2025

Happy New Year!

Both of us (Alan and Diane) are doing great but girding ourselves for 2025 and preparing to try to ignore a lot of national and world politics. Highlights of our 2024 included a cooking class in March on how to make ramen.

Photo: Alan operates the ramen(/pasta) machine.
Under close supervision of the teacher of course.

Then there was a trip to Texas where a total eclipse of the Sun was happening April 8. We have another page with a few pictures from the trip which was excellent, but we were clouded out during the actual eclipse. 

Brother Dan Gould from Fort Collins came to Berkeley later in April for a really nice visit.

Dan delivered a special "chips & dip" ceramic plate that Susan Sternlieb had made, in response to Alan's suggestion about how nifty it would be to hand such a plate around to guests at a party. Here we are trying it out. Works GREAT!!  Thanks, Susan!

We also went over to Monterey Market...probably THE best produce market in Berkeley (or anywhere that we know of). We've taken many cooking classes (e.g. Thai Favorites, Summer Vegetables, Recipe's from Cesar's, ....) in which the chef/teacher shopped at Monterey Market for their vegetables.

We took lots of fascinating Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) classes*:

[see more complete list at the bottom of this page* ...Don't ask us to remember anything we learned!]

In June we saw "Galileo, the Rock Opera" at Berkeley Repertory Theater. It was good, but we both reminisced about the play version that had come out years ago.

Berlin

In July we went to Berlin, Germany where the International Planetarium Society (IPS) was having its conference, the first in-person one since before the COVID pandemic. You can see a some photos from that trip on a separate page, but the experience was handicapped by a few mishaps. First, our flight from US to Germany started out on the morning of July 19 when there was a worldwide computer outage (due to a faulty update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike) affecting all Microsoft Windows devices. The flight was delayed but we made it to Munich where we were just in time for the shorter flight to Berlin. However, after several delay announcements in Munich, most of the people waiting got up and left after the last announcement was made in German, leaving us puzzled. When that announcement was repeated in English, the puzzlement was gone: the flight had been cancelled. Hundreds of people were miserable and angry for hours at the airport. We spent the night (only slept a few hours) in Munich. We made it to Berlin the next morning and Alan was even in time to do his presentation at the Zeiss planetarium there.

See/read more on our trip on the Berlin page....

In October we visited the Rosie the Riveter museum in our neighboring city, Richmond. It was a fascinating place that honors the women who supported the WWII war effort. Those in Richmond were buiilding ships, but in other locations they built planes. 

There were also interesting historical exhibits about the Port Chicago munitions explosion disaster where over 300 people died, mostly African-American. Hundreds of African American workers refused to go back to work under unsafe conditions. 256 men were court-martialed (defended by Thurgood Marshall). The "Port Chicago 50" were charged with mutiny and served 16-year prison sentences. Not until 2024 did the Navy exonerate all 256 men including the Port Chicago 50.  There were also exhibits about the Japanese-Americans who were unfairly abducted and imprisoned. But that's a whole other story....

Then in November we went to a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Eastbay Astronomical Society at Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland. Award winning UC Berkeley Astronomy Professor Alex Filippenko gave a talk.  We were surprised when Alex was happy to take a selfie with us! He's clearly a master selfie-tographer in addition to being a stellar astronomy professor.

In December we visited the Grist Mill State Monument where the historical mill is still working. See Bale Grist Mill selfie video.

See a few photos from our Texas trip.

See photos from our Berlin trip.

* More complete list of the OLLI classes we took: