Happy New Year!

Greetings all, and a Happy New year to each and every one of you! May 2026 find you blessed with wonder and splendor.

As has been the case for a couple of years, this year’s New Year’s post is a bit late. We had the pleasure of a visit from our good friends Terry and Tim (henceforth T²), and nothing was going to get in the way of our enjoyment of their company. We love y’all and are very glad to have you in our lives.

It’s been a busy year on a number of fronts. Retirement has evolved into a life pattern, and it’s been rewarding, peaceful and comfortable.

There has been a big push to get the “computational” side of our lived sorted out, and thanks to ChatGPT, that is nearly done. I’ll get into this a little more later in the post.

Oh, if I didn’t mention, this is gonna be a bit longish. So, get a warm beverage and lean in, or come back later when you have time to digest.

Before I get to far into the details, I have a couple of favors to ask.

If you are reading this, and would like to continue to read this, would you please go to the contact page and just send me a short note. First names are fine, and you can make up an e-mail address if you want, but I would like to get an idea of how much this is read. Just provide enough info so that I can enusre it’s a real person vice a bot.

Having this information will help me in prioritizing my activities. As you have prolly noticed, I’ve not posted particularly frequently lately. Not a huge reason why or why not, particularly now that I’ve got the site fairly well organized and decidedly better behaved.

As part of my “computational” organization, I stood up an instance of Immich, a “Self-hosted photo and
video management solution”. This has come about due to a certain sensitivity to a large number of personal photos being distributed via Google Albums.

The entire process of standing up Immich was painful. It was a detailed and in-depth usage of ChatGPT, and I would be lying if I said it was easy. We went around in circles for literally a month without really getting anywhere. After putting it aside for a week while I did some research on my own, I came back and created a new session in the hope some progress would be made. What is the definition of insanity, you ask? In any event, everything fell into place in literally a couple of days.

This entire process was very tedious, and I’ll put together a treatise for a later post.

The reason for all this gyration is the photo library is credential based. If you want to see the images in the Photo Albums page, or just want access to the entire tranche of images, you need login credentials. To get those, you need to contact me. You can do so using the contact page. As an additional protection, the Photo Album page requires a password to access. Again, contact me and I’ll send that information out.

Now, back to the task at hand, the year’s summary.

As in years past, I’m going to do a brief summary of the year’s activities, and then I’ll move to looking into the new year, 2026.

In early January, the daughter of a childhood friend of mine reached to let me know that David had passed away on Christmas Day. David had been a lifelong member of the American Legion, and a flag ceremony was being planned in his honor. After a bit of thought, I decided to fly down to New Orleans to attend a life celebration ceremony. His daughter asked if I had any photos of David that I could bring, so I got out a bunch of old scrapbooks and grabbed some images of him, and Kenny his cousin, who passed away many years ago, to bring. The ceremony was nice, I got to see some folks I hadn’t seen in a long time, and I got to meet Patrick, Kenny’s son. I had some pictures of Kenny when we were in college and gave them to Patrick. He was amazed, and very appreciative of having them. In any event, Breeze airlines only flies a couple of days a week, so I had a full day to kinda just drive around the area. There were a lot of images collected, and I am derelict in my duties to post there here. Mea culpa.
In early February, T² came to town, and as usual visited several local attractions while they were here. Our first visit was to The Mariners Museum in Newport News. This is an amazing facility with a lot of civil war artifacts and representations. We tried to visit the Army Transportation Museum at Fort Eustis, but after waiting in line for quite some time, were told it wasn’t open on Sunday. We were able to get into the Virginia War Museum in Newport News. It’s an interesting place with a variety of military vehicles and artifacts.
Melanie and I got a wild hair and visited the Historic Jamestown museum in early March. This is an interesting mixed-use facility, half of which is national park, the other being a private archeological excavation site, Jamestown Settlement. We have not done the Jamestown Settlement part as it’s mostly outdoors, and it was a bit chilly when we went, but it’s on the list of things in the area that we have NOT done!
In April, T² came for a visit, and as usual, we had a number of nice days out. Our first venture was a ride on the Schooner Alliance. This is always a nice ride ans Melanie and I had done it before, and this day was no different. In talking with the crew, the owner of the boat had decided to retire and sold the boat to one of the crew. They were making some small changes, but not deviating significantly from the formula that had served them well. The next day found us at the Fort Monroe museum. This is a fascinating place, with a deep history, much of which I was not aware of.
Later in April, T² came back to Williamsburg, specifically to attend the Tattoo in Norfolk. Melanie and I had been to the Tattoo in Edinburgh, Scotland years ago and were looking forward to the show. The whole process was problematic from the get-go as there was a blurb about “no professional cameras” on the website when I booked the tickets. That’s not very specific, so I e-mailed the organization looking for more specificity. It took several e-mails before I was told, no cameras with removable lenses. Ok, so I took the Fuji X100F as it meets that specification. The precursor to the Tattoo is a parade outside the facility of a plethora of Military Units and bands. It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed the show. When it came time to enter the arena for the Tattoo, the placard outside the facility said “no lenses larger than 6 in”. This is a FAR cry from no cameras with removable lenses, but that was neither here nor there at this point. Entering the facility, we had seats with good views of the entire field. The show started well enough, with marching bands and such, and then proceeded into a longish program of electronically amplified music, which while decent music, way too loud and completely not what we were expecting. The electronic music consumed about half of the show, and the closure was a nice display of marching bands. To say we were disappointed is an enormous understatement.
Luckily, the next day we went back to the Army Transportation Museum at Fort Eustis, and were able to gain entry. It’s a marvelous display of a lot of transportation equipment the Army has used over the years. There are indoor and outdoor exhibits. There has been indication that the museum is moving, so if you want to see it, check before you go.
As a wrap up for the weekend, we went to a Shakespeare Birthday Celebration at Agecroft Hall in Richmond. It was an interesting exhibit, with a number of impromptu “plays” put on by local actors at various places on the grounds. The program delineating these was exceedingly confusing, so we wound up walking around looking for the plays. The actors were in street clothing, which definitely detracted from the performances.
For Mother’s Day, Melanie and I went to Durham to spend the weekend with Stefani and Jourdan. We had a nice look around the area, stopping at the WRAL Azalea Gardens and Lafayette Villiage. Both were charming and made for lovely visits.
In late May, early June, it came time to prepare for Meghan’s relocation to Raleigh-Durham (RDU). She had a week off for “house hunting”, so I accompanied her down to RDU. We spent the week looking at houses, but also had time to visit the Carolina Tiger Rescue, and the North Carolina Botanical Garden. A suitable house was identified, and we departed the area happy that our mission was accomplished. The challenge of selling her existing house, and buying the house we identified, lay ahead.
In June, we had another lovely visit from T2. This time, a very busy one. We started the visit at the Virginia Air & Space Center in Hampton, VA. This is an amazing facility with a large array of aeronautical equipment.
The next day found us at the Hampton History Museum. A visit to the cemetary behind the museum completed the day’s adventure.
The last day of their visit found us at the Torggler Fine Arts Center on the campus of Christopher Newport University in Newport News. This is an interesting exhibit of fascinating art of all genres.
The day wrapped up with a visit to the Watermens Museum in Yorktown. This is a small exhibit highlighting the contribution that the local “watermen” made to the area. Watermen is a general term covering anyone working in or around the boats in the area.
It was a fairly lackadaisical summer, with not a lot of exploration out and about.
In September came the Colony Area Car Show. I’ve got a blog entry about the car show, so I won’t say a lot more about that.
In November, we got a visit from T². None of us were feeling all that well, so we limited our excursions to a short visit to Colonial Williamsburg.
To wrap up the year, Melanie and I took a trip to Dominion Raceway outside of Richmond to watch Jourdan and Stefani take laps in exotic cars with the Extreme Experience. We had given them gift certificates earlier in the year as thanks for all the times they had had with us. It was an interesting experience. Their actual time in the car was fairly short, about 10 minutes, so the entire process didn’t take long. It was fun though.

