Categories
Life

A look back at 2023

It’s time for the yearly retrospective post again. This time, because previous such posts on this blog often seemed to bog down when trying to display the many photos in them, we made a separate album on Flickr with a selection of photos with captions, as they would normally appear embedded in this post.

You can view the album at https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjB8BcV. It is set to appear in a separate tab of your browser, which we hope will make it easier to go back and forth between this text and the photos. In any case, the text in this post and the captions of the photos should make following the album easy. One video of the many we made with the GoPro during our USVI St. Thomas trip is worth sharing separately. It is a video made by M off St. John, during our snorkeling cruise, showing a Manta Ray: https://gopro.com/v/QoGveNwQDZ5EP

On with the story!

January found us visiting Longwood Gardens. We had spent New Year’s Eve with our friends Ellen and Jim at their house, joined by Reiko, Troy, and their kids Jordan and Kitt. In anticipation of this, we had booked an AirBnB in West Chester, so it was easy to pop in to Longwood Gardens to spend New Year’s Day. We had dinner at their 1906 restaurant and went around their Christmas light display.

Soon after, we went to Mohonk Mountain House to celebrate our anniversary. There was massive fog around the mountain which led to some very moody pictures but prevented us from getting interesting views from the path around the mountain during a guided hike. We retreated indoors and enjoyed a bit of archery (see photos).

Near the end of February we attended an impressive Lyric Fest concert, Cotton, at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral. It was a multimedia event with commissioned songs and photos of cotton by Philadelphia artist John Dowell. Details here: https://lyricfest.org/commissions/cotton/

In March we again did not have the same Spring break, as we have not had in many years, but we at least had an overlapping weekend. We went to Mohonk Mountain House once again, where we found very pretty snowy scenes (see photos). We also took part in a cocktail competition by Mohonk employees, which was great fun. Upon our return home, we had opportunities to hang out with D’s brother Kostas, who was visiting the US to collaborate with a coauthor of his, while on sabbatical. We showed him a number of our favorite spots, such as New Hope and the Washington Crossing State Park. In the photos, you can see a pic of Kostas and M during a wine tasting at Terhune Orchards in New Jersey.

An event D enjoyed a lot in April was the induction ceremony for the International Honor Society Omicron Delta Epsilon, of whose Temple University chapter D is the academic advisor. We included a photo of D speaking at the ceremony, taken by our friend and D’s colleague Charlie. Also memorable in April was yet another Lyric Fest concert, the first one to be presented in Longwood Gardens, in their music series, on Earth Day. The concert was named The Metamorphosis of Plants, and it was another multimedia affair, in which photos of flowers were projected while the singers performed. Thanks to our dear friend Suzanne, cofounder of Lyric Fest, photos by both of us were included in the event, alongside photos by a few other photographers. You can see us in the photo album in front of a screen that shows some of the flower photos. It was kind of mind-blowing to see your Very Own Photos on a large screen.

May found us being social butterflies and enjoying yet more musical events, including a performance by Itzhak Perlman in the Kimmel Center with friends Nicki and Charlie, and, later, a great Piffaro concert, “Entre Dos Alamos”.

There is not very much to say about our Spring semesters at work. D had a chance to teach Game Theory (first time was in Spring 2022) and had a strong contingent of students at the top of the class, but the rest showed the terrible effects of COVID on students: a lot of them seem to have forgotten how to study and have lost the motivation to do so. D also had a section of Microeconomic Principles, where the terrible effects of COVID were even more pronounced. M’s semester was only ok, for many of the same COVID-related reasons along with the ups and downs of being Departmental Chair.

June started spectacularly with a week-long trip to St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. In preparation, we had bought a GoPro camera (these cameras are waterproof and perfect for underwater photos and videos). There was good snorkeling there, and we also took a sunset cruise and ate at some really good restaurants, as well as enjoying the pool and bar of our resort. (We stayed at the Margaritaville — it was a very affordable option and we have to confess we had fun with the frozen concoction maker in our room.) The album linked above has a photo from our snorkeling and the link below the album link will take you to a video of a Manta Ray M made on a snorkeling trip we took. In the album you can also see an action shot of M from the snorkeling trip.

We packed another trip in June, this one to Connecticut, to check out the Madison Beach hotel, visit our friends Sierra and Jacob and Sierra’s family, and stay once more at the Thimble Islands Bed and Breakfast. The beach of the Madison Beach hotel is very nice and it has drinks and snacks service. However, the weather was unseasonably cool and very windy, so we didn’t really have a beach time there. We did get to see a cool double rainbow while there, though, and visited some great restaurants and the Book Barn in Niantic, which we were introduced to on our first visit to the area.

July started with a dinner at Vernick for M’s birthday and on the 2nd we attended Melanie and Gavin’s wedding at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Melanie is the daughter of our dear friends Mike and Eva. It was a wonderfully spirited celebration, one of the most exciting and uplifting weddings we have attended. In the photo album you can see our Photo Booth contribution to their guest book.

Before our Fall semesters started, we paid a visit to Longwood Gardens again (photo in album) and we had one last hurrah of a vacation, this time in Cape May, NJ. We had a number of beach visits, nice dinners, and a spirits tasting (photo in the album).

September started with a visit to Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ. We had been there only once, many years ago, and we really liked wandering around and admiring the sculptures. We also had a lovely lunch at their unfortunately named restaurant “Rats” (photo) unless you are a fan of the Wind in the Willows and are familiar with the character Rat.

We planned two trips to get photos of Fall foliage in October. The first was in mid-October, once more to Mohonk Mountain House (our third visit there in the year). In the album, you can see two photos, one of Mohonk lake and the resort at the far left, taken from the most remote part of the hike around the lake, and then one photo of M at the top of the mountain, near an artificial pond. The second leaf-peeping trip was at the very end of the month, together with Mike and Eva, to Shawnee, PA where record highs in the upper 70s were reached on Saturday while we were hiking. You can see three photos from this trip in the album, at Dingman’s Falls, at the Silverback Distillery (we two are fans and went for a tasting and some purchasing, Mike and Eva gamely joined us and Mike was our driver, since he didn’t drink), and at Hidden Lake. The leaf report from those trips is that we were too early for peak conditions at Mohonk and a little too late in Shawnee but we were not deterred by this and got some fabulous photos in both locations.

November found us paying several visits to the Morris Arboretum, still in search of Fall foliage, and we have included a photo from one of these visits in the album, where you can see a strikingly red canopy. We had Thanksgiving at Suzanne and Kevin’s, continuing a tradition (that goes back to 1995 for D) where we chatted with Suzanne and Kevin’s daughters Mei and Lily, whom we see less frequently these days than we’d like, and their partners’ lovely families. We also had a lovely conversation with Charlotte, a recent voice student of Suzanne’s at Bryn Mawr and currently a graduate student at MIT in atomic physics. We had seen her before at Suzanne’s parties and we always appreciate chances to catch up with her.

December came with the end of the Fall semester (both of us had to wait until the 20th to be done with grading) and one extraordinary Lyric Fest concert of Benjamin Perry Wenzelberg’s winter cantata, commissioned by Lyric Fest, on poems by Jeanne Minahan. Benjy is a remarkable 24-year old composer and conductor, and we are very happy to have been able to sponsor one of the songs in the cantata, Winter’s Antidote, an ode to hot chocolate. You can find more information about this concert at https://lyricfest.org/concerts/any-of-those-decembers/ and a video excerpt just appeared a few hours before the writing of this sentence, at https://youtu.be/kyiOqR_y6nE?feature=shared. On Christmas, we were lucky enough to spend the evening having dinner with Suzanne, Kevin, and Charlotte (last photo in the album). For New Year’s Eve, tomorrow, we are looking forward to a repeat of the gathering at Ellen and Jim’s.

In terms of our teaching work, in the summer we were both hit by the Generative AI tsunami that threatens to negate the value of the college essay (by making it easy for students to outsource most of the writing to ChatGPT) and to make the life of everyone in the “knowledge professions” massively interesting, to say the least. M attended seminars on this in the summer, got D interested about it, and we both did our best to adapt our course assignments in the Fall semester to be impervious to AI cheating. For D, this worked OK in his economics of risk and uncertainty class, where he decided to make the “homework” be in-class exercises once a week, but it caused a big problem in his writing-intensive economic inequality class, where his modification of the paper requirements to make them AI-proof made the course too hard for most of the students. M became an expert of sorts on AI at her University and led faculty workshops and small group discussions. She also finished her term as Chair.

In the Spring semester of 2024, we both have sabbaticals. We are looking forward to doing our sabbatical projects and doing some traveling, including a short trip to Cincinnati to see the total solar eclipse in early April and a visit with Jelena and Rob in Belfast in May (hopefully!).

We wish everybody peace and health for 2024!

Categories
Life

A look back at 2022

January

Another year is ending, which means it’s time for our annual news- and photo-laden retrospective blog post. As usual, we emphasize the fun things we did and our photos, without totally ignoring how our work went.

We started the year with a short trip to what has become our favorite Airbnb in Shawnee, PA, near the Delaware Water Gap, for our 22nd wedding anniversary. We had a lovely time, eating and drinking well, seeing some nature, and hanging out with our friends Sierra and Jacob, who brought along a double Bananagrams game with which we had some epic games, as well a fantastic pie they made.

Buttermilk Falls January 2022
Hidden Lake, January 7
Marianne on January 6 in our Airbnb enjoying house-made noodles and saki from a local brewery.

During this trip, despite being (as we thought) very careful and being up-to-date with vaccines and boosters, we picked up COVID infections. It disrupted the start of classes for both of us, but we had a relatively easy time with it and recovered completely.

February

On February 11, we took advantage of our maximum level of COVID immunity, after all the vaccinations and our infection, to have a really lovely dinner at Elements restaurant in Princeton, to celebrate Valentine’s Day. A multi-course tasting dinner complete with wine pairing.

Marianne at Elements, February 11

During the last weekend of February, we stayed at and Airbnb in New Hope where we shared a lovely dinner out with Charlie and Nicki. Of course, that is when Russia invaded Ukraine, and we ended up monitoring the news and being edgy for Sunday and Monday — which is one quadrillionth or less of the disruption Ukrainian lives had to absorb.

March

March started with the extremely successful Lyric Fest concert “Yiddishe Nightingale“, which we caught at the Academy of Vocal Arts on March 2. This concert came about from an idea that our dear friends Mike and Eva Leeds had, and was generously supported by them. The concert drew a large crowd in all performances and was great fun and quite an education for the two of us.

As has been the case for several years now, our spring breaks did not coincide. Nevertheless, we did get a weekend in an Airbnb in Perkasie, joined by Suzanne and Kevin and Tallulah, their sweet and happy dog (this Airbnb was super dog-friendly). Here are Suzanne, Kevin, and Marianne getting ready for a game of Double Bananagrams (courtesy of Sierra and Jacob) with me. Suzanne and Kevin braved a scary snowstorm to join us there!

Suzanne, Kevin, Marianne on March 12

The day after the games, we went for a wine tasting at the Trolley Barn Public Market in Quakertown, on our way back home. Pennsylvania wines are … cute.

April

April had some sweet events for us. There was the Lyric Fest concert “The Song Catcher” on April 9th, which presented folk songs reimagined by contemporary composers. Before it, we had a great lunch at Cuba Libre, and after it we were chaperones (!) for the Arcadia U Cotillion at the Warwick Hotel in Center City having been asked by one of M’s star students.

On the 15th, we had the great good luck to be joined by our dear friend Jill for drinks at Jean Georges, in the new Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia and then onto dinner at The Love with her son Owen. Twilight in the 60th floor lobby was quite a sight!

Marianne, D, Jill at the Four Season lobby (on the 60th floor)
View of Philadelphia from the 60th floor of the Four Seasons, with Logan Circle as the focal point (happy for the black dots on the glass, which save birds from deadly collisions with the glass panes, even as they make photos…interesting)

In mid-April, we also got our second COVID vaccine boosters. We had mild reactions to the shots, as on the previous occasions.

Near the end of April, M hosted a reunion “girls’ weekend” in the city for a few of her high school classmates, a.k.a., the Valley Girls. This was so much fun gossiping about what happened to classmates and doing an impromptu walking tour of Philadelphia that they organized another one for November.

For D, the highlight of the end of the month came at his department’s annual awards luncheon, where he was awarded the best research paper award.

D’s trophy for the best research paper award

May

May brought the end of the semesters for both of us and the start of lighter times. Another semester ended well for us (although D was not thrilled by how teaching a section of “Econ 101” students, for the first time in some years, went—students seemed to have forgotten how to be students and to be mostly apathetic and clueless as to what it means to study). Marianne was the mace bearer at Arcadia University’s graduation, for the first time (and had to lead the procession off the field in double-time due to a tornado warning).

Our young friends Sierra and Jacob had a party at Jacob’s parents’ house to celebrate their first wedding anniversary as a kind of delayed post-Covid celebration of their wedding and Jacob’s graduation from medical school. It was lovely to take part in the celebration and meet some of their friends we had been hearing about over the years, as well as catch up with both their parents. And all that yummy food!

We had a brief trip to Ocean City, NJ, where we were able to grab some nice bird photos, amid socializing with M’s colleagues and relaxing a bit.

Bird photo
Bird photo in Ocean City, May 22

D’s brother Kostas visited the U.S. near the end of the month, and we were able to catch up with him a couple of times in NJ.

Marianne, Kostas, Dimitrios in Princeton after lunch
Marianne, Kostas, Dimitrios in Princeton after lunch at Mediterra on May 27

June

We started June with a week in Germantown, NY, where we stayed in a favorite Airbnb with Eileen. We made several side trips and excursions. Here we are at the Vintage Vibe market in Rhinebeck:

Eileen, Marianne, and Dimitrios at the Vibe urban market, June 4
Eileen, Marianne, and Dimitrios at the Vintage Vibe urban market, June 4

After the Vintage Vibe market we visited a nearby distillery, from where we simply must commemorate the bloody Mary drinks Eileen is smiling about in the next picture; each had a veritable garden of greenery on top.

Eileen with the amazing (and very spicy) bloody Mary cocktails, June 4

We visited a few more interesting places, including Poets’ Walk, and had the chance to have dinner a couple of times with Anthony and Barbara, whose country house is only about a mile and a half down the road from our Airbnb. On the last full day of the trip, we visited Montgomery Place and its gardens. Eileen snapped this nice photo of us:

Eileen’s photo of us at Montgomery Place, June 7

After we came back home, we had several lovely social events before we ran out of June days. One was a bourbon tasting in our gazebo with a colleague of M’s and his wife. We learned quite a bit from them about bourbons and got pleasantly tipsy.

We also attended a gala fundraising event for the Wilma Theatre, that Mike and Eva had generously invited us to. The event started at the Kimmel Center, continued across the street at the Wilma, and concluded with an outdoor cast party at the lush and romantic Horticulture Society pop up garden on South St. We had a blast visiting with Mike and Eva, Mike’s brother Ed and his wife Nancy, attending the gala event on the stage of the Wilma, and having delicious food and drink and participating in the bidding to support the theater.

Another fun social event was going to Arcadia University’s campus on a nice Friday afternoon and evening for an outdoor movie showing with dear friends Reiko and Troy. We felt like kids again watching Spiderman and eating movie candy and popcorn provided by M’s HR committee.

With Reiko and Troy at Arcadia U, for an outdoor movie showing, June 24

Two days later, we went to the Jenkins Arboretum and Gardens for Suzanne’s art exhibit opening. We chatted with several friends at the reception, bought some ceramic bowls Suzanne had made (her new direction in art, not that she has stopped painting), and did not miss the opportunity to make photos. It is as usual hard to choose just one photo, but perhaps this one will do.

At Jenkins Arboretum and Gardens, June 26

We ended June with a great dinner at Jean Georges at the Four Seasons hotel in Philadelphia to celebrate Marianne’s birthday (a little early, due to restaurant availability).

Marianne celebrating her birthday a little early at JG in the Four Seasons (on the 60th floor)
Sunset over Philadelphia from the 60th floor of the Four Seasons hotel

July

One cannot have enough birthday celebrations, right? We had another one on the first of July, with Lily joining us, so we could also celebrate her graduation.

Lily and Marianne at LaCroix for a birthday lunch, July 1

This month we made our first trip for brunch to the Yardley Inn. They had a nice big tent for outside seating, which we appreciated a lot. They also had some mighty good cocktails including their specially made YI house bourbon and very good food. After brunch, we went to hang out for a while at Washington Crossing State Park, a bit up the road on the same side of the Delaware River, where D caught this photo of M in a pensive mood.

Marianne at Washington Crossing State Park, July 10

In the middle of the month, we visited Branford, CT, where we stayed at the quaint and luxurious Thimble Islands B&B, which is right on the water. The visit allowed us to visit friends nearby, as well as the Mystic Seaport Museum, and a state park with excellent opportunities to photograph birds. It will take a lot of restraint to post only a few photos from this picturesque trip!

Sail making room at the Mystic Seaport Museum, July 14
M’s photo of timepieces from the Mystic Seaport Museum, July 14
Osprey photographed from right outside our room, July 16
View from our room at the Thimble Islands Bed and Breakfast, July 17

The next photo shows Marianne taking a photo of the Gillette Castle State Park — a remarkable mix of a Disney sensibility with Henry Chapman Mercer’s Fonthill Castle Arts-and-Crafts workmanship in Doylestown complete with a trick bar, an indoor koi pond, and many elaborately carved wooden doors, each one different from the others.

Marianne in front of the Gillette House, July 15.

August

Temple U’s Fall semester started in mid-August, earlier than in all previous years D has taught there. That left us with a narrow window for a seaside vacation to say goodbye to the summer, but we managed just fine, finding an old-style resort called Icona, in New Jersey, on Diamond Beach, a little north of Cape May where we enjoyed relaxing on the beach with lunch service and umbrella set ups.

A selfie we made in front of the Icona resort on Diamond Beach on August 10

Near the end of the month, we went to the annual end-of-summer party at Mike and Eva’s. It was great to catch up with them and their offspring Dan and Melanie with their partners, as well as colleagues from Temple and a Temple PhD alum who teaches locally. A memorable and fun highlight was a traveling Prosecco bar on wheels, the use of which Melanie had won at a fundraiser.

September

With classes underway for both of us, we made a little time for our bivalent COVID boosters mid-month. Fortunately, we had light side effects and our teaching was not disrupted.

We had a lovely visit with Ellen and Jim at Longwood Gardens, with lots of walking and admiring fall colors, the fountain light show, and the special light installation.

With Ellen and Jim at Longwood Gardens, September 24
M’s photo from the fountain light show at Longwood Gardens, September 24

The day after the Longwood Gardens visit, we dropped by Mt. Cuba center nearby, where we had a lovely visit in the lush grounds.

M’s photo from the Mt. Cuba Center on September 25

October

We enjoyed a weekend outing in our favorite Airbnb in the Delaware Water Gap area again (same as where we stayed for our anniversary in January). A highlight of this visit was visiting a number of spectacular waterfalls nearby.

By a waterfall in the Delaware Water Gap area, October 15

Here is a photo of Hidden Lake from October 16 — compare with the second photo above in the January paragraph.

Hidden Lake, PA, October 16

We timed this trip to see some Fall foliage, and we were not disappointed. Tempting as it is to add a dozen more photos now, we will only add one more.

M’s photo of Hidden Lake, October 16

The end of October took us to Long Island for a memorial mass and celebration dinner for a dear family friend. The dinner and the company more than made up for the extra long trip to New York on a Saturday afternoon via the Rockaways and with a nail stuck in our tire. Brunch the next day with my nephew and his family while the tire was being repaired.

November

We made another short trip to Washington Crossing State Park. It’s nice to see as we’re putting this long blog post together, that we managed to make at least one trip every month, even as we eschewed airports and planes.

M at Washington Crossing State Park, November 12

The next day, the 13th, we attended Lyric Fest’s concert A Singer’s Singer, a biography in music of Winnaretta Singer, a remarkable heiress of the Singer sewing machine fortune who became a major sponsor of art song in Paris in the beginning of the 20th Century. We loved the concert so much we regretted not having gone to its first performance on the 12th, which would have allowed us to see it again!

The following weekend, during a rare November heat wave, Marianne made the trek to Port Jefferson, Long Island via trains for a second gathering of the Valley Girls. The festivities included wine tasting, an art museum, a farmer’s market, a Viking market, and a dune hike. Hilarity ensued.

We celebrated Thanksgiving at Suzanne and Kevin’s. It was a small, cozy, lovely gathering, and we met some nice new people.

