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I reached my one-month anniversary at Formlabs today.  I have been working an average of 14 hours a day plus another 90 minutes of commuting.  As is always the case with a new job, there are a million things to learn and hundreds of people to meet.  This initial push has allowed me to come up to speed fairly quickly and I believe I am now in a position to begin scaling back to a more sustainable work rate.  What has suffered the most is my fitness.  Starting today, my plan is to get an hour of exercise every morning.  If I leave at 6 am I can beat the traffic into the city, get my workout in, and arrive at the office before 8 am.  This morning, despite the sub-zero temperature, I enjoyed being out in the sun during an easy 3-mile walk that took me to the Lynch Family Skatepark where I photographed one of the swimming pool-like features with a “Tee” train and the Boston Sand & Gravel Company in the background.

This year’s Calabria holiday card features both boys on the front side.  Maya, Jeanine, and I can be found on the back.  Past cards have more often than not featured Maya on the front and it was time to balance the scales.  The card should be reaching many of you shortly.  I like posting a copy on the blog as well so that we can look back upon it years from now when the physical cards have long since been recycled.

I am often amazed by the patterns I find in nature. Something very interesting must have been happening as this water turned to ice. Find the feather in the photo for a sense of scale.

It is often said that teachers do not join the profession for the money.  After hearing what her colleagues and students had to say about my sister-in-law during her retirement party from UVM, it is easy to understand what motivates them.  Susan has enriched the lives of all she has touched and the gratitude in the room was overwhelming.  Speaker after speaker, young and old, had nothing but the most amazing things to say about her and the impact she has had on their lives.  I took hundreds of photos at the event (celebrated as a “graduation party”) which can be found here.

Jeanine and I traveled to Burlington, VT this morning.  Her sister Susan will be having a retirement party tomorrow and the family is converging for the celebration.   A 27-year veteran of the University of Vermont, she is the Chairperson for the Department of Social Work and has served as an Associate Professor in the department. 

We are looking forward to her party tomorrow and got the celebration started with a family outing this evening which included all three sisters and close friend Jean.

Pictured here, from last night’s holiday party are a couple of the people I work with at Formlabs.  The entire team is extremely talented and a real pleasure to work with.  Ridiculously dim lighting limited the quality of the shots I could get but these certainly captured the mood.

Jeanine and I enjoyed the Formlabs Holiday Party held at Lucky Strikes on Assembly Row this evening.  She met me at the office for a tour of the facility before we made our way to the festivities.  We rented out the entire venue to accommodate our nearly 500 employees and their plus ones.  Jeanine and I are more than twice the age of the average Formling.  As we were being checked through the door, the attendant asked to make sure we were attending the right party.  It was as sobering as it was funny.

Always nice to get a little local coverage by the Concord Journal. 

For the first time since joining Formlabs, I enjoyed a post-dawn walk that took me down to the Charles River. For the last three weeks, I have been arriving at the office before sunrise and leaving after dusk to beat the traffic and to get ahead of the curve at work.  It was my first dose of weekday sunshine since starting and it felt great despite the below-freezing temperatures.  I plan to join a nearby gym, hopefully, this week, where I will workout each morning before coming into the office.  I need to get in shape for a couple of soccer games coming up in February.  My team will travel to Argentina for the matches and I plan to do some mountain climbing with Nico in Patagonia ahead of the competition.  I am in shape for neither activity and need to get into a more healthy exercise regime. Pictured above in the foreground is the Longfellow Bridge with the Esplanade in the background..

Built in Boston, a self-proclaimed community of local techies keeps tabs on executive hiring in the Boston startup scene.  My move to Formlabs was covered in their November installment.  

It was a year ago that Open Table first opened its doors to the residents of Maynard during their annual Sip & Stroll celebration.  This year, visitors to the facility enjoyed musical entertainment by the Maynard High School Wind Ensemble and a craft-making area.  Bags of homemade granola were on sale to raise funds for the charity and Jeanine addressed the standing-room-only crowd to remind them that not everyone enjoys the security of knowing where their next meal will come from.  I was asked to photograph the event, which took place last night and spent a few hours this morning culling through and post-processing the images.

One town over from Concord is Lincoln, where one can find what is best described as Ponyhenge, a whimsical collection of some 30 wooden and plastic rocking horses arranged in a circle.  The phenomenon is said to have started with a headless horseman halloween display after a single rocking  horse was left behind.  Over the years, other horses have mysteriously appeared to form the collection that has now become an Atlas Obscura destination.

Closer to home, the Concord, Sudbury and Assabet Rivers are all well above flood stage.  Pictured below is French’s Meadow, completely inundated with water.  If not for the fact that our kayak carrier only fits the Audi (which Maya has at college) it would have been a nice day for a local outing on the water.

I set a new record time for reaching the office this morning of 26 minutes.  All it required was a start time of 5:18 am.

Nicolai has been nominated by US Soccer for 2018 Player of the Year with a Disability. Votes are collected from National Team and Youth National Team coaches and staff, National Team players who have earned a cap in this calendar year,  American professional soccer league head coaches as well as select media members, former players and administrators. The winners will be announced during the first week of December. The U.S. Soccer Player of the Year award is the highest honor awarded to soccer players in the United States. The Male and Female Player of the Year awards are the oldest and most prestigious awards of their kind, dating back to 1984 for the men and 1985 for the women. The Young Male and Young Female awards were added in 1998 and the Disabled Player of the Year in 2012.

Below is the bio listed for Nicolai:

Nico Calabria, Forward – Amputee National Team
Nicolai “Nico” Calabria had an outstanding 2018 for the U.S. Amputee National Team, scoring six goals, and dishing out four assists while captaining the squad for a fourth straight year. He opened his 2018 account by scoring two goals and had an assist in an invitational tournament in Houston that included England and Haiti. At the 2018 World Cup in San Juan de los Lagos in Jalisco, Mexico, from Oct. 25 to Nov. 4, Calabria led the U.S., scoring four goals (one against tournament runners-up Turkey) and providing three assists. These were no tap-ins; he scored with his head or foot, while both assists required impressive athleticism and ingenuity. Calabria was born with one leg and hip and started using forearm crutches at the age of five when he took up the sport of soccer which he has played ever since. At age 17, he was named to the U.S. National Amputee Soccer Team. He has since captained the team at the 2014, 2016, and 2018 World Cup tournaments and is the all-time leading scorer for the U.S. with 17 international goals.