This year was much like other recent years in many ways (same house, same kids, same cars, and so on), but also saw several significant milestones in my household. Perhaps the the biggest story of 2019 (for us) was paying off our house’s mortgage (June). Earlier in the year, I realized I’ve now lived at this address longer than any other in my life.

At this time, we also mark the end of a decade (or at least many people do), and I’ve written about that elsewhere.

Benjamin : The Athlete In The Family

Benjamin was the first of our children to participate in sports, and he began that in 2019, first with a season of soccer and then with a season of basketball, both in recreational leagues organized by the City of Harker Heights. His soccer season was winless and his basketball season nearly so, but he met new friends, learned skills, figured out how to play a role on a team, and became stronger and healthier. Perhaps most importantly, he thoroughly enjoyed all of it. He is already scheduled to begin another soccer season in Killeen in late January.

Prior to that, he was in dance for a year and had his first recital in June.

2019 was also the year he learned how to read. My wife and I insisted on not only reading to him every day of his life, but this year we forced him to read to us at least a few minutes of every day. It has paid off and now there are several books he can read without stumbling. Interestingly, he instantly recognizes larger words like “government” or “corporation” (perhaps because they appear frequently in superhero stories) while still sometimes balking at simpler one-syllable words. Right now, his favorites are the Dog-Man graphic novels.

Early in the year, he got his own bedroom for the first time. I don’t recall the date, but he lost his first baby tooth in the fall.

Halfway through first grade, his grades are spectacular and he makes friends easily. I think he’s the only person I’ve ever known who has had only African-American instructors in school (so far). He is perhaps the most confident person I have ever met.

He also, in the final weeks of this year, rode his bike without training wheels.

Rebecca : Reader Extraordinaire

Our daughter has grown and matured so much that it’s easy for me to forget that she is still a child. She reads at a high school level. She’s in “company” at her dance studio and will soon participate in her first dance competitions (in the past, it’s only been recitals). Mostly in the middle of the year, she worked a lot on her YouTube channel, uploading fresh content for her friends and cousins (but she grew discouraged when YouTube began automatically disabling comments under her videos). She asked me to teach her to “code”, by which she probably meant programming, which I don’t know how to do — but she was patient as I tried to teach her website coding. She learned the basics of html and css and is currently working on an update to her page on my website. Also this year, she figured out that Santa isn’t real. She asked me to paint her room lavender (it had been pink) and I did.

She is more than halfway to legal adulthood.

She astounded me late this year by listening patiently to me explaining the problems I was having writing my latest novelette and then explaining to me how to fix it. I took her advice and the story is better for it.

I know she’ll hate that I tell this story, but I discovered this year that I can make her smile when she’s sad, simply by asking: “Will it help if I fart?” (Fortunately, only the question is required to bring laughter through her tears.)

She continues to be one of the brightest lights in my universe, a place that was very dark for a very long time.

Family

One new thing we tried this summer was “A Day With Daddy” and “A Day With Mommy” — in which each parent took a turn with each child for most of an entire day, doing activities of the child’s choosing. It was fun enough that we’ll probably do it again next year. (I wrote about this in June.) We did it a second time in August.

Vacations / Trips / Visits

For Spring Break, we visited Kemah Boardwalk and Space Center Houston (both south of Houston), then for our Big Summer Trip — as usual, directly after the June dance recital — we went to San Antonio. There we saw Legoland, the Alamo, Rivercenter Mall, the Riverwalk, Mission San Jose, Confluence Park, and Natural Bridge Caverns. During that trip we also met up with longtime internet friend Dana (and her husband Arthur), with whom my wife and I have communicated regularly over the entire decade — beginning on Flickr. This is at least the third long-distance Flickr friendship that resulted in an in-person meeting for us. All of us enjoyed spending most of one day with Dana — and she brought gifts, which were much appreciated. While in San Antonio, we ate at Bill Miller Bar-B-Q, Frontier Burger, Republic Of Texas, and Bier Garten — I recommend all except Frontier.

In July, my wife and children flew to North Carolina and back to visit family, all three adding a new state to their visited lists.

We visited my brother in Flower Mound, Texas, in May and December, and his family came to see us in November. We always enjoy our short visits.

