"Sally Forth," strip by Francesco Marciuliano, drawn by Jim Keefe

Wow. It's been a weird year — and for us, the weirdness began before COVID-19. On New Year's Day, as a matter of fact. Nevertheless, here's the 2020 holiday newsletter from the Boyles in Washington, Pennsylvania and California.

Alan and Tonia will be empty nesters this Christmas, for the first time in more than 30 years. In July, Alan stepped back from his full-time position as aerospace and science editor at GeekWire, a Seattle-based tech site, but he keeps his hand in as a contributing editor. He's also keeping up Cosmic Log, his longtime blog about space and science, and has started up a podcast called Fiction Science.

Alan had been planning a big cross-country trip to celebrate his "Don't-Call-It-Retirement," but the pandemic knocked those plans into 2021.

Tonia has been mostly housebound since early on New Year's Day, when she stumbled and fell hard on her tailbone while playing with Bijou, our Tibetan spaniel. She suffered a spinal fracture that laid her low for months. Just when she was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the COVID-19 lockdown began. And then, in July, Bijou passed away (more about that later).

We've been on a more even keel since then: Tonia has been able to do the traditional canning, jam-making and baking, occasionally picking up tips from one of her favorite programs, "The Great British Baking Show." She's also working on her own website for sharing requested recipes. Here you see us picking out the 2020 Christmas tree at Trinity Tree Farm, a charming mountain spot south of Issaquah.
 

Natalie and Dan timed their move to Penn State in State College, Pa., just right. After buying a house and furnishing it with the help of Aunt Drommie, they were able to ride out the pandemic in their home offices.

Natalie is an assistant research professor and program coordinator for Penn State's Insect Biodiversity Center. Her big academic project has been organizing a virtual course on pest and pollination management, in cooperation with Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg in Germany.

Dan is a research and development engineer at Penn State's Applied Research Laboratory, specializing in undersea systems.

You can keep up with the couple's research papers via the academic database entries for N. Boyle and D.S. Plotnick. Natalie also set up a Twitter account for the Insect Biodiversity Center at @psu_ibc.
 

Evan has settled in as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California at San Diego,  conducting research on RNA biology in Gene Yeo's “Team RNA” lab with a fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation.

He's also one of the organizers of the Graduate Diversity and Science Lecture Series, also known as DASL, which shines a light on the amazing work being done by underrepresented student and postdoctoral life science researchers at UCSD. 

Search Semantic Scholar for published papers by Evan August Boyle, follow @evaubo on Twitter, and check out this alpaca selfie, taken in February at the Alpaca Hacienda in Temecula, Calif.
 

Bijou, our Tibetan spaniel, turned 17 on New Year's Day — but 2020 was her final year with us. Her seizures became increasingly serious as the year wore on, and we finally had to let her go in July. She was a joy to have from beginning to end.

This is the first Christmas that we've been without a dog since we were married back in 1986. When we're ready to bring another dog into our home, a Tibetan spaniel will be among the top candidates. Rest easy, Bee-bee!

Happy Holidays! Here's hoping we all build back better in 2021!
 


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