2012: Year in Review

Well, 2012 was certainly an eventful year at our house. The big news, of course, is that Tom graduated from High School and headed off to college, but there was lots of other stuff happening too.

The boys were both busy building interesting machines like Tom’s engineering project (building, competition), Peter’s robot (first build, moving), and hacking around with things like dry ice.

Tom got his driver’s license and graduated from High School, and Peter spent the summer working at the Museum of Science.

We had a number of nice day trips around town during the summer. We went biking, kayaking, hiking, …

and went out to Peddock’s Island. But the most exciting event of the summer was just sitting out on the Esplanade for the Pops concert on the Fourth. A big thunderstorm forced an evacuation in the middle of the concert. It was like a scene from a zombie movie!

In June we went out to the Berkshires to visit my parents and go to Tanglewood with them to see Diana Krall play an amazing concert in the shed.

We attended a number of other concerts and plays this year, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime.

At the end of the summer, it was time to take Tom to college. He’s now at Rose-Hulman. We drove out through upstate New York, Ohio, and most of Indiana. Along the way, we made quick stops at Niagara Falls, and the Air Force museum in Dayton.

For the second year in a row, we had a big storm at Halloween time. This one damaged a lot of trees and knocked down a high voltage line and closed our road for a couple of days.

Chris and I kept busy with projects around the house (link1, link2), gardening (link1, link2), birdwatching (link1, link2), and programming projects (link1, link2).

Chris is still working for the Media Lab and Computer Clubhouse Network. This year’s conference was in Dublin. On the one free afternoon it was pouring rain, but she went sightseeing anyway. It was too wet to hike, but the waterfalls were going like gang busters with all the water pouring through them.

Mike is still working at the MathWorks. Some of his former companies came up in surprising ways, like the fact Exa had an IPO after so many years as a ‘startup’,

PETER’S NEWS

This year has been relatively calm for me. The sheen of a new school is completely lost as I start sophomore year, there was no fascinating trip over the summer, and most of the year I have been either relaxing or toiling away at my homework. The one really great experience that I had this summer was volunteering at the Museum of Science. This was one of those really unique experiences because I ended up volunteering at the Computer Clubhouse which is not open to the public so it was my first time really getting to spend time in it (Chris volunteers there as well so I have seen glimpses of it from time to time). During my time there I learned to use Blender to create 3D models although I never had the chance to print any of my models out it was still really fun to make crazy buildings and objects.

Sophomore year hasn’t been anything special as of yet. My classes are still relatively generic and nothing has really presented itself as something really interesting. I have more homework than last year because of my full schedule and 3 AP/Honors courses.

TOM’S NEWS

Tom’s too busy being a college student to send us his news. Maybe we can get him to update this section when he’s home for Christmas.

Overall it’s been a pretty good year for the Garritys. Hope it has been for you too.