We hope you all had a wonderful year and wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Our dog Kyndra continues to bring us much joy as well as many good laughs. She scampered up Steve's car and lay on the roof to try to prevent us from leaving for bridge when we were in Palm Springs.

We went to a Judy Collins (with Steven Stills) concert at Humphrey's on the Bay. What a delightful venue! She can still sing and he can still play guitar, but the less said about his singing the better.

We were also really excited that our favorite basketball player, LeBron James, has moved to Southern California to be a Laker. So we went and saw him in an exhibition game here in San Diego. It was fun, but watching on TV is better.

We cut the cord to cable TV and use the Internet with our Roku to stream YouTube TV, PBS Passport, Amazon Prime, and YouTube (we cancelled NetFlix).

Travels

Our favorite way to travel these days is to watch the Kara and Nate vlog on youtube! We traveled far less this year, Tucson being the furthest we went to play bridge and see friends. We skipped every Bridge Nationals and expect our next one to be the Summer 2019 in Las Vegas. Other travels were to local California regionals such as Riverside and Ventura.

Brearley

It has been 50 years since Kitty graduated high school so she went to her reunion in New York City last April and visited her grandchildren at the same time. It was good to see old friends again and after a few minutes it seemed as if they had hardly aged at all. The school is still expanding and felt much less like a prison than it once did; the ugly green walls are now a pleasant beige!

Kitty went back to NYC again in late November for grandson Jack's third birthday bash. Even though a stomach bug caused her to miss out on genealogy research and visiting with friends, she still made it to the party!

Visitors

It was fun to have old friends Barbara and Martin Mannlein for a visit and show them the garden.

Kitty's cousin Marty also visited San Diego and Kitty had dinner and a walk in Pacific Beach with her, barely avoiding being run down by the plethora of motorized scooters!

Editors of the District 17 Online Magazine

We are excited to have helped to take the District 17 ScoreCard newsletter to new heights as an online magazine. It is no longer published in paper format at all! This new media combines Kitty's graphic talents with Steve's editing and both our writing skills. Click the image for the December issue or click here for our yearly Bridge book review article.

DNA & Genealogy

Kitty's retirement career, genetic genealogist and blogger, continues to expand; she gets many requests for her presentations as well as for her help in using DNA to solve adoption and unknown father cases.

Several cases stand out from this past year: Click here to read about how she found that an unknown father was clearly descended from the early Spanish settlers of New Mexico - This resulted in an invitation to speak in Albuquerque, which Kitty was delighted to accept because it meant she could spend time with old friend Janet and check on her former garden.

Click here for the strange case involving two war babies. It started when Julie discovered that her Dad was not her biological father. Kitty figured out who Julie's Dad was, and Julie contacted her presumed half sister, Barb, who she knew from school days. But Barb had already done her DNA and was not a match to Julie or anyone else on her father's side. That's right, her dad wasn't her Dad either!

Health

Steve's prostate cancer new protocol trial finished, and for six months afterwards all was well. Now his PSA is rising again, so he is on new meds. He saw his oncologist at MD Anderson in Houston twice this year; his oncologist continues to assure him that he is doing fine... We understand that Steve's prostate cancer needs to be managed as a chronic disease, and are hoping it can be handled here with fewer trips to Houston from now on.

Kitty's health has improved markedly since she stopped eating gluten. Her colds can be walked through and her morning congestion is gone. She discovered she was gluten intolerant accidentally, while trying the South Beach diet with her friend Lynne. She checked her DNA results and found several celiac disease markers! Click here for the full story.

She immediately checked the results for other family members and warned the ones with similar markers

The really good news is that being gluten free means the weight has been coming off steadily. She is now 15 pounds down and putting her jeans in the dryer to shrink them

Margie Gwozdzinsky

One of Kitty's dearest old friends, Margie Gwozdzinsky, passed away in May. Margie was Kitty's partner when their team won the 1989 Venice Cup, the World Women's Bridge Championship. Click Margie's image for the article Kitty wrote about her at bridgewinners.com. Sadly, Margie never quit smoking, so perhaps her lung cancer was not a surprise. Margie tried a final "Hail Mary" by going to a Mexican clinic, but that also failed. We are very grateful to Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego for listening to Kitty and Margie and then putting her back together well enough so she could fly home to Florida, to die surrounded by friends and family.

The GNYBA (Greater New York Bridge Association) is inaugurating the "Countess Cup," a two session newcomer event in her honor, on Friday December 28. This is very fitting as she mentored so many up and coming players.

Social Media

Instagram is Kitty's favorite social media app, as she can quickly upload a photo after a few simple edits (reframing, brightening, etc) and simultaneously post to Facebook. Almost every photo in this newsletter is linked to the Instagram original. Steve is not a fan of any of these privacy and solitude destroying time wasters!