Well Gordon, it was fine to get your Christmas card and finally I am beginning to answer some, starting with yours. We did not send Christmas cards. As my Gambling Birthday Bash Trip Report will explain, we were pretty busy.

You always fill your envelopes with stamps. Well if this works, I will be filling this letter with pictures of stamps. Not the same, to be sure, but in the spirit anyway.




While I was away I gave my computer new spirit. And so it works better and faster and for a while perhaps I can play with it. None of them really last very long, but then I won't either. Ah, I'm beginning to sound a bit like those characters in Dickens.





There, that should be a bit better. At least I have a great gambler in the mix. Dostoyevsky wrote most of what he wrote to pay his roulette debts. Sad, really.

Baudelaine was a favorite of this French girl I met in Madrid back in our days. I was quie taken by her. We went to the art gallery and she showed me those lighter pictures of Goya with laughing young people throwing friends up in a blanket. She liked Baudelaine (The spelling is off on that; I hope I have the right poet) and so, of course, for a while I liked him too. And we wrote some letters for a while and then it just dwindled away.




I did not need a girl to help me find pleasure in these two Americans who wrote popular fiction. Nor do girls get much positive development from either of them. I've always liked girls, however. Always. One big regret is not having enough of them in my youth. In old age it is not very easy to have them.

So how have you been? I hope the new year finds you happy and perhaps with some new activity to replace the work that dried up at the end of the old year or perhaps by now they have reopened again.
We are all well and having a good time. There are little things like arthritis and such but no life threatening illnesses and at this age that is a treat. The funerals of friends have started. For a while it was just the old parents of friends, but now they are in line and dropping too. So anything that does not hasten my dropping is good.

We have had no winter here yet. It was cold yesterday and the lake froze only to thaw again today. It is incredible and wonderful. I guess we will benefit some from global warming. It will insure that my old dock which I just supported as best I could and recovered will make it into another year. Thick ice is the devil on a doc especially if the thaw comes quickly. Years ago here we lost the dock almost every year. One March the boys and I were out in rough windy waves with ropes hauling it back to shore and securing it again.

And speaking of the devil:



I am not very busy just now but have no money to travel. We have another wedding coming this year so I have to save up. I will get to Vegas again, of course, perhaps around the end of June because I can combine it with a trip west to a nephew's bar mitzvah and stretch at least most of the air espense into two trips. I'll try to go again in December. I love it then. A good time to use up the coupons.

We will get down to N Carolina to see E's step father and to the wedding outside Chicago, but not much else this year. I am hungry to go to Costa Rica again but can't manage that just yet. Besides I need more time brushing up on Spanish. I've let it slide. I do try to read a bit on Blogs now and again, but it is not the same as actual study.




In the meantime my books should keep me happy enough. I am selling some on Halfbay too and may expand that. We have so many and the kids don't seem that interested. right now I am selling some of Elizabeth's stuff that she wanted to get out of the way when she moved her office into the house.

That has worked very well, saving her money and moving her toward a semi-retirement. And it has not been any trouble for me, so it has all worked well.

Well, I don't know what else to tell you. And besides I am out of stamps. I hope to see you one of these days. If Montreal would start dealing live poker, I'd be up there often. And that may happen. It is becoming very popular here.

Well, time to ride off with one of my favorite Latin American poets: