That was the first jigsaw puzzle of 2022, gifted to me by a friend.
In 2022 we are almost-empty nesters. Nellie is still living independently a few miles away. Danny left the Army in 2017, signed up for a business degree at Adelphi University, and graduated at the end of 2021. He was living at home with us for most of that time, but in mid-2021 moved to an apartment of his own a third of a mile away.
My workload hasn't changed. I still do my weekly podcast and monthly diary for VDARE.com, supplemented by occasional articles and book reviews for print outlets. Rosie still works as a Medical Billing specialist.
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Here are some photographs from these years. Clicking on a picture brings up a bigger version.
| ———— 2022 ———— | |
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• January 1st 2022: As prescribed by immemorial tradition, Danny placed that one pesky last piece for me. |
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• January 25th 2022: New year, new life. This is Michael Joseph DePinto IV, 4 days old, with his grandpa … |
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• … grandma … |
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• … and Uncle Danny. Yep: looks like Sir Winston Churchill. |
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• In solitary splendor. |
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• The great snowfall of January 29th, 2022. We got eighteen inches. I had to do a lot of shovelling; but Basil came out to help. |
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• Mother and child, Michael now 17 days old. |
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• Late April 2022: Rosie & a posse of girlfriends escaped for a weekend at Myrtle Beach, SC. Cue Cindy Lauper. |
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• May 23rd 2022: The nuclear family at Danny's graduation ceremony. |
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• America the beautiful: two exceptionally goodlooking guys at the Derbyshires' July 4th barbecue. |
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• Baby Michael will be christened July 17th. |
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• Baby Michael's great day. He is actually christened as Michael Joseph, the same forenames as his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. So here, a few moments after the actual July 17th christening, are me, Rosie, Michael Joseph IV, Nellie, and Michael Joseph III. |
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• Mike III's family threw a great garden party for us all after the christening. Here are Nellie, Mike III, and Mike IV with the cake (which was delicious). |
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• For the 2022 Labor Day weekend we took a vacation in the Boothbay Harbor region of southern Maine. Rosie is a keen gardener so a big attraction for her was the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Here she is communing with a lovely patch of "black-eyed Susan" sunflowers. |
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• A curious feature of the Gardens is
the five huge wooden trolls scattered around
in them. Says the Gardens' guidebook: "These trolls were built on-site in 2021 with Danish artist
Thomas Dambo's team and help from Gardens' staff and over 150 volunteers. They took around two
months to create." Each troll governs some aspect of the forest trees. Here is Rosie with Lilja, the youngest troll, in charge of the scent of the blossoms. |
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• You can't go to Maine and not bring home a lobster picture. Here I am with a framed champion in
the Pemaquid Point Lighthouse
museum. (No, the buoy isn't growing out of my head. I just couldn't be bothered to do the necessary picture editing.) |
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• Highlight of the trip: the Cabbage Island clambake! The clams were just a side dish, though. It should really be called a lobsterbake. |
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• We brought one lobster home for Michael Joseph |
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• Grandpa, Basil, and Michael Joseph IV. |
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• Four and a half years on from my previous meeting
with them, the New York area's Bruce Lee enthusiasts invited me to another event. A Hong Kong firm has produced a limited set of extremely
lifelike busts of Lee, and one of the local enthusiasts has bought one. So here I am with Bruce and Angela Mao at Angela's restaurant in Queens; December 3rd, 2022. Angela's aged way better than I have. I need a neck job. |
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• One of the Bruce Lee enthusiasts works in graphic design and has an appropriate skill set. He made up this montage for The Way of the Dragon and … me. Thanks, Ed. |
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• Christmas! — well, almost: this is December 22nd. Rosie, Basil, tree. |
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• Seeing in New Year 2023 chez Derb with old friends Louise and Xiaolong Lee. |
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• First jigsaw puzzle of the year — a mathematical one. Also a structurally interesting one: the 1,000 pieces are cut from wood. That makes them a bit harder to snap together, but once snapped they stay snapped. I can pick the whole thing up without support, as here. |
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• Super Bowl 2023: two football non-fans. No particular offense to Our National Game: soccer sends me to sleep, too. |
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• The last week of March 2023 we spent vacationing in Texas. Here is Rosie with Davy Crockett in front of a very famous building whose name … I can't remember. |
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• Me, with same building and Texas state flag. |
