Alan with Radiant Sky
KAREN'S RETIREMENT PARTY
Happy Hour on the last day
ECLIPSE TRIP
The clouds cleared for totality!
A trio of young ladies posed us for this shot at Big Bend - Mexico is on the left side of the river
TUCSON & SEDONA
Karen's Mom's 90th birthday
Sedona scene
Sedona's famed Chapel of the Holy Cross
Hiking in Sedona
KITCHEN REMODEL
Before and After - we're still waiting for chairs and bench cushions
Before and After
Smale Christmas 2024
Welcome once again to the Smale Christmas Letter!
2024 has been another Big Life Event year for us, as Karen retired on September 20 after 37+ years working at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in many roles and for many different companies. It also marked Alan's first full calendar year as a 'gentlemen of leisure.' (Ha! See below.)
Retirement often means travel, and we certainly got the jump start on that in 2024. We went on an extended trip to Texas in April for the solar eclipse, followed by a driving tour around Big Bend National Park. We enjoyed a Baltic cruise with friends in June (covering Sweden and a teeny bit of Finland, plus Poland, Germany, Denmark, and Norway); visited Tucson and Sedona in September-October; went to the World Fantasy Convention in Niagara Falls in October; and Karen dragged Alan along for a photo weekend with Goddard Photo Club members in Cape Charles, Virginia. And finally, we took a comprehensive and awe-inspiring tour of Egypt and Jordan in November. In Egypt we went to the Pyramids, cruised the Nile, visited several tombs in the Valley of the Kings (including Tutankhamen's), took a balloon ride over it, went to Abu Simbel, and saw a variety of temples and other sights. In Jordan the highlight was Petra, which is much more extensive and even more interesting than we'd anticipated.
What will the next year bring? Stay tuned! (Which means we don't really know ourselves yet - but we're sure it'll be terrific.)
This year, Alan threw himself into his new life as a full-time writer. His novel, RADIANT SKY, came out in November (a sequel to his July 2022 alternate-Apollo thriller, HOT MOON), and he may have done a bit too much writer-related travel this year. He guested again at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in Florida in March, went to FantaSci in Raleigh-Durham in April, hunkered down for a grueling (but fun) ten-day pro writers workshop at Rio Hondo in New Mexico in May, and was also on the writer program at Balticon later that month. He took in Shore Leave in Pennsylvania in July, did Virtual Worldcon in Glasgow in August, and enjoyed World Fantasy in upstate New York in October. (In addition, he took two extended solo trips to England in January and April/May.) Alan is working hard on the third and final book in the Apollo Rising series, and the word on the streets is that he'll also have a (completely unrelated) cryptid short novel hitting the bookshelves in January 2026. And maybe other surprises too! Alan is certainly enjoying his post-employment booklife, and also his unusually "free" evenings and weekends.
Karen spent the first two-thirds of 2024 managing the SESDA Astrophysics Group at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, meaning that she dealt with NASA civil servant customers and managed 35-ish contract employees on about 30 tasks. This was a position she took at the beginning of the year despite management knowing she'd be retiring sometime later in the year. When she was able, she did her best to wrap up the loose ends of the technical web development work she had been doing for the past ~15 years, while also hiring and training up her successors, both technical and managerial. Don't tell anyone, but she's pretty happy to be retired and is looking forward to diving into projects that have taken a back seat for a while, both photographically and around the house and yard. Since we went on several major trips post-retirement, Karen has learned that one of the best things about retirement is not returning from vacation to a backlog of work email! Wheeee!
The Chromatics? Still going strong, although scheduling gigs is harder with all our travel, plus other group members' family and work commitments. We opened for local a cappella legends the Tone Rangers in an open-air amphitheater in Virginia this summer, and sang to excellent crowds at the New Deal Café in Greenbelt, MD, in February and November. We performed our AstroCappella repertoire at the National Air and Space Museum (Udvar-Hazy) in December, and we have plans for even more fun in 2025!
In other news, closer to home: this year we renovated a large part of our downstairs. We now have a whole new kitchen, with wood floors also extending into our dining room, powder room, hallway, and Alan's office, and built-in bookshelves in that office as well. It's been a journey, to be sure, but we love the new-look kitchen and the additional counter and cupboard space, and are still trying to figure out all the features of our new appliances.
We wish everyone a great holiday season, and a Happy New Year!
Alan alansmale@gmail.com
Karen karen.smale@gmail.com
Stormy sunset over Stockholm
Copenhagen's famed Nyhavn
Waterfalls!
Eidfjord in Norway
EGYPT/JORDAN TRIP
At Giza pyramids!
Looking down at the mass ascension over the Valley of the Kings
Ballooning over the Valley of the Kings
Abu Simbel
Esna Temple columns
On the Nile
Alan at Petra in Jordan
NIAGARA FALLS TRIP
