Alan, 62, is finishing up his first full year as science and space editor at GeekWire, a Seattle-based tech news site. Memorable assignments include chatting with Jeff Bezos, Amazon's billionaire founder, about his Blue Origin space venture at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs (after touring Blue Origin's factory); and his first trip ever to Mexico, to cover SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk's plan for sending settlers to Mars. He also journeyed to Dubuque, Iowa, for the 40-year reunion of his Loras College class.

Tonia is officially retired and on Social Security. Getting the house, garden and yard spruced up for visits by Boyle relatives and a tour for the members of Tonia's garden club kept us busy. The year's highlights included a Fourth of July fireworks cruise with Evan and Elias, attending the Seattle Floating Homes Tour in September, and raising her first crop of ground cherries. Top that off with Natalie and Dan's wedding in June ...  

In January, Natalie left WSU to study bees for USDA's Agricultural Research Service office in Logan, Utah. Her work takes her to crop fields and conferences across the country, but one of her regular locales is amid the almond groves of California's Central Valley. She focuses on native bee species that serve as alternatives to honeybees for pollination. Here's a recent paper: "Migratory Bee Hive Transportation Contributes Insignificantly to Transgenic Pollen Movement Between Spatially Isolated Alfalfa Seed Fields."

Dan Plotnick is a physicist who focuses on underwater acoustics at the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory. He lives just down the street from us in Bellevue. Yes, for now, it's a long-distance marriage, but the newlyweds do lots of traveling back and forth. To get a sense of what Dan delves into, here's a recent paper: "Circular Synthetic Aperture Sonar Imaging of Simple Objects Illuminated by an Evanescent Wavefield."

Evan has completed the coursework for Stanford's master of science in medicine degree, and he's associated with the Jonathan Pritchard Lab as well as the Greenleaf Lab. He focuses on bioinformatics as well as the mechanics of gene editing, using such tools as CRISPR-Cas9. One of his highlights was the publication of a paper in the journal Science relating to evidence of natural selection in modern European populations: "Detection of Human Adaptation During the Past 2,000 Years." He's also working with Berkeley CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna on a paper titled "High-Throughput Biochemical Profiling Reveals Cas9 Off-Target Binding and Unbinding Heterogeneity."

Elias, who hails from Reykjavik, joined us for Thanksgiving again this year. He is a volcanologist working on his Ph.D. at Stanford. Here's one of his papers: "Forecasting the Path of a Laterally Propagating Dike."

Back in Bellevue, Alan and Tonia marked their 30th wedding anniversary in August. Next year will mark 40 years in daily journalism for Alan. Our Tibetan spaniel Bijou will turn 14 years old on New Year's Day, and our Cavalier King Charles spaniel Rosie (who has to take it easy due to heart problems) will have her 10th birthday next July. We have two canaries to keep us company - Greenie, who always seems to be on her last legs; and Lemony Snicket, who's singing up a storm.

We realize 2017 will be challenging, but here's hoping that we're all hale and hearty and happy this time next year. Merry Christmas, happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year to you all!