The day after we had a short visit by Sierra and Jacob, for dinner and a few energetic rounds of Sweet Existence, a game based on the Strange Planet comic series.

M paid a visit to Dominique and family for what has become the traditional Leftovers meal on Saturday, and on Sunday we had brunch with our friend Emina, formerly a PhD advisee of D’s.

December

Another Fall semester came to a successful conclusion for both of us. On the 13th, we visited Center City on a whim to see the light show at City Hall and look at the Christmas Market, after which we had a nice dinner at Estia.

The next day we went to a movie house, for the first time since the pandemic started, to see a matinee screening of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Hours, joined by Suzanne and Kevin. The opera was very good, in every respect–visual, acting, vocal, staging, story–and then we capped a lovely day with a Mexican dinner at a local favorite of hours, Tamarindos.

D was lucky enough to be able to submit grades as early as the 12th (payoff for the unusually early start of Temple’s Fall semester), but M was only able to submit grades 10 days later. However, we had a nice time shopping for presents and decorating and it never felt completely hectic to do so.

On the 16th we drove up to Long Island for grand-niece Caterina’s sweet 16 party. It was nice to catch up with M’s family and some friends we hadn’t seen in years. We also came away with the following photo, taken by Dominique, which makes us smile (the party theme was the 1950s):

M and D at the Sweet 16 party, December 16

We were lucky to not be affected by the bad winter storm that hit most of the United States over Christmas, never losing power. On Christmas day, we celebrated in a cozy gathering at Suzanne and Kevin’s after a Skype video call with D’s family in Greece.

Patient readers, thank you for reading this gigantic post. We hope you enjoyed this account of how our 2022 was and we wish you a healthy, happy, and peaceful 2023.

Categories
Life Photos

A look back at 2021

So we thought the pandemic would end in 2021? Did we? Oh well. However that goes (not well, at the time of writing this), we can at least recap the year in our usual end-of-year post, starting with a photo of a red-tailed hawk captured at the Pennypack Ecological Restoration area in January (with D’s Fujifilm X-T2, equipped with the long lens D got for Christmas 2020):

Red tailed hawk on tree
Red-tailed hawk on tree in Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust

January also marked the start of our second semester in which we taught completely online. It was to be just as challenging as in the fall of 2020, and not worth additional complaining about here.

We marked D’s birthday with a Zoom visit, which allowed far-flung friends Jelena and Rob to join in from Belfast, which normally would have been a very expensive proposition. It was a lovely virtual visit with lots of good friends, much appreciated.

D’s Gluten-free birthday cake

February started with a snow storm on February 2nd and snow stayed on the ground for weeks. Neighbors down the block built a giant snowman, seen below as it was being built, and then on February 8th and February 15th.

Giant snowman being built

We also made a trip with our cameras to the Morris Arboretum, where we saw a lovely snowpeople family.

Snow people at the Morris Arboretum, 2/6

Opportunities to use the long lens on the Fujifilm X-T2 were offered by birds on our bird feeders with snow in the background, like this cardinal.

Cardinal through a glass window pane with snow, 2/19

Early in March, we paid another visit to the Morris Arboretum, when D played with the long lens once more, capturing a red tailed hawk in flight and then nicely posing on a tree.

Flying red-tailed hawk, 3/7
Posing red-tailed hawk, 3/7

A couple of days after these photos were made, the sun was out at lunch time and we we had our lunch at the top of the stairs to the porch, not missing the opportunity to take a selfie. This incidentally documents how D looked after shaving his beard to ensure N95 masks fit his face as well as possible. (Later on, he allowed a tiny part of the beard to grow again, where it would be completely covered by the mask — picture later).

Selfie on porch steps, 3/9; M made this plate

A few days later, it was time for Marianne to get her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19; D followed in 8 days with his first dose of the Moderna vaccine.

M waiting to check for any allergic reaction after her Pfizer first dose, 3/16
D after getting his first dose of the Moderna vaccine, 3/24

April 4th was Easter. We got together outdoors in our yard with D’s former student Olena (the one was gave us outdoors broadsword lessons last summer — see our recap of 2020). We had a big, beautiful, and sturdy chocolate egg as something special for dessert. It was so sturdy that it came with a wooden hammer to break it open! It was well worth the trouble to break it open, as it was filled with candy and chocolates.

Our Easter chocolate egg, with the hammer it came with and M’s hand

Later in April, we had the chance to see some nice tulips at the Morris Arboretum.

Tulips at the Morris Arboretum, April 18

In early May we had our first dining out experience since March of 2020, in the outdoor “cabins” of Charlie Was A Sinner in Philadelphia. The occasion was to celebrate the birthday and make some engagement photos of D’s former student Sierra and her fiancé. Here’s us toasting them:

First outdoors restaurant dining since the pandemic started (photo credit: Sierra Arnold)

May also saw Arcadia University’s in-person graduation, and we hosted an outdoor party in our back yard for M’s department colleagues right after. M continued to get more settled in as department chair all year.

On the last day of May, we were delighted to be able to celebrate our dear friend Suzanne’s birthday with her, Kevin, Lily, and the latest canine family member, Talulah, in Suzanne and Kevin’s cabin in PA:

Talulah, Lily, Suzanne, and Kevin on May 31

In June we enjoyed a week-long driving vacation in Germantown, NY, in the Hudson Valley. We stayed at a wonderful AirBnB and had many opportunities to be in nature and hang out with M’s brother Anthony and his wife Barbara.

M in the garden of Montgomery Place
The wildflower garden of our AirBnB with the house itself in the background

Incidentally, as far as D was concerned, this was quite the year for bird photos. Here’s one that made D happy to have taken the long lens on this trip.

A bird on Poet’s Walk on 6/18

Near the end of June we had a quick but delightful visit by Jill who had traveled from California with her youngest son Owen to check out local colleges (he’s already at the age of college-hunting!). On one evening, we had an outdoors dinner with them and a friend of Owen’s and his mother at Tamarindo’s, and then took them to our back yard where the young people saw fireflies for the first time in their lives. It was a magical moment for all, especially when fireflies landed on them.

July started with a short staycation in Philadelphia. During these few days, we got to celebrate M’s birthday and the wedding of our friends Sierra and Jacob, and got to see the new wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

M in the new wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on 7/1
M enjoying her birthday dinner at The Love in Philadelphia
M and D on Broad Street on the evening of 7/3 (photo credit: Jacob Arnold)

In July we also had our second of three driving vacations, this one to an AirBnB on the East shore of Cayuga Lake. The less said about the quality of this AirBnB the better (in future, we are only going to consider AirBnBs whose hosts are rated as Superhosts), but we did get a nice visit to NY wine country and M’s old haunts in Ithaca and Geneva, and got to hang out with our friend Eileen, who was able to join us for a few days of wine and spirits tasting and great eating surrounded by magnificent scenery.