House, Neighborhood, And City

Most of our house-related news was covered in my August entry, Our Ninth House-iversary, though I can now add that I’ve repainted the garage (in December). It has been “Palm Frond” green since early 2011, but it became difficult to get matching touch-up for that color, plus I now realize it was a mistake to use matte paint in the garage (too difficult to clean). So I painted it “Spring Thaw” (light gray), semi-gloss, the same paint I’d used in our house’s halls last year. This works much better for me. Also, I replaced the cheap exhaust fan in the kids’ bathroom, and recaulked the master shower.

We involuntarily switched electric companies in May, when our company of choice (Bounce Energy) was purchased and absorbed by Direct Energy. When Direct’s rates began to shoot up in November, I toyed with switching again, but didn’t do it. In December, we saw the highest rates we’ve seen in our entire lives, so we switched immediately, choosing Constellation Energy as our new company. We haven’t gotten a bill from them yet, but believe it will be a relief. Also, we chose a plan that is supposedly using renewable energy (instead of coal, which our previous companies used).

Construction has continued apace in our neighborhood, including the last three homes in Phase 1 (our phase), now nearly finished.

Personal

One huge change in my life has been my increased output of fiction. I published two short stories in 2018, but this year I was on a roll. I opened the year with a very short-short called Condition, but then completed a novelette I’d been rolling around in my head for nearly 20 years: Compelled. Through the rest of the year, I worked on — and completed — six other stories, five of them in the same fictional universe, which I call “Verbo”:

• Verbo Virtutis (Verbo 1)
• Of My Own Accord (Serena’s origin story)
• Clavis Digito (Verbo 2)
• The Adventures Of Frank Number Two (Frankenbeth’s origin story)
• Ultima Verbo (Verbo 3)

(The other was a time-travel short story called Timeline 614T.)

All of this was a fun diversion, but mostly it was to keep the stories from endlessly rolling around in my head. Just like the characters in Compelled, I can cleanse my mind of the stories by the act of writing. Already, I plan in 2020 to work on a novel that I first began in 2004 — again, mostly because the characters and storylines have been in my head all this time and I need to purge them.

In (probably) related news, I also read more books in 2019 than in any other year since reaching adulthood. See my Book Reviews list for links to all my reviews. In a first, more than half of the books/stories I read were by women — 32 of 60 by my count. I leaned more toward science fiction (and fantasy) this year, but still managed to read history, science, philosophy, and advocacy too. I am hoping to read at least 60 more books in 2020. It struck me a few months ago that I have only a finite number of books left in my lifetime. If I keep averaging 60 books a year, and live another (generous estimate) 40 years, that’s 2,400 more books. I wonder which ones they will be.

This year I began changing the oil in our vehicles at home, rather than driving them to a “quick-lube” shop every time a change is due. My hope was to save money by doing this, but it turns out it’s not that much cheaper. However, it surprised me that it saves time (once you add in the drive times to-and-from those places, the waiting in line, the paying, etc.) Further, it ensures I’ll see parts of the car I don’t normally look at, and maybe notice when something’s not right.

Photography

The photography part of my life has shrunk to the point that it probably doesn’t deserve its own section anymore in my year-end entries. But this year, after a long hiatus, I did buy two more lenses, the Canon EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM and the Irix 150mm f/2.8 Macro Dragonfly. Both are outstanding at what they do and made parts of my photography easier and more enjoyable.

I no longer attempt to photograph my children every day, or even every week — at these ages, their physical changes and milestones begin to spread out over years instead of weeks. Now I focus more on the usual, typical events: birthdays, first day of school, Christmas morning, and so on, with a few extras thrown in here and there.

Weather

This year turned out to be the third-coolest of our years in Killeen, barely warmer than 2014 and 2013. Nine months were cooler than their averages, with June and October clocking in as the coolest in at least 10 years. Only August, September, and December were warmer than their averages (and September was the warmest of all time for this area). 2019 was the only year in the past ten with seven consecutive months cooler than average (January through July). 2019 was slightly drier than our average, but not by much.

We saw only 21 days that reached 100°F or warmer, which meant the summer was very mild by local standards (our average is 34.3). As for 90-degree days, we had 129 — which is more than average but very close to it. We had only 15 freezing days this year, which is also fewer than average, meaning our winter was fairly mild too. And no days remained below freezing the entire day.

(Note: this was my 10th full year of keeping track of daily weather. Going forward, I will use the 10-year averages as baselines, against which I will compare all future readings.)

For more our 2019 weather, see 2019’s weather page, or my Killeen weather summary page.

Newer Entry:	Spring Break 2020
Older Entry:	2010s : A Decade In Review

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