Both my parents turn 80 this year. Dad's birthday is first. Here are some of the life lessons I've learned from him specifically, that I wouldn't have got from just any father.

The road less traveled is there to be explored.

Dad has always made it his business to know where every road or path goes and what one can find there. He rarely takes the same route twice in a row. Often a routine trip home from church in Tulsa or visiting his parents in OKC would turn into an adventure in the countryside, as he would spot a road he didn't recognize and turn off to explore it.

If I were a right-wing conspiracy theorist, I would think that the reason the Democrats are allowing the Trump presidency farce to play out is so that all the white supremacists and misogynists feel comfortable identifying themselves on social media, in order to compile a registry of such people for use after Clinton takes office. Because otherwise I would have to admit that I was totally dead wrong about Obama's motives for the last 8 years, and that would be awkward.Mining ever closer to the present...

When I finished reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, I immediately started reading it a second time. I can count on one hand the number of times I've immediately reread a book, and two of them were on similar topics, so before I tell you what I thought of the new book, I'll tell you about the other two so we can see how they relate.

Continuing on towards the present:

mining progressively closer to the surface:

More stuff worth saving from a sinking ship:

Continuing to mine the past for what's worth keeping:

Here is our annual roundup of the past year, in words and in pictures.

continuing to mine the past for stuff worth keeping...

When I was in school, I frequently asked my parents for recommendations of what to read for book reports. They had an extensive collection of classic speculative fiction, so I read famous titles including The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis; The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, and War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells; Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell; The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.