M contemplates the sunset on Cayuga Lake, 7/10
In which we surround Eileen at a winery with a great view of the lake, 7/12
M and Eileen at Taughannock Falls, 7/14

In mid-August we spent a few days at a family reunion in New Hampshire, in M’s brother Jerry’s vacation rental, where we were treated to the famous Uncle Jerry breakfast, cooked on our porch at the crack of dawn. In accordance with global climate change, we were hit by an extreme heat wave. We did manage a nice outing on a not-too-stifling morning. Another way to cope with the heat was to buy two kiddie pools to put our feet into while sipping cold wine, to skip pebbles at a river, and to have ice cream for lunch.

Family outing at Franconia Notch, 8/10

On the way back from New Hampshire, we stayed in New Haven for a few days where we had a lovely time visiting Sierra’s family. Here’s us on a boat tour of the Thimble Islands.

D and M on a boat tour of the Thimble Islands, 8/15 (photo credit: Sierra Arnold)

Soon after our return home, it was time for us to start going to school for in-person, masked teaching. It was challenging but turned out to be less of a COVID-spreading activity than we were fearing, thanks to vaccine mandates and masking. M had to deal with including remote students via Zoom into her live classes, which proved to be an endless source of frustration. Here’s D’s first day back, waiting for the train to take him to Temple’s campus, donning the highest-quality N95 mask he could find.

D about to go to school for first in-person classes since March 2020, 8/23

September came in with a bang: a very severe storm that spawned a tornado that missed our house only by a couple of miles and that dumped a ridiculous amount of rain in the space of a couple of hours. We took our dinner to the basement to finish it, as we were under a tornado warning, and then we did a little work to help our sump pump deal with the water influx. Thankfully, we had no permanent damage, but we are well aware that our basement walls need some upgrading.

We enjoyed a weekend escape to Ocean City, NJ, on September 11-12, with Charlie and Nicki. D is partial to this photo he made of M on a boat tour of the Ocean City Bay.

M on a boat tour of Ocean City Bay, 9/12

Near the end of October, we took a short trip to a lovely AirBnB in Shawnee, PA, near the Delaware Water Gap. This also gave us the opportunity to visit Bushkill Falls for the first time.

At Bushkill Falls, 10/24. Note my minimized beard, for masks to fit better (I promised such a photo above)

We spend Halloween visiting with Suzanne and Kevin in Schnabel’s woods:

Kevin, Suzanne, M 10/31

In November we continued our outings in nature and we had a lovely, intimate Thanksgiving at Suzanne and Kevin’s, among fully vaccinated and boosted friends. I can’t not include this picture of M from Bowman’s Hill Wildflower preserve:

M at Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve, 11/6

In early December we went to see the Morris Arboretum’s Holiday Train display and to a wine tasting and outdoors hanging out by a fire event at Unionville winery in New Jersey. For Christmas, we took a short driving vacation to an AirBnB in the Rhinebeck, NY, where we were happy to be able to visit with Anthony, Barbara, their daughter and our niece April, and April’s sweet dog Cascade. Here’s a photo by M that shows the rest of the gang by Blithewood Mansion:

At Blithewood Mansion, Bard College, 12/27

It’s time to end this massively lengthy post. We wish all a healthy 2022, with the pandemic receding and life returning closer to what we had been considering normal!

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Life Photos

A look back at 2020

Bah, humbug, you say? Granted, this was not the year anybody wanted, with a raging pandemic causing and exposing so many problems around the world. Yet here we are, M and D, your friends with the (normally) once-a-year blog update, carried to the end of the year in good health and decent spirits, thanks in no small part to our families and friends who have kept us connected, even if mostly via video conferencing.

The year started for us with our fantastic trip to Sweden. We have already written a post about that, so in this post we will update you on the rest of our year.

January

January 10th onwards, that is, since we returned from Sweden on the 9th. Right before classes started we had a nice opportunity to catch up in Philadelphia with our friend Sierra, D’s former student who is now a PhD student at the other end of Pennsylvania, which makes getting a chance to see her a rare, happy occasion. D was keen to wear his Christmas gift shirt from M for the occasion:

Both M and D started teaching as usual in January, which was the last teaching-related activity that went as usual in this most surprising and upsetting year.

February

On February 2nd, we had a nice gathering at home to celebrate D’s birthday a little late. It would be the last time we could have many people in our house for an unforeseeable length of time.

The middle of February found us visiting Longwood Gardens for their annual orchid exhibit, which was beautiful as ever and gave us plenty of good photo opportunities.

March

This was the month in which the pandemic’s effects started to be felt in our area. On March 11, Temple University announced a sudden shift to online instruction for the rest of the semester as of March 16. D had one more chance to meet face-to-face with his students on March 12, and then grabbed books and papers from his office and set up office at home. Arcadia University decided to switch to online instruction at the same time, but gave faculty and students a few days off to get ready. M also got books and papers from her office and we became prisoners of Zoom for our teaching for the rest of the year. Like so many other people, we did some last-minute buying at the time, with March 16 still being memorable as the last day we went to the local supermarket.

Lots and lots of online purchases were to ensue, not only for food but also for wine and spirits (and chocolate and chips), throughout the rest of the year. It had somehow escaped our notice until then that Pennsylvania had already in the pre-pandemic times allowed the shipping of wine from other US states, so now that we figured it out, we quickly became members of two wine clubs. As for spirits, it was legal to order for delivery from Pennsylvania-based distilleries, so we started doing that too. Eventually, we also found restaurants that were selling cocktails together with dinners for take out.

We also bought a bunch of gift certificates to support favorite restaurants and a local bookstore, and became members of Bookshop.org to be able to buy some books online while supporting indie bookstores.

During March and April, we also had a series of online video visits with friends and family, which were wonderful, if inadequate, substitutes for face-to-face visits.

To stay in sort-of-acceptable physical state, we started (almost-) daily walks, initially around the neighborhood, staying far away from others, as we should. In the first couple of weeks of the lockdown, neighbors wrote inspirational messages with chalk on the sidewalks and street pavement.

April

On the first Sunday of April, M used instructions from New York Times to make some masks; it was the first of at least two such sessions. The results look sharp:

M’s masks become popular with our friends and we gave some to them. They also helped M produce them, we should say gratefully, by sending along those metal strips from coffee bean bags that are so handy for limiting the fogging of eyeglasses when embedded into the top of the mask.

During April we also continued watching streaming plays from the National Theatre of London, something we started doing in March, if memory serves.

May

We continued the daily walks and photographed lots of flowers in neighbors’ yards. We did a lot of cooking at home and tried out some cocktail recipes. For an alternative to walking for outdoor exercise/amusement, we got a pickle ball game set that we played with a few times in our back yard. Here is M at it.

Our semesters ended reasonably well, both of us having managed to transition to online instruction without too many problems. It was a big disappointment for us and all our graduating seniors that graduation ceremonies were held in improvised, virtual ways, but there was no escaping the need for it.

