there on the 4th of July for the first time ever, and the fireworks were around!

Immediately after the Cape we went to the ASA American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) annual meeting in Colorado. They usually have science-oriented tours the day before the conference, and this year they had two tours of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR. I signed up for both of them because I figured that Trump would shut them down as soon as he could. Because Colorado is a purple state, and NCAR is responsible for a lot of employment around there my view wasn't popular, but sure enough five months later the government announced something pretty close to shutting it down! The picture shows a solar panel testing facility at NCAR. They test those things for years, but possibly some of those tests will be cut short. Our own panels are guaranteed to put out 92.5% of the rated power after 25 years, but I'm sure nobody has tested them for that long.

We saw a lot of our ASA friends at the meeting, and then hung around for a week or so to see Denver and visit friends in Colorado Springs. Check out the 4K drone video of the Colorado scenery, which also shows us with a couple of the friends we visited at the end. The sound track is a great one from Karen Green, so try to listen on headphones or decent speakers. The lyrics are in the youtube notes.

In late September we visited North Conway and Wolfeboro in New Hampshire. It was a little early for peak foliage season, but we did capture some foliage as you can see in the video. At the end you can again see us and some of the friends we were visiting, including guest drone flyers Edward and Andrew.

In October we went to Savannah, Georgia for a family reunion with Laura's side of the family. We had a good visit but the time with family was fairly short. I thought that the "No Kings" demonstration (see pic) would be a fun thing to capture with the drone, but unfortunately it was held in a park with heavy tree cover so there was no overhead drone view of that. Georgia is a red state, but Savannah evidently has more than a few blue-leaning people. I did capture some pretty nice video of Georgia with the assistance of guest drone flyer Grace. If you have skill in spy satellite photo interpretation, look for the shadows of Grace and me (also the background of this web page). Afterwards we headed over to nearby Tybee Island for a few days at the beach, and some more drone footage.

We caught most of the concerts of the Carlisle Chamber Orchestra; the November concert is shown in the picture. They're one of the top-ranked community orchestras in the country, usually ranking in the top five! Plus they're free, with a suggested $15 donation if you have the money. Yes, we do have a couple of friends who play with them.

We removed part of a fence, did some clearing of invasive bushes and cut down a few trees in our back yard. That re-routed a few of the animals that often visit the yard. The trailcam caught quite a variety of critters when positioned to look at the newly-cleared area!

The year-end concert that we try to catch is the Blue Heron concert. This year it was "Christmas in 16th Century Spain" as they do music mostly from about 500 years ago. Gives new meaning to the "oldies." They're fantastic, but by comparison they always make me wonder why I even bothered to sing in the choir back in the day!

Have a great 2026 and try to stay healthy. The good news is that covid is lower than in recent years, but the bad news is that the flu is bad this year and measles keeps breaking out! (And I hope you're not priced out of the (un)affordable care act next year.)

Tim (and for Laura)