Greetings to all of our friends and family!
It's been a busy and productive year here! Before diving into 2025's highlights, I should mention that we never quite got around to finishing (or sending?) a 2024 highlight reel—either of which seems entirely possible. So let's start with December 2024's biggest news: we got married!
The ceremony was everything we wanted; a textbook example of a traditional ceremony. Our dear friend Megan Grimalid performed the ceremony and did an amazing job. We held it in the party room of our local Bricks & Minifigs - Kalamazoo's finest LEGO store. As it turns out, spaces normally reserved for kids' birthday parties work great for weddings too! We'd like to thank everyone who helped make our special day so memorable. We're planning to have a reception in the near-ish future to include more of our friends and family (we could only fit so many in the LEGO party room). That said, we just spent our reception budget on tickets for the Hallmark Christmas Cruise this upcoming year, so... we'll see.
This year we decided to keep our camper for our own use rather than renting it out. Naturally, this meant we only managed to camp a couple of times all summer - but we still had fun, even if it was just at Mom & Dad's cabin in Traverse City or in Kirky's parents' yard. (Perhaps we'll plan on renting it out again next year, which will of course mean we'll suddenly want to use it ourselves.) We made it up to the cabin in Traverse with family, friends, and all the dogs many times throughout the year. The neighboring cabin has been added to the mix this year, giving us wonderful additional space. Kirky, Minnie, Stryker, and I stayed there for the first time this Thanksgiving with Kirky's parents and Ruby. I would have included a lovely picture of it, but I fell off the dock trying to take it - the resulting photo was a lot funnier than anything I could have taken on purpose, so I'll link that instead.
We took a trip up to St. Ignace with Kirky's parents to see the Truck Show, which involves a lot of semi-trucks and was a lot of fun. With my admittedly limited knowledge of trucks, I'd say the one that had a trailer that looked like a giant ear of corn was my favorite.
We had a great year of shows: seeing Yo-Yo Ma with Maureen last spring, attending several wonderful performances at the Barn Theater, and just recently catching A Christmas Carol at the New Vic.
In unexpected news, Wolverine the clothing company decided to use my face as the cover for one of their catalogues, from a photoshoot of my family done a year or so ago for an article about my parents' large Christmas tree tradition. While my face wouldn't be my first choice if I were working in marketing, I'll nonetheless be adding "Catalogue Cover Model" to my resume.
We didn't travel too far from Michigan this past year, but we made it out into nature often for walks so the beagles could practice their favorite game: seeing how many trees they can tangle their leashes around.
Lance & Shelly taught us to play backgammon this year, and we competed in a tournament they organized. We were both eliminated rather quickly, but it was a fun time!
This year marked the 50th anniversary of the Stulberg International String Competition, which I'm still on the board of. The competition was held in May and went very well despite some inclement weather.
October was busy as ever with Charlie & Tammy's haunted house, Nightmare Realm. This is the fifth year I've been helping there as manager of technical things, and I'd say the season went very well. The weather was pleasant, and none of the animatronics punched any customers - what more could you ask for?
Kirky cashed in on his "lifetime supply of LASIK," which essentially means he can get it twice, and after his second procedure, he's now looking good (ha).
It's been a busy year with work and projects for me. Without initially intending to make a job pivot, I accepted a position at National Heritage Academies in Grand Rapids around March or April as their main Artificial Intelligence Engineer, although still fixing computers a bit as well. It's a rather unique position that has been primarily Research & Development. I'd been doing quite a bit of AI work as a hobby for years before this, and I'm enjoying the transition to making it my professional focus. The work has been wonderfully varied - I've built several AI tutoring systems for students, a gamified learning platform, and developed various educational games including point-and-click adventure games with AI-powered characters. I've also been working on some more experimental projects: systems that can analyze nuances in artwork and provide feedback, some novel processes for geometric memory storage & retrieval, and a system that can read & process brainwave signals directly by AI. It's been exciting to combine education, AI, and game design in ways that actually help students learn. I've been able to significantly increase the rate & scope of math projects that I've been able to tackle this year (and at their core, everything reduces to a math project at some level).
Kirky's been busy this year writing a book about Stryker, which will be available on Amazon as soon as I finish the book cover alignment for printing. It tells the story of Stryker's life since we adopted him. Kirky has also been working on a few songs, turning lyrics he's written into full productions that are now available on iTunes.
Minnie & Stryker have had a good year. Since I can't take them to work and park them in a conference room (yet), Dad has been coming to beagle-sit them on the two days a week I go up to Grand Rapids. Despite mysteriously gaining some weight from Dad's visits, they love sitting and watching Murder She Wrote reruns with him. They've both embraced the new cabin up north, claiming the main couch in the living room and the largest bed as their own. Whenever possible, they accompany me for rides in the minivan - but only when trips involve me being out of the car for less than 45 seconds, since Minnie knows how to honk the horn. It's a very effective way of getting me back to the car quickly.