June

In anticipation of a subdued celebration of M’s 60th birthday on July 1, with no visitors due to the pandemic, we ordered a Sacher torte online from the Hotel Sacher in Vienna with plenty of lead time, thinking that there might be a long delay in fulfillment and delivery due to the pandemic, but to our surprise it came almost immediately, in early June:

This month was momentous for M professionally speaking, as she became chair of her psychology department. It could not have happened at a more challenging time. She did have good support from her colleagues, though, and as of this writing, everything has gone fine, except for her being constantly busier than ever before.

We also started having visitors, at most two at a time, outdoors at a safe distance. Here are our dear friends Suzanne and Kevin:

A very pleasant activity we were able to resume was visiting the Morris Arboretum.

We can’t forget to mention that all through the summer we were reading several books and websites, as well as attending webinars, on how to prepare for a good hybrid or online-only class, as it looked more and more certain that this would be the way we’d teach in the Fall semester.

July

July month started with a quiet celebration of M’s birthday. On the 18th, we were lucky enough to have clear skies and access to a place with relatively low light pollution to photograph comet Neowise. Here is a photo M made of the comet.

Near the end of the month we spend a few days in Ocean City, NJ, very cautiously, avoiding the boardwalk and stores, where altogether too many people would be seen not caring to wear a mask even if they got near other people.

August

August went by like July, minus a trip to the shore but plus visits from various friends, taking advantage of the warm weather to sit in our back yard, enjoy some food and conversation, and, as was the case with Olena (another friend who’s D’s former student), give us a demonstration of historically accurate broadsword fighting.

The last week of August was also the first week of the Fall semester for D (M started a week later). We were thankful that our desire to teach fully online was accommodated. Temple University did try to start with some in-person classes, but that experiment was short-lived, as COVID-19 cases at Temple started spiking and the university moved all in-person classes online (except a small number of classes that can’t be done online, such as some nursing and medical school classes).

September

Amid the teaching (with its attendant constant making of short videos and grading of online quizzes, really kind of draining), we did continue with our escape routes, like photography, to blow off some steam. The following sunset panorama was a gift from the sky on the 4th of the month.

On the 7th we had a chance to visit the Morris Arboretum again, this time with friends. Here’s a green “fireworks” image from that visit:

We also took a weekend trip to Ocean City again, where we met a small “COVID pod” of friends cautiously in open air and did not visit stores (where it was common to see from the outside customers blithely shopping without masks on) or crowded beaches.

We also added a new destination for our walks, the Churchville Nature Preserve. It is a nice place for a Sunday morning walk:

October

October’s weather did allow some more outdoors visiting with friends. Early in the month we had a visit by Mike and Eva.

We also took advantage of good weather to attend an outdoors family gathering in New Jersey to mark our niece Avery’s first holy communion.

Leaf color this month was good, though we have had it even better in select past years. These two images from Alverthorpe Park in Jenkintown give a taste.

A little later in October, we had the opportunity to visit this park again with our friends Suzanne and Kevin. Here is Suzanne walking alongside M, followed by a photo of M and D taken by Suzanne.

On Halloween weekend, we stayed at an AirBnB in Kennett Square for a couple of nights, to be near Longwood Gardens to visit for the chrysanthemum exhibit. This also allowed us to have a nice stroll in Longwood Gardens with our friends Ellen and Jim, who live nearby. Here is a photo of M with Ellen and Jim and then a photo from our walk in the meadow.

November

Elections were the big starter of the month; this blog is hardly the place to discuss politics, but we did vote in person, wearing both masks and plastic shields over our faces.

Later in November we took some walks in the Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust. There D was lucky enough one day to capture a photo of a hawk with its lunch in its left talon, waiting to be consumed. This was taken with the regular lens of D’s Fujifilm X-T2 camera. If only Santa’s gift of a long lens for this camera had arrived already!

For Thanksgiving we ordered takeout from one of our favorite restaurants in Princeton, which had a complete Thanksgiving dinner ready to pick up in a box. It felt so very strange to drive to Princeton to get the food and drive right back, without doing any of the usual things we do in that town (buy books, take pictures, buy chocolates, buy clothes), but as mentioned already, we were trying to stay as far away from infection possibilities as we could. Here is M at our Thanksgiving table (just by ourselves, but the weather was good enough to start outside). Sadly, shortly after this photo was taken, we were chased inside the house by a persistent wasp, which also managed to come in after us undetected and sting M (painful, but with no bad allergic reaction, thankfully).

December

December started with a visit to Alverthorpe Park with our friends Reiko, Troy, Jordan, and Cooper. It was D’s first serious attempt to use the long lens Santa brought (very proactive Santa was on this occasion). Here is a sample photo (the goose was a good 30-40 feet away):

Later in December our first fully-online semester of teaching came to an end. Both of us felt that teaching online, especially under duress, instead of by choice, was a very difficult endeavor. Every class takes longer to prepare, you are endlessly making videos and slide sets for class when you are not endlessly grading assignments, the only exam format we felt made sense was open-book — which is very hard to write at the proper level, you are missing face-to-face contact with your students, they miss it too, it’s overall a sad necessity. However, we managed. Most impressively, M managed to reach the conclusion of her first semester as department chair in one piece and with her department functioning well, despite seriously diminished resources.

In the middle of the month we had a snow storm that was followed by several days cold enough for the snow to stay on the ground. We were lucky to be able to take advantage of a little free time that we made for ourselves in the middle of final exams to go to Alverthorpe Park and to the Morris Arboretum to make photos in the snowy conditions. We leave you with a photo of a deer from Alverthorpe Park and a gallery with some photos from the Morris Arboretum, including some from its holiday train display with miniatures of famous Philadelphia buildings made out of wood and other natural materials. Tip: for the gallery: clicking any one of the photos displays bigger version; this is important for some that can only be viewed uncropped in this fashion.

We leave you with the wish that the year 2021 will be massively better than 2020 was. We are so looking forward to being able to hug our friends and family and to visit them indoors without qualms, not to mention going to the opera, concerts, theater, and restaurants and our very own classrooms to teach our students face-to-face!

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Life Photos

Trip to Sweden

In the 2019 retrospective post, we promised a postscript about the then upcoming trip to Sweden to see the Northern Lights. Here it is, finally. It took a while to pare down the thousands of photos we made to the small selection you see here.

We arrived in Stockholm on December 30th. We stayed in Gamla Stan, the oldest part of the city, until January 2nd, which gave us the opportunity to explore the city, including the great Vasa museum and the Viking museum, and have New Year’s Eve in a very nice restaurant there and to enjoy gifts from the sky that we did not expect, when both the sunrise and the sunset on New Year’s day were amazing.

New Year’s Day sunrise, seen from a window of our hotel room
New Year’s Day sunset, seen from near the Viking Museum

On January 2nd we flew to Kiruna, in the far north of Sweden, from where we were taken by bus to the Tourist Station in Abisko National Park, where we stayed for four nights and chased the Northern Lights.

