Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Also, Happy Hanukah, Solstice, Kwanzaa, and any other celebrations I might have missed.

Wow, I've really fallen off the radar this time, haven't I? It's been an incredibly busy December, and we had family here for Christmas week, and basically I just haven't been doing things like keeping up with my blog. So, apologies to all of you! But best wishes indeed for the season.

The highlight of my Christmas was having my daughter home from college (before heading off this morning for an international trip with a group from school), and my brother and his girlfriend visiting for most of a week. It was terrific all around.

The highlight in material terms (toys!) was an exceedingly generous gift from a family member of an ebook reader—a Sony Reader (PRS-700, the new one with the built-in light)—which I have been enjoying hugely and have been filling up with everything from classics to favorite SF from when I was a kid (Tom Corbett, Space Cadet!), to freebies from Tor Books and the Baen Free Library. I've got close to a hundred books on it now, and have barely scratched the available memory. Thanks, Chuck and Youngmee!

Another highlight was an odd counterpoint: my wife handed me another blast from my past—three Tom Swift, Jr. books that her aunt had given to her for me, including Tom Swift and his Diving Seacopter, an absolute favorite from a certain age in my youth. And, to round the story out, DARPA is actually hoping to build a craft just like it—yes, an airplane that can go underwater! Talk about science fiction (once in a while) predicting the future!

I hope you're all having a great holiday season. I'll leave you with this thought from Charles Lindbergh.

"By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he's a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body. And if at times you renounce experience and mind's heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space." — Charles A. Lindbergh