So that’s the highlights of the fun activities this year. It was a full year otherwise. The ongoing saga of getting Walk, Wright, LLC to finish the house continued. I got to be “friends” with ChatGPT. That was interesting, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t helpful, albeit frustrating.

Mid year, or therabouts, I decided to start keeping a journal of what I was doing. Not sure why, but keeping a journal in the past had worked well in the past. At first I kept a written journal, and that worked fine. A got an invitation to trial an Android app called DiaryIt and have used that for a while, but honestly, it focuses to much on cute, and not enough on functionality. So, I’ve gone back to the “good old days” and ordered a Moleskine Daily Diary. I had kept those for years, and it’s like coming back to an old friend.

Resolutions:

Unfortunately, this is gonna look a lot like New Years past. As a matter of fact, I copied and pasted last years post, and updated…..

Post more to the blog. This is definitely a TBD. Depends a LOT on the amount of feedback I get. Hint, hint, hint.
Profanity – I used to work in an office full of ex-Sailors who had salty vocabularies. Unfortunately this rubbed off. Don’t have that excuse any longer.
Drop the 20+ pounds or so I’ve picked up since retiring. The clothes no longer fit. This has started today. The app I used to use for calorie counting, MyFitnessPal, no longer has a version which runs on my tablet. At the end of the day, that’s prolly not a bad thing, as everything I’m reading indicates that they are monetizing (enshittification) the app and making the free version less capable, and more of a pain to use. I need to find an alternative. For now, I’ll keep a manual log.
Reinvigorate the photography. 2025 was a “fairly” good year, but it paled in reference to previous years. Currently, I’m doing a “Single in January” series on Cameraderie and truth be told, it’s already a struggle to make myself go out and grab some shots every day.
Get back on the fitness course – I had a couple of visits to Melanie’s pain specialist, with the end result being an MRI which indicated significant issues with the cartilage between L4-L5 and L2-L3. Her words were “I have no idea how you are as functinal as you are”. H’mmm.
Finish projects before starting new ones. At any given point in time, I’m in the middle of at least 3 projects. Some for good reasons, some not. I need to organize and prioritize.
Travel – Well, this will be a big year for travel. The kids and I had decided to embark upon on a 2 week junket to Japan in November. Lot’s to do in preparation for that.
Relocation? This is a big TBD. With both the kids being in RDU, it’s making less and less sense to be here in Williamsburg. It’s a two edged sword though. Williamsburg, for all it’s foibles, is very comfortable. Slow and peaceful. RDU is not any of those things. It’s a highly populous, busy area not unlike Northern Virginia. It’s also a high grow arrea with a lot of demand for housing. We are “discerrning” when it comes to housing, and only seen a smal handful that fill the majority of the wish list.

So, folks, I think that is all for now. Please touch base, if you read this and would like it to continue.

Take care, and Happy New Year!