The Kiruna airport is tiny and we had to walk on the ice-encrusted snow to the terminal upon arrival. Good thing they had gritted the snow well.
Portrait of the two of us with the Aurora, by our great photo guide, Sarah Skinner.
Aurora so bright it was reflecting on the lake
Dimitrios with his camera on the tripod ready for action to capture the Aurora
The Aurora, the warming tent our guides provided, and the Big Dipper
Aurora convolutions

As you see, we had great luck seeing the Aurora on two of the four nights. Even greater luck was being able to see polar stratospheric clouds, a much rarer phenomenon.

Polar Stratospheric Cloud from the bus on our way to Kiruna on January 6; iPhone 11XR photo

After our excursion to the Arctic (Abisko is a good 200 km inside the Arctic circle), we spent three more nights in Stockholm, seeing a few more sights (the Middle Ages museum, Stockholm City Hall, and the Nordic museum), making new friends, and celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary with a dinner at the Michelin rated restaurant of the Grand Hôtel. After that, it was time to fly back home and get ready to hit the ground running for the Spring semester. All in all, it was a great and memorable trip.

Categories
Life Photos

Looking back at 2019

Look at that, it’s time for another end-of-year blog post! This one will be followed in early January 2020 by a little postscript, as we will have returned by then from an exciting trip to see the Northern Lights (we’re hoping the weather will allow it) and we know you’ll not want to wait until December 2020 to read about that.

January started with a short trip to Mohonk Mountain House for our anniversary. We attended a wine class given by Kevin Zraly and took a guided walk up the mountain to the tower.

Work-wise, there were not big surprises in the Spring semester. The new item was that the course on economic inequality that D experimentally first offered in 2017 (see that year’s review on the blog) was now offered for the first time as an officially approved elective with writing credit.

Near the end of January we had a party at Estia restaurant to celebrate D’s 60th birthday. It was lovely to see so many friends and family come to break bread together and raise a toast to celebrate D’s newly round age.

In March, D’s brother Kostas and nephew Yannis, Kostas’s son, visited us for a week. Kostas came to participate in a workshop on Machine Learning at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, so we could visit with him on the two weekends that book-ended their visit, but Yannis stayed with us and we had several outings with him.

Kostas, Dimitrios, Marianne, Yannis in front of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton

In March we also took a short trip to Frederick, Maryland, as guests of our good friends Ellen and Jim. Frederick is a historic town, with many buildings that are a century or two old, good eateries, and a nice river park.

Frederick, Maryland

In April, D continued his streak of singing in the Meet Me @ The Music event organized by Honors music students at Temple University. This time, he performed the Song of Drunken People by Khrenikov, with a student accompanying him on the piano. For a top-notch performance (not by D!), and to get an idea of how fun this song is for a bass to sing, check out this YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4Jqabh1UI

M had a good Spring semester too, with the best, i.e., most hard-working and spirited, senior class ever. They made a deal with her that if they all got in their thesis papers she would go with them to the build-a-bear workshop at the local mall. Needless to say, the sight of twelve young people parading around with their newly made stuffed animals, a game of hangman, including a caricature of “Dr. Miz”, and pizza for all, made for a memorable celebration of the semester.

In late April, our good friend and D’s department chair (at the time) Mike Leeds surprised D with the Outstanding Service Award during the 2019 Economics department Award Luncheon.

D with his award and Mike Leeds

In May we made a day trip to Paxson Farms, which proved as photogenic as promised online, and a two-night trip with an AirBnB in Kennett Square as our base, to visit the Nemours Estate, Winterthur, the Hagley Museum, and Longwood Gardens (all properties of various DuPonts in the past) without much back-and-forth driving from home. It proved to be a very nice, relaxing trip.

In June we visited Ocean City, NJ, for a few days, and were joined by Charlie and Nicki, which gave M the chance to go sailing with Charlie in the bay.

In July we drove to Ithaca, NY, and Aurora, NY, for a nostalgic visit to Cornell University, where M studied for her PhD, and to the Inns of Aurora, where we had a lovely visit in 2018. Check out M standing at the entrance of Uris Hall at Cornell, where her office was when she was a graduate student, and then a lucky capture of two bees in Cornell Plantations.

M in front of Uris Hall
Bees and flowers at Cornell Plantations

In August we visited with our friends Troy, J, and C, the Goschenhoppen festival, a recreation of life in Pennsylvania a couple of centuries back. Lots of photo opportunities there, from which we selected this reenactment of building a house to show you here.

Cutting a log into planks for house construction in Goschenhoppen festival

In August we spent a few days in California, visiting our good friends Jill and Rick and their youngest son, Owen, in Morro Bay at the beach house and in Pasadena at their house, as well as spending a few days in Santa Barbara. The trip was so photogenic it was a big task to narrow down the photo selection for this post.

September brought us great sadness at the loss of our wonderful friend Phil Jones, who died a month or so after he turned 74 years old. Phil was a friend we met in Mendelssohn Club when we were singing in that group in the 1990s. He helped us to get together romantically with a well-timed email, he sang and did a reading at our wedding, and was generally always around when we needed help. We are just two of many, many people for whom Phil was a wonderfully positive presence. Phil and his wife Ann had been at the 60th birthday party at Estia, where our friend Suzanne snapped this lovely photo of them.

Phil and Ann Jones on January 27 at Estia Restaurant in Philadelphia
Program for Phil Jones’s celebration of life in Chestnut Hill Meetinghouse, September 28.

A much happier event in September was the completion of the big job of putting new siding on our house. The old siding was made of cedar tiles. It was put up when the house was built in 1928 (our contractor found pages from newspapers dated June 1928 under the siding, evidently put there as insulation) and over the many decades it became weather-worn and full of holes (certain woodpeckers also had a hand, er, beak in this, too). Here are before and after photos.

The Fall semester was good for both M and D. We’ll finish this post with some photos from our visits to the Morris Arboretum and Longwood Gardens to see holiday light displays, as well as some photos from a fun excursion in South Philly with M’s brother Anthony and his wife Barbara and daughter April on Christmas Eve — but remember to stay tuned for another post in January for, we hope, great photos of the natural light display called the Northern Lights, which we hope to catch during our upcoming trip to Sweden.

Categories
Life Photos

A look back at 2018

Another year has gone by. We have been posting annual retrospective posts here since 2009 and the post you are reading continues the tradition (which has developed into the one post that appears here every year, our “Christmas Letter”).

The year started with a cold snap. D attended the annual meetings of the American Social Science Associations, where he attended sessions that covered economic issues related to economic inequality, his new obsession.

After the conference was over, we paid a short visit to Jersey City to see Dominique, Steve, and their girls, and had the chance to see the girls in skating practice. D had a lucky shot of an incoming ship from our hotel room, in which a seagull paid a timely visit.

In February, we enjoyed a visit to Longwood Gardens with Phil and Ann for the annual orchid extravaganza, an excellent way to spend a few hours when the weather is cold.

This photo by D came out painterly, mostly thanks to the steam on the window.

