Martha says: These fancy dress photos are from our nephew Mark Waks' wedding in September.  At 66, I've had another very active year.  I’m still running the Quilt Museum library where the card catalog is now on the museum website so people can join to borrow books from all over the US.  I’ve put a few more photos on this website to show the quilts I’ve enjoyed making this year.  And I’ve added new photos of Gabriel to show how much fun we’ve had watching him grow.  Ben brings Gabe to our house once a week where he can work and we can play.  If you want to watch a video, just wait for it to download. My travels have been family visits in Rochester and New Jersey.  Our vacation with the whole family was in the Adirondacks as usual.  I think I climbed 3,899 ft. Snowy Mountain for the third and last time in August.  What a young athlete can do between breakfast and lunch took me almost until suppertime.  This winter, I’m looking forward to skiing in Vermont with Jon and Larissa while Bob’s away in Asia.

Bob says: Another year of animé, simulators, grandparenting, and... oh yes, I knew I forgot something, work. You can see Gabriel for yourself on his photos and video web page, so I'll omit the usual grandparent's raving and kvelling.

I just finished five years at Unisys, which I will "celebrate" by going on an extended trip to Asia in February, for the sixth time. While the novelty of visiting China, India, and Australia has long since worn off, and the wear-and-tear from air travel has only increased, it will be good to see the friends I've made on those distant shores. Besides, February in Australia is a lot nicer than February in New England. These five years have seen a remarkable turnaround in a company that was at death's door when I joined, and I flatter myself by thinking I had some small role in that.

I've official retired at leader of my simulator project and turned the work over to an open source collective. Paradoxically, I seem to be busier than ever. With more people on the project, more bugs and issues are turning up. I'm one of the few contributors who actually understands how old computers were built and are supposed to work, so I've become the "go to" guy on the gory details. I'd actually like to spend more time on the simulators, but that must wait for retirement from work, which will be Real Soon Now (tm).

This year, I was able to formalize my one-man animé group by recruiting a handful of other contributors to help. We mostly focus on older shows that past translation teams have abandoned for one reason or another (invariably a good one, I might add). The team finished fifteen separate projects this year, ranging from live-action movies - meaning a movie with real actors based on an anime - to forgotten shows from the dawn of commercial anime. If I had go provide just one recommendation, it would be “Usagi Drop”  either the animé series or the live-action movie. It's a heartwarming story about parenting, mercifully free of most of the clichés that beset the genre.

I've continued to be volunteer "IT Director" (i.e., computer slave) at the New England Quilt Museum, and I've also been helping my neighbors with their increasingly complex computer and device environments. This has given me a lot of insights into the workings of the computer industry and the complexities it forces on ordinary people. This coming year is going to force a difficult transition on a lot of folks who aren't ready for it, because Windows XP goes out of support in April. If you are still running it, you have three months to move onto something else. Good luck...

Ben says:  2013 was a good year for all 3 of us.  Lori finished veterinary school in May and began working as a small animal vet and freelance Chinese translator.  I enjoyed another productive year working on X-Plane (my tenth!) and look forward to the next patch release in the spring.  Gabriel turned 2 in June and has many, many things to say. He enjoyed his first vacation at Timberlock with his beloved playmates Bubi, Grandpa, Jon, and Rissa.

Jonathan says: 2013 was a good year for us. Isabella has recovered well after her scary bout with Lyme disease, and the other pets are all happy and healthy, though Jazz will miss all the attention he was getting from Larissa’s sister, Nastasia, now that she's gone off to college. Larissa's still making shiny things for GenArts (the video effects company in Cambridge where she works). I'm working on a game called Cascade for Funkitron (the casual game company where I work at home). It's a big project that has lasted the whole year and will likely take a little longer. We're hoping it'll make it big. We're also starting to put some more time into fixing up the house. My Star Wars role-playing game is rolling along towards the finish of a big season. And this year Larissa has started organizing a creative writer's group to write science fiction and fantasy.