Michael Field's Blog

  Quick Review 2018 – 2020   I know I won’t remember everything, but I want to give you a flavor for the antics of the Field family for the last couple years as we didn’t send out the annual Christmas / Holiday letter then touch on how things changed in 2020. As I mentioned in this year’s letter, 2020 was going to be a year for a significant amount of travel.   This was a ramp up from the previous years, but those years were not with out their highlights. Lenora’s brother and wonderful wife got married in Sonoma in the early summer of 2018 and we took the opportunity to tour the Sonoma and Napa Valley wine country and visit friends who had relocated there.   Serendipity also moved England and Scotland to the top of the bucket list in 2018 as we visited London and Edinburgh with bus trips out into the countryside in both countries. The highlight of 2019 was a 5,000-mile road trip to Santa Fe, NM, and Moab, UT, with stops along the way out and back. We didn’t realize it at the time

  COVID-19 Experience   There was an article I saw recently about a pastor who didn’t believe that COVID was real because he didn’t know anybody who had it, then both his parents died of it. The surprising thing was that he didn’t express any remorse for any misinformation that he might have communicated while he was a non-believer. As a scientist, I was a believer from the beginning and did a writeup for Facebook that shared with friends the science behind the expression ‘flatten the curve.’ What was truly scary was that it was clear to me, from a back of the envelope calculation using the early numbers out of China and Europe, that a lot of people were going to die. Lenora and I operated at what we called the 90th percentile level of precaution as in we were more cautious than 9 out of 10 people. Our standard for the 10 th person was our daughter who took every precaution. We went into lock-down. We had our groceries delivered then either cleaned them or quarantined them in

  Holiday Letter 2020   Introduction Usually when I sit down to write the annual Christmas/Holiday Letter/email, I start out reviewing what things happened in the past year to see what stands out as especially meaningful, things like family events, trips taken, old friends visited, and new experiences. So, I went to the 2020 calendar and flipped through the months – December, nothing: November, nothing; . . . I had to go all the way back to March to find a meaningful entry that had not been crossed out or erased. Everyone reading this is likely in the same boat, so I am not going to elaborate here on what kind of a year 2020 has been in terms being kept from doing things, kept from being with people, and kept from living life to the fullest. Still there were silver linings, silk purses made from sows’ ears, serendipitous situations, and bright spots. 2020 was not the proverbial ‘ill wind’ as the winds of fortune blew some to fair ports and sheltered locations. When writing th