In March, D sung for the third time in the Meet Me at the Music event organized by Music Honors students at Temple University. He performed the “measuring duet” from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro with a student soprano and a student accompanying on the piano. Here is a recording made on D’s phone by M.

We also went to Annapolis in March, on the weekend that was the bridge between our Spring breaks. We had a very nice visit with our niece Christina and her little daughter Violet.

In April, D was lucky enough to have a photo he took the previous December in Florida included in the annual John James Audubon Center exhibit (the photo is at the level of his hands in this snapshot):

Near the end of April we paid a visit to Longwood Gardens with our good friend, PhD advisee of D from some time ago, Emina. We saw the great tulip exhibit there and had an excellent lunch at the 1906 restaurant there. Check out that “flower pot” dessert, which is entirely edible:

M had two gorgeous photos of hers included in a curated exhibit in the Wayne Art Center in May.

Our big summer trip was to Paris. We timed it to surround M’s birthday. We encountered a ridiculously hot spell while in Paris, which was a bit of a problem without AC in our AirBnB studio apartment, but we survived the heat and accumulated many happy memories and nice photos.

Enjoying a Kir Royale near the Palais de Justice
A delighted M having lunch on her birthday in the Jules Verne restaurant, 135 meters above street level, in the Eiffel Tower
A photo D made in Monet’s garden at Giverny

For many more photos from our visit to Paris and vicinity, here is an album that we have curated from the hundreds of photos we each made.

We did manage two short trips to Ocean City, NJ. Here’s a photo of a radiant M from one of these trips.

In early August, we made a short road trip to Aurora, NY. We stayed in the Aurora Inn, right on the side of Cayuga lake. On the last full day of our visit, we had fun taking a winery tour by boat, visiting three wineries by the lake with our friend Rebecca, who lives near Aurora.

A nice sunset from Aurora (D)
On the boat to wineries (photo by Rebecca Carr)

In the fall, M joined a family reunion in New Hampshire and a high school reunion, while D stayed home to keep working on his teaching and projects.

For both M and D, school work all year went well and was unremarkable.

Near the end of December we had excellent news about M’s health from her latest tests and the doctor’s examination.

We are looking forward to whatever new adventures 2019 will bring!

Categories
Life

Looking back at 2017

The year started with a clean bill of health for M after the usual tests. We spent our anniversary in Princeton, doing the things we love doing there (a meal at Mediterra, a visit to the Lindt chocolate shop and to the Labyrinth bookstore). D started teaching a brand new undergraduate course, on the economics of inequality. It’s the hot topic of the day, of course, and it is remarkable that D’s department had never offered a course on it. The course was well attended and well received. D is planning to apply to make it formally a part of the economics department’s course offerings. He also has started writing a book to serve as the text for such a course, based on the lecture notes he made while teaching.

In February, notable events included a visit to a hugely photogenic Longwood Gardens and D’s second appearance in the Meet Me at the Music event at the university. This time D sang Prince Gremin’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and the “La ci darem la mano” duet from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, joined by an undergraduate voice student and an undergraduate pianist. It was fun as usual.

In March, M had two of her photographs included in an exhibit about flowers in the Philadelphia Sketch Club.

In April, both M and D had photos of birds exhibited at the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, not too far from our house.

April also saw D’s first ever participation in a rally, the Philadelphia March for Science, on Earth Day, April 22. He marched with three Temple University undergraduate students. The crowd marching was substantial and only started to disperse when a downpour started.

April was also when M was approached by a publishing company that wanted to produce a new edition of her Personality textbook. This was welcome news, as her previous publisher had decided against producing a new edition. The new publisher found that there was keen interest by many professors who had adopted the textbook to continue using it, so they made M a nice offer. As of today, December 31, M is doing the last bit of proofreading, and the book will be available to be used in teaching in the spring as an e-book and from the fall and later as both a hard-bound book and an e-book.

May saw D perform his last official act as director of graduate studies in his department; he is vastly relieved to not have to continue in this burdensome role, so he can spend more time in his scholarly writing. May also saw Temple U’s graduation and a sendoff of a graduating advisee of D’s who is going on to pursue her PhD in economics. She has done some projects with D starting in 2014, and was instrumental in inspiring him to create and helping him teach the economics of inequality course. D is happy to see her spread her wings, having flown the coop, and is glad to be in touch with her as she moves to higher achievements.

M and D each had two photos included in the Philadelphia Sketch Club’s New Member exhibit in June, with the opening day of the exhibit the day before our departure for the adventure described next.

June saw us visiting Ireland and Northern Ireland for a momentous event in the life of our good friend Rob: his wedding. Five years ago, Rob met Jelena, who had just arrived to teach at his university. On June 23d, they were married in Belfast; Rob asked D to be his witness, an honor D was very happy to accept. Here is the happy couple seconds after being proclaimed husband and wife:

Wedding
Jelena and Rob at Belfast City Hall

It was really nice to have a chance to explore Dublin, where our visit to the Emerald Isle started, then go to Belfast and see again Rob’s parents after 15 years, and meet his sister and aunt, as well as Jelena’s brother and her lively and lovely witness, and of course celebrate their wedding. We still have not dared watch ourselves in a short video the brother made of our blind tasting of whiskeys. We were pretty buzzed by the end of that event! Also notable was a visit to the Belfast Botanic Gardens, where we saw an amazing collection of roses. You can see one rose below, and more here.

Belfast rose
Multihued rose

Just a week after we were back from Belfast, M visited Greece for a week. She spent a quality week with my mother, brother, and my brother’s family, and got to see just how nice it is to swim in the Aegean Sea.

M swimming near Thessaloniki, at the aptly named Paradise Beach

The rest of the summer felt like it went by very quickly. We did not rent a big house in Ocean City this year, preferring to spend the money on the big trip to Ireland, but we missed spending two weeks surrounded by our friends at the shore house. Mid-August found us visiting the Woodloch Lodge and Spa for a few days. On August 21, we headed to Princeton to catch the solar eclipse. While this location did not get 100% occlusion, it did get 79%, and the town turned the occasion into an outdoor party, complete with a telescope for everyone to use for a brief glimpse of the event and free safety glasses.

In September and October, we had our second photography exhibit at Elcy’s coffee shop in Glenside. We were happy with the success of the exhibit. All in all, a good year for our photography! To bring the year to a good conclusion in that area of our lives, M took an intense landscape photography class during a weekend in October, in Chanticleer Gardens, and came back with new tricks and great photos. It was a good conclusion to a year of photography classes to which M dedicated many a Tuesday evening, when she was not taking her other art class, that is! Tuesdays were art evenings for M for most of the year. Here is a photo M made in Chanticleer Gardens:

In early November, D’s brother paid a quick, almost-one-week-long, visit to a coauthor of his in Princeton. It was nice to have the chance to see him.

Dinner with Kostas in Princeton

M had another routine battery of tests in mid-December to close the year, with excellent news.

To cap the year in style and comfort, and to add to our photography œuvre, we travelled to Captiva Island, Florida, for an almost week-long stay spanning Christmas. This is now