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Happy New Year 2013



Happy New Year
Happy New Year

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Another Year

We're just two days short of spending a year here in the USA, having arrived from London on January 4, 2012. That full year is longer than we have been in any country since we left the USA in 1999. We sort of equaled it in China in 1999-2001 but while we were there many more than 12 months it was not continuous. The next closest was Germany, where we spent September, 2008 through June, 2009, for a total of just over 10 months.

Our year has really gone by, as they always do. And we are not the only ones to say that. It's a constant refrain from we old folks. Its said best in song, in “Fiddler on the Roof”. Tevka asks “where have the years gone? As per usual you can get an overview of our year in our posted annual letter. We actually got it done and out before the end of the year so this page will have to fill in the end-of-year gaps. Our original idea was to skip an AL and send some paper cards. It does seem “less virtual” and because we were at a place with a return address and might get some we could. But hardly before the ink was dry on our thoughts we got some nice annual letters from other people and decided to keep up our tradition one more year. It seems that the new-normal is to accept e-communications as being as appropriate as paper ones.

In the past 12 months Gerry has slacked off on taking photos, but still took enough to make Jan and others scratch their heads: including a few duplicates that he is still trying to remove he's taken about 19,000 or an average just over 50 a day. He readily admits that most of them are boring to most people; for him they act like a diary, and diaries become interesting only 20 or more years after written. It's the same for photographs; we've recently unpacked photos from 30 and more years ago and they are quite startling: we were that young – and thin? Were fashions really like that. And we found a picture of Jan's grandfather, which is quite impressive. But some of the pictures are pretty nice, or at least get a reaction out of some people; a nice sunset that Gerry posted to Facebook is among them.

The end of the year was quite a busy period for us. We celebrated our anniversary by visiting the Newseum and seeing Dicken's “A Christmas Carol” at the Ford Theater.

Newseum Balcony with Capitol View
Newseum Balcony with Capitol View

We'll see when the next edition comes out.



 



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