We've been living in midcoast Maine for more than four years, I entirely retired and Betsy almost. A quiet life in beautiful surroundings, the weekly routine includes multiple yoga classes, serving as Designated Shopper for my octogenarian sister's household, and mopping floors and emptying trash one evening a week at the local food co-op (25% discount, and a sense of community). The main conduits to the outside world are a multifarious RSS feed from the blogosphere, a few magazines, the riches of amazon.com, and NPR. I write a lot, though not systematically and not for any very clearly defined audience. The blog (at http://oook.info/blog/) has been a constant in the five years since the 40th, and continues to reflect some of what attracts my attention from day to day. I luxuriate in an endlessly varied location, a lot of music and books, plenty of Netflix, and adventurous cooking and eating. Best career I've ever had.

We have occasional adventures away from Maine, including annual visits to California (we did the Big Sur 21 Mile Walk in 2009) and Nova Scotia, but travel is not the pleasure it once seemed. Visitors from our various past lives (high school, Peace Corps, graduate school, the 20 years in Nova Scotia) have been among the greatest pleasures of the last five years. It's interesting that few of our friends are drawn from the four Harvard years.

I've been revisiting and rethinking a lot of stuff from the past, including imagery, music, and books read over the years. I contributed a few pictures to Mo Lotman's superb Harvard Square book, and I continue to work on digitizing stuff from hundreds of rolls of film from my several lives as a photographer. I still harbor ambitions as a woodworker and musician, but these realms haven't seen a lot of progress in the past 5 years.

I've put together a Web page with expansions and links, for anybody who wants to explore further: http://oook.info/45th/