Happy New Year to all! It's been a wonderful year for us with many travels, an eclipse, and a big move. Thank you everyone for your various Christmas cards and newsletters, We don't send cards but rather this creation which is an end of year effort.

We Moved to Avon, CT

Early this past year, Kitty moved in with Bart in Texas but kept the San Diego condo. As much as she liked his friends in Dallas, she did not want to live in that state. When she asked him where he would like to live he said Connecticut. She agreed with the proviso that winters would be in San Diego. He grew up in Wallingford and his brother lives in Cornwall Bridge, CT. This seemed a good plan since most of Connecticut is an easy day trip from NYC where Kitty's grandchildren mainly live. In fact, Kitty did 3 day trips to the city for various functions; one with Bart. Plus they took the train to the World Series where the Yankees disappointed us all.

We picked a real estate agent and an area to focus on - west of West Hartford - on our fall foliage trip last year and Mary sent us new listings regularly. One day we saw exactly the place we wanted: in Farmington Woods, a condo community on 375 acres with an 18 hole golf course! Maybe next year we will play that course ...  We bought it without actually setting a foot in it. Mary, our agent did a video walk through and advised us all the way. Thank you Mary 

The eclipse

However with the solar eclipse coming through Dallas on April 8, and its totality visible in our backyard, we waited to move until after that event. Richard, Bart's brother came down to visit in order to see it. The weather was perfect and it was amazing!

Family visits

Once we had moved, we made regular visits to Richard and Patty Bramley and they came to us too; once even for a lobster dinner. Living in New England, we discovered that the grocery store has a big tank full of lobsters. Kitty found this irresistible. Bart got used to eating lobster every few weeks. Kitty's mom used to say that it was better to eat them at home since they are so messy, yum!

Kitty and Bart saw her grandchildren and family at their Long Island summer place in Bellport, when they visited Avon, and when Kitty went to NYC for Julie's performance. They are now 7 and 9: wonderful ages. Julie sings and dances so well and Jack is a speed Rubik's cube maven, When they visited us, Jack found a nutribullet device that we did not know we had at the bottom of our pantry. Then we had to go to the Stop and Shop to buy more fruit; who knew that would be such a fun expedition with youngsters who wanted to buy out the store! We have been making smoothies ever since.

We see Kitty's brother and Salt Lake City family when we travel cross country by car which is likely to be twice a year. Kitty last visited them in the spring when she was driving her plug-in hybrid from San Diego to Chicago where she met up with Bart at the trials. Much easier to charge the Volt in our CT garage! We use Bart's gasoline powered Acura for our road trips.

We made fewer cousin visits this year as we were busy setting up our new home. In Texas Bart's cousin Bonnie and husband Jerry visited with us before our move. Back East, we stopped at the Lake house and stayed with Kitty's cousin Lance Beyer on our way to the Toronto Bridge nationals. We also had a lovely Bramley cousin lunch in NYC in the Fall following a beautiful memorial service for Bart's first cousin Bobbie who passed at 95. Two of her sons gave very moving talks. She was quite an amazing woman; combining child rearing and career well before it was the norm. Bart and I walked through Central Park afterwards from the Strawberry Fields to Monument Row in honor of cousin Bobbie who used to walk there with Bart.

Wordle

Both Kitty and Bart are serious Wordle players who expect to get it in 3 or 4 guesses. Bart keeps a running average over 760 plays which is 3.44. Bart stays up til midnight to play while Kitty waits until morning. She plays with her 2nd cup of coffee after Worldle (map game), Flaggle, Strands, and Waffle.

Kitty got curious about letter frequencies, so she wrote a program to count them up from the page with the used Wordle word list.

She explained the logic to grandson Jack who was fascinated and seemed to understand the concept of a loop and that computers are better at counting large quantities. He got her to run it again. She has since updated the program to read the current used word list page.

Christmas

Thanks to a review in the NYT wirecutter, we got ourselves a wonderful Xmas present, a small portable waterproof bluetooth speaker. We love it! Great sound and easy to use our spotify playlists from Bart's smart phone.

As usual this newsletter is too long. There are many more pictures on the next page, so click here for the full travelogue and photos.

Happy New Year everyone!