Maya slept over last night so she could have her new car inspected by the dealer who sold it to her first thing in the morning. We will accept any reason for a visit from one of the kids. While she was enjoying coffee in the great room, I was struck by the similarity of texture and color between the swivel chair, her fleece, and the lampshade. We enjoyed a far-ranging discussion with her last night and are so proud of the woman she has become.

High winds in the area took out power to our neighborhood this morning. I was working at my computer and did not notice anything until I received a message from our battery backup system informing me of the outage. In our last house, we had a natural gas-powered generator, and it would take about half a minute to come online, making it very obvious when a blackout had occurred. It also tended to not want to start during extremely cold or windy conditions, those most likely to be present when the system was needed. This is now the 7th time the grid has gone down since we moved into the house and I have to confess to being happy every time it happens. Our backup system was fairly expensive and the more times it is pressed into service the better I feel about the investment.

Concord has its own electric utility (CMLP), and I have nothing but great things to say about its responsiveness and competence. They had the whole neighborhood back online within 90 minutes.

With the new year, Jeanine and I are both switching to new email domains. We are leaving behind our “@comcast.net” domains in favor of an “@gmail.com” domain. This transition will complete our disengagement from Comcast, a company that has caused us no end of frustration and grief. We would ask everyone to update their contact database accordingly.

Happy New Year!