Bill's Blog

Lucy Tops 2008 Events

For me 2008 had some serious highs and lows. Perhaps as a harbinger of events to come in 2009, the greatest high in 2008 of the year came on the eve of the next year. The event that topped all others in 2008 was the birth of my second grandchild, Luciana Delora Linder. I have placed 30 or so of the best photographs on Fickr.com and I invite you browse my photostream. After you click on one of the small pictures that follow, a large photo will be loaded from my Flickr photostream. They were taken on the day of Lucy's birth.

My year started out hopefully. I had damaged my airplane late in 2007 and was hoping to have it repaired and hangered so that we could travel to South America. While we waited for the repairs, we traveled in the southern part of the USA. Those travels were recorded in this BLOG. There are many things to highlight about the trip. First and foremost is the wonderful reception we got each time used CouchSurfing.com. Every host was wonderful and they made our journey much more pleasant. Following close on the heals of this were the wonderful visits with my dad and my distant cousin, Carolyn Parr. I spent more time with my dad since the summer I lived with him in 1965. Carolyn and her husband Jerry were simply wonderful to us. Other highlights were eating barbecue across the Mississippi delta, a week in the Garden District of New Orleans, San Padre Island, Savannah, Charlotte. We loved staying with my sister, Dawn. We met the wonderful Margaret in Charleston.

The hopefulness drained away as time passed. My plane was never fully repaired. It had turned into a money pit that I could not escape. So, with great reluctance I sold it in May. I was very depressed for months afterwards. Plans to travel to Portland were scraped. Nothing seemed to be working out. Birgitta and Seth decided to not buy the Elliot house. There were only two things that cheered me in the summer: wonderful weather and Johanna.

We got lots of grandma and grandpa time during the summer. And we loved every minute of it.
The garden was not very fruitful this year. There were lots of raspberries and pears. The squirrels took all the hazelnuts in August. Deer or some other large animal came a couple of evenings in September to eat all our grapes. It was a pity, because the vines were heavy with fruit.

We finally got out of the country in October. We spent a little over a month studying Spanish and visiting various places in Guatemala.

The year ended much better than it began. The American people finally voted their pocket books to elect a progressive president, a man of color. The US economy is in such bad shape that serious reforms could be enacted for the first time since the 1930's. So far, the only serious attempts to save the economy has been to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the bourgeoisie. More of the same seems to be on the horizon. The economic problems will certain postpone the only real fundamental reform that is possible now, a national health plan that will provide quality health service to everyone at a cost the country can afford. If you had not heard it before, the USA spends the most and gets the least of all the industrialized countries when it comes to health care. People actually lose everything and go bankrupt due to health care costs. If you live in the USA, I highly recommend that you watch the Frontline show Sick Around the World - Can the U.S. learn anything from the rest of the world about how to run a health care system? The link to the left will get you to the Frontline page with the link that will play the show. It is important that everyone put pressure on the new president to fix our health system.

What is ahead for Betty and me? We hope to be in South America before the end of January. Whether we first fly Buenos Aries or Santiago, we plan to spend at least on month touring in Chile. After that we hope to see the far south of Argentina. After all that, we will try to find an apartment in BA.
Of course, this is very close to the plan we had one year ago. Let us hope it all goes better this year.

Posted by bill at January 5, 2009 11:37 AM