Life After Windbird, Day 140: Dinner with the Woodins
Date: Friday, December 30, 2016
Weather: Clear, Turning Partly Cloudy; High 43, Low 27 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Studio, Falmouth, MA

I ended my day by having dinner with Bruce and Jane Woodin at their house. Jane always goes all out with decorating for Christmas and this year was no exception. As Bruce said tonight, she takes Martha Stewart’s suggestions very seriously, and, as a result, everything was just beautiful. She made sure the candles were lit outside the front door to welcome me, and inside the lighting of the mantle garland, wreaths on the doors, and the centerpiece, the Christmas tree, were just right.01-bruce-and-jane-by-their-christmas-tree They have had two of their three grandchildren with them all week, so this was our first chance to get together. Thanks to Bruce and Jane for a lovely evening.02-with-bruce-and-jane-woodin

About an hour before I was to head out to Bruce and Jane’s, I got a phone call from Linda and Mike Stuart. These are my friends who are biking around the world. I didn’t hear from them at Christmas, so I was so hoping I would get a call around the New Year. I was elated to get the call. They are biking through the Andes Mountains in Ecuador right now, and I know from reading their daily logs that the lack of air in the high altitudes and the steep gradients have been most challenging. But they assured me that they are doing fine. It was just so good to hear Linda’s voice and to hear that all is okay. They will be in the mountains for two more days and will then head to the coast to the city of Guayaquil. They will be there for a few days and are then flying to the Galapagos where they will meet up with their son Garrett and his girlfriend for a cruise through the islands. When they return, they will be biking on to Peru and even more challenging mountains. Linda, I love you. And you, too, Mike. I send you all the strength that I have to give!lajas-003

Back up a couple of hours, I got a call from Detta Porat. Detta and Tom are my good friends that live in Portsmouth, NH. They spent the Christmas vacation with Detta’s sister at her vacation home in St. Croix. I knew they were returning yesterday, but I didn’t know what time. I didn’t dare call Detta this morning for fear of waking her up after a late arrival. As it turns out, they arrived in Boston at 3 o’clock this morning. That’s either very late or very early, depending on how you look at it. We had tentative plans that I would drive up for New Year’s Eve and the phone call today confirmed that. So I will be heading to New Hampshire and plan to arrive in Portsmouth around 3 in the afternoon. I have some Home Depot and Costco shopping to do on the way, but I might try to work in a Zumba class in the morning before I leave. We’ll see just how energetic I feel in the am.

I frittered the rest of my day away working on photo issues on the website. Because Google is no longer supporting Picasa, all of the links to photos in my logs over the years were broken. I still have the photos, but no one can view them online. Justin has been working on getting them “reconnected” and he needed me to check out which photos are now ‘back’ and which ones are not. It took most of the day to just thoroughly check out Year 2, but at least I did get the 283 logs from that year checked out. Now I just need to do the other ten years!