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• Did I make tasteless quips about Mrs Derbyshire being
the Yellow Rose of Texas? Of course I did. Did she mind? Not a bit. Here she is in McAllister State Park, San Antonio. |
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• In early May 2023 we spent a happy weekend with friends in Greenwich, Connecticut. This is me at leisure in the Audubon Center. |
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• June 2023; my birthday dinner at Bistro Cassis in Huntington. All right, I'll admit it: I really have a thing for girls wearing glasses. Check out this cutie … |
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• In May I finally tackled my second Christmas jigsaw puzzle, a 3,000-piecer of Dominic Davison's Venice at Dusk. Finished it June 8th. A worthy challenge! |
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• August 3rd 2023 was the centenary of Calvin Coolidge being sworn in as President by his father, a notary
public, in the parlor of the Coolidge homestead at Plymouth Notch, Vermont. We attended the centenary celebrations at the homestead along with a couple of hundred other Coolidge fans. The actual homestead parlor can hold only half a dozen, and in any case the precise time of the swearing-in was 2:47 a.m. on August 3rd … so we skipped it. There was, however, a gala dinner the evening of August 2nd, which we did attend. It included an on-stage re-enactment, shown here. The part of Calvin Coolidge is being played by Tracy Messer; Coolidge's father is represented by former Governor of Vermont Jim Douglas. |
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• August 3rd we did some sightseeing further north in Vermont, mainly at the Shelburne Farms estates on Lake Champlain. The lake's in the background here. |
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• Yet another jigsaw puzzle, this one gifted to me by a reader, a veteran puzzler, with a warning that it's harder
than he thought. Yes: it was harder than a mere 1,000-piecer has any right to be. It's a NASA image of the Earth from space showing most of the Western hemisphere and part of the Pacific ocean. If you look very closely you will see, at just about the center of the picture, that one pesky piece that always defies placement. I'm waiting for Danny to drop by … |
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• October 24th Mom and Dad took a random day off to visit Untermyer Park in Yonkers. A lovely relaxing day out. |
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• Halloween 2023: Our grandson Michael, aged one and three-quarters. |
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• January 27th 2024: relaxing on the couch under our front (i.e north-facing) windows with my Saturday delivery of
The Economist and assorted critters.
Rosie, who took this picture while walking east-to-west across the living room, diplomatically left out my left ankle (elevated off-picture at bottom right), which is encased in a great big surgical boot. |
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• Here's a picture of that boot with its companion crutch (one of a pair). Backstory, in very brief: December 9th my
left foot slipped from under me as I was walking down my driveway. It completed its slipping with a savage twist of the ankle as I fell. More details
here. This picture is from January 29th, 51 days after I fell. Still limping. |
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• This being January, no mere ankle fracture will keep me away from a jigsaw puzzle. This one, a gift from a friend (thank you!) is a 1,000-piecer from ZenChalet, the pieces all cut from wood. It's an abstract pattern based on the yin-yang symbol. I'm a little more than halfway through it at the end of January, with either the yin or the yang complete — I'm not clear which is which …. |
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• April 8th there was a total eclipse of the Sun. We were hosted for the event by friends in north Cleveland,
Ohio. They live just a hundred yards from the Lake Erie shore and right under the path of totality. It was my first-ever total solar eclipse. My strongest impression was of the suddenness of it. Watching through — of course! — special eclipse glasses, we saw more and more of the Sun's disc disappear behind the Moon. Eventually there was just the tiniest sliver of Sun left visible; yet the light around us seemed not much dimmed, our shadows still sharp. Then BAM! — that last sliver disappeared. All around us went dark. We no longer cast shadows. |
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• Before heading home we stayed on one more day in the neighborhood to visit Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Not bad; but their trails really need better signposting. |
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• Dad and Mom spent the fourth weekend of August with friends in upstate New York. On our way home we took a detour to
Sarasota Springs to see the lovely
Yaddo
Gardens there. Here is Rosie with, of course, roses, and one of the Four Seasons statues (not sure which season). |
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• Same trip: Here am I in (under?) the Yaddo pergola. |
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• October 2024: On our way home from visiting friends in Maryland, we stopped off at the Hampton Mansion historic site. That's the actual mansion, up there between Rosie and the afternoon sun … |
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• … and this is me, relaxing after walking around the 63-acre grounds. |
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• Early December we joined a tour group to explore Belize. Here we were with some Mayan ruins at the Lamanai archeological park. |
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• Also from the Belize trip: The only picture that exists (or is ever likely to) of me snorkeling. |