2022 in review: a Christmas letter

I wrote this for an old acquaintance who sent me an email holiday letter, and figured: why not add it to my year in review? 

Our 2022 was not too bad. 

Phil published two crime novels (https://pdviner.mycapps.co.uk/) and the short film he made with our neighbor during lockdown went to film festivals and even won some awards. He's now got the bug to return to his first love, filmmaking, and is planning to do a low-budget adaptation of his novel The Call in 2023. He also volunteers for a community bakery and his sourdough and cinnamon buns have reached perfection!

[Grover] turned 15 last week, and we celebrated with a trip to London to see the Royal Shakespeare Company's adaptation of My Neighbor Totoro, which was fantastic. Her main interests Dungeons and Dragons (acting as the dungeon-master for her group of friends, coming up with characters and adventures for them) and anything Japanese. She's been taking Japanese lessons over Zoom to fulfill the "skills" section for the Duke of Edinburgh award, which is kind of like American Outward Bound or Eagle Scouts or something like that.

I plug on as Head of Department, editor of the journal Dictionaries, and doing all the teaching and other linguistic/work things I do. Since 2009, I had been doing a British/American Difference of the Day on Twitter, but I've decided to retire that venture and I've replaced it with a newsletter, for those who are interested in UK/US linguistic relations and the other sorts of things I work on. If you'd be interested in seeing it, I've got an archive of the newsletters so far (and a link to subscribe) on my blog here:  https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2022/12/newsletter-archive.html 

We had some early summer time upstate with my family, including my dad who turned 86 yesterday (in California with his girlfriend of the past couple of years!) despite his two cancers. The eldest of my younger brothers, demonstrated for us his new invention a walking cane that becomes two canes when needed (https://canesandable.com/). He's since applied for a patent for it, making it his second invention since nearly-not-surviving a motorcycle accident 10 years ago. Who knew that it would turn him into an inventor?! There have been some other serious health crises in the family this year, but I am too far away to offer any real help, which feels a bit bad. 

We made up for lost travel time by visiting a lot of new places as well. Phil and I took a 20th anniversary trip to Glasgow to see the band Sparks. We had a family jaunt to Bergen, Norway (using up a voucher from a Covid-cancelled conference in 2020), which was beautiful. And I got to go to two lexicography conferences in new-to-me places: Lorient, France and Mannheim, Germany. So different from the previous two years!