Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Kwanzaa, Happy Solstice, Happy New Year and Happy Festivus for the rest of us! Here’s our recap of the year’s happenings for the Boyle family …
The past year has been mostly focused on family goings-on — and on adjusting to all the craziness in the wider world. Without a doubt, our most photogenic family member in 2025 has been Cal, who turned 2 in June. Much of the traveling that Alan and Tonia did during the year involved trips to Penn State to see Cal and his parents. We have a plenitude of pictures documenting how much Cal has grown over the past year, but we promise to inflict just a few on you here.
Natalie, Dan and Cal: Growing up
Natalie and her husband, Dan, marked their sixth year at Penn State, where Natalie is an assistant research professor and the coordinator for educational programming at the university’s Insect Biodiversity Center. Dan is a research scientist at Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory.
Meanwhile, Cal turned 2 years old. In April, Alan spent some time in State College after attending a board meeting in Washington, D.C. In July, Alan and Tonia went out to Pennsylvania for a visit. Dan took a quick trip to the Seattle in October to catch what turned out to be a 15-inning playoff game for the Mariners. (The M’s won.) And in November, Natalie, Dan and Cal visited the Boyle homestead for an early Thanksgiving. Evan also flew in, providing an opportunity for all of us to pose for the picture shown at the top of this holiday letter.
Click on any picture for a slideshow:
Evan: Moving up in the biotech world
Evan lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and this year he was promoted to senior data scientist at Octave Bioscience. He’s part of a team working on genetic methods to measure the activity and progression of Parkinson’s disease. The project is supported with a $10 million grant from the Michael J. Fox Foundation. In August, Evan made a solo trip to the Seattle area to check in with Mom and Dad.
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Tonia: On the road and at home
Tonia and Alan took a trip to the Oregon Coast in May to meet up with Alan’s sister, Donna, and with Donna’s daughter Alissa. Our Airbnb home was in Manzanita, and we checked out Nehalem Bay Winery, the Alder Creek Farm and other local points of interest. Our trip to Pennsylvania was another big production — and Tonia played her grandmotherly role to the hilt.
This year was an off year for our blueberry patch in the back garden, but we gathered more than enough blackberries from the neighborhood’s brambles for Tonia to make blackberry jam. Fig jam and apricot jam were other delicacies produced in Tonia’s kitchen. We also enjoyed home-grown tomatoes, arugula, beets, Brussels sprouts, leeks and delicious Romano broad beans.
Tonia is also exploring the world of AI: In September, she enlisted ChatGPT to help her write a poem to mark a friend’s birthday. And one of her latest projects involved turning a self-portrait into a digital painting in the style of Modigliani.
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Alan: Semi-retired and semi-slim
Alan’s grandest gain of the year is a big loss: Thanks to a new fitness routine that includes weight training and a personal trainer, plus some modest changes in diet, he lost 30 pounds over the course of the year. If Alan loses another 5 pounds, he’ll no longer be in the “overweight” category based on body mass index. So that’s something to shoot for in the new year. He’s also continuing with piano lessons, but he’s still not ready for Carnegie Hall despite four years of practice.
Work-wise, Alan remains in the semi-retired category. He’s still a contributing editor at GeekWire and a contributor to Universe Today. He’s also still the mastermind of Cosmic Log, the blog he has maintained for 23 years; and co-host of Fiction Science, the podcast he’s been doing with sci-fi author Dominica Phetteplace for five years.
The year’s notable news events in Alan’s traditional coverage area — space and science — included the first and second launches of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, the Worldcon science-fiction convention in Seattle and the inauguration of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. (Sorry, no junket was involved in covering that story.) Also, Alan’s past reporting on the Titan submersible tragedy for GeekWire got shout-outs in two TV documentaries, but his interview for the Netflix show unfortunately ended up on the cutting-room floor.
In May, Alan was one of the science writers taking part in the Centrifuge festival of one-act plays, presented by Infinity Box Theatre Project at Seattle’s Theatre Off Jackson. Alan worked with playwright Sameer Arshad on a play about aliens, neighborliness and general relativity titled “Neighbor Trek” — and gave a light little talk about relativistic time dilation before each performance. In March, June and October, he attended a series of rallies in defense of democracy and science, starting with “Stand Up for Science” at Seattle Center and winding up with the “No Kings” march through downtown Seattle.
During two of his trips outside the Seattle area, Alan was able to mix business with pleasure. The trip to the Oregon Coast in May (mentioned above) yielded a story about satellite connectivity for mobile phones. In November, Alan traveled to Chicago for the ScienceWriters2025 conference and moderated a session focusing on America’s space policy. Then he spent a few days in Iowa visiting family and friends — and checking out the gravestone that was erected for Alan and Tonia in the cemetery near where Alan grew up. Let’s hope it’s a long time before that plot is occupied!
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Ollie: Sunset years for our canine companion
We don’t know the age of our rescue dog, Ollie, but he’s acting as if he’s getting into his senior years. He likes nothing more than to take a snooze on the couch during the day, or to get his bedtime treat and then hunker down beside a human for a good night’s sleep. However, he has to get up (and get that human up) for a bathroom break during the night. That’s a sure sign he’s becoming a senior citizen.
Ollie is taking pills and drops to counter the kidney troubles that were flagged by his veterinarian this year. He does have the occasional “accident” that results in a wet spot on the kitchen tile. But four years after he came into our lives, he’s still a well-loved companion to the other senior citizens in the household. Here’s wishing Ollie, and all our family and friends, good health and much happiness in the new year!
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Look back at our ex-Xmases:
2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020
2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015
2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010
2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2005 | 2004
2003 | 2001 | 2000 | 1996
