The puppies grew older, but no less energetic. Or cute.
Bear continued to trundle along, despite reaching a very unusual age of 16 for a dog his size, and while he was having problems with his back legs, never stopped loving the snow.
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Dobie, as it turned out, was a Flerken (from Captain Marvel). Who knew?
Maddy came out for a couple of weeks, and we had a dinner at Stir to celebrate (late December, actually). Stir is the demonstration kitchen for Barbara Lynch, the owner of a number of Boston's best restaurants. The format is simple; a five course pre-fixe menu with matched wines. Except we weren't thinking about the fact that Maddy is a vegetarian. But the nice thing about an event with only twelve people at it and a chef who's normally one of the head chefs at a super-high-end restaurant... they can improvise as needed.
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Kevin and Suki flew out from the San Fran area to visit Brad and Huidi, and we drove down to Rhode Island to have a Christmas dinner with all of them.
Noah came up to visit from NYU over New Years, and we visited a special exhibit on Winnie-the-Pooh at the MFA with Rick and Elizabeth. Like everything we've seen at the MFA, it was spectacularly well done. You might, if you're looking carefully, see Alison's Christmas present. I started growing a beard. A goatee, specifically.
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Then we had to meet Brad and Huidi on the other side of the country, flying into San Diego to visit Alison's folks in San Marcos for her mother's Birthday.
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While we were in the area, we had dinner with the Mongolia crew at Susan Harmon's place, where her husband, who's an audiophile, showed us his sound room. Sound building actually, it was a complete separate building. The equipment was both massive (with speaker arrays that had something like 120 separate speakers) and unusual, in that it used vacuum tubes, the technology that was used for amplification before transistors were available, and which I thought were as extinct as dinosaurs. But it turns out they still make them in Russia. Who knew?
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Worth honorable mention is Alison's second Christmas present, "Sticky," a walking stick I cut, shaved, carved, and shellacked myself.
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In the meantime, the dogs continued to demonstrate a propensity to destroy enormous swaths of our stuff. Latest edition of "things the pups have eaten" include hearing aids (for the third time), a playstation four controller, and my subwoofer.
Mid February, we went to visit the Spellman Philatelic Museum at Regis College, one of (I think they guy said) two museums dedicated to postage stamps, and saw some amazing things, include a dress made from postage stamps and the first adhesive postage stamp, the Great Britain Penny Black. What I though was more amazing was that parts of the stamp were engraved by hand. Each stamp. Those crazy Englishmen.
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Mid march, we did another No. 9 Park cocktail class, this time on a set of cocktails from a famous Irish bar in NYC, the "Dead Rabbit Grocery & Grog." They've published a couple of books, one of which is interesting and the other hilarious (the hilarious one because it's kind of a combo cocktail recipe and graphic novel in one).
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The next weekend, we went to the Decordova Museum to mock the modern art. I did, at least. Rick and Elizabeth seemed like they might actually have like it, which is kind of scary.
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The last weekend in March, we went to "Bahfest" at MIT, advertised thusly: "BAHFest is a celebration of well-argued and thoroughly researched but completely incorrect scientific theory. Our brave speakers present their bad theories in front of a live audience and a panel of judges with real science credentials, who together determine who takes home the coveted BAHFest trophy. And eternal glory, of course."
The winner, in this case, provided a fanciful and very humourous proof that the black plague was caused by the proliferation of bagpipes in Europe. It's definitely one of those "you have to be there" kind of things, but I think we'll keep Bahfest as something to go to each year.
In May, we joined Eric and Cathy Haines touring the Somerville Open House, a yearly even where a number of artists (I use the term loosely, because while some truly are, others fall in the category of "thinks I would display on my refrigerator if my 5 year old had drawn them." Some of the non-traditional art included the pretty cool kinetic sculpture (shown below) and the building staircase (also shown below).
Afterwards, we had dinner at the "Pindrop Sessions Season ii finale," which was a combination of a meal from a semi-experimental kitchen, then a concert and beer at the adjoining Aeronaut micro-brewery.
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The picture of Dobie and his big fuzzy tail is gratis!