The drought has ended!!!

Okay, so it's been eight years since I've (or anyone else) has posted anything here, and I guess it's about time.  In those intervening years, Ian has grown up and graduated from Alfred University (the fifth consecutive generation) and is now headed to Alfred State College for a nursing degree -- and he's about to get married!  Jeanette and I divorced in 2016, after struggling for several years -- and say what you want about who is responsible, but Ian has told people, including me, that he thinks his parents are happier now.  And, speaking of happier, my sweetheart nowadays is a paramedic student, horsewoman, seamstress, professional driver (including being captain of A.E. Crandall Hook and Ladder Company's 100-foot aerial), mother of four children, and owner of 10 or 11 cats (although I understand cats have staff, not owners), by the name of Valarie Ann Gregory.  We plan to move her and the cats and the horses to my place on the hill and make it ours. 
You may know that, after graduating from high school in three years just to get out of there, I spent my freshman college year at Alfred University and then transferred to Friends World College, a Quaker institution which used experiential learning rather than classroom instruction, to educate its students.  I spent one semester at the North American campus on Long Island, sitting in seminars, riding horses, sailing on Lloyd Harbor, reading books, listening to my advisor read the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and passages from her book on the poet, sitting in Friends meeting for worship, and going on field trips, all in order to develop my own course of study.  Each student met regularly with their advisor and kept a journal, and it was on this basis which we earned our college credit.  For second semester, I rode a bus to Wisconsin and then caught a ride to Boulder, Colorado with a friend (who, for a brief time, I considered my girlfriend), where I did volunteer work at the Native American Rights Fund (a legal organization staffed by, and working for the benefit of, Native Americans), learned Lakota from the man who had just finished creating the first teaching text of the language, took a short geology course which included a flight up and down the Rocky Mountains in a Cessna airplane, went camping and skateboarding with Matt Fitz Randolph who was living with his parents in the same house I had come home to after being born, and spent time looking for eagles with a Crow "Indian" by the name of Sam. 
I returned to Long Island in May and spent time with other students, reflecting on our experiences, and then returned to Alfred, where I helped Uncle Bill Parry build a deck and his artistic creations, in exchange for his taking me into his studio and teaching me about how he made sculptures. 
That autumn, I had planned to travel to Kyoto, Japan, to Friends World College's Asian Center, in order to study Japanese culture, and look into how smaller, more isolated nations dealt differently with resource extraction and exploitation, than did large, continental nations like the United States.  I had planned to go on to Iceland the following year, and later made contact with a family there, and began to learn the language.  But that is getting ahead of myself. 
I had acquired a passport and visa and a ticket for a chartered flight to Japan, stopping off in Pusan, Korea, which necessitated my getting a second smallpox vaccination, since that disease had not yet been eradicated there.  I had earned a Regents diploma and a Seventh Day Baptist denominational scholarship for college, but learned, in late August I believe, that some of the money I had counted on to live on while in Japan.  So I chickened out and decided to take a leave of absence, in order to earn money and then continue my studies.  But I could only find part-time work in Alfred and, although I had gotten engaged to Tracey Saxton, I decided to move to Myrtle Beach in order to work under Tim Alderfer as a Process Engineering Technician at AVX Ceramics.  The rest is, as they say, what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.  But what happened after that will be the subject of another post.  I told you all of THAT, so I could tell you THIS:
On December 24th of this year, after waiting forty-two years, I am finally going to fly to Japan!  Valarie is going, too, and we are traveling with -- among others -- one of the Biology faculty at Alfred University where I work, whose husband takes a Digital Animation class to Japan every year.  I am boning up on the Japanese I learned when I finally returned to Alfred University to finish my degree, and am researching what I can do while in Japan, to finally attempt to answer the questions I had intended to ask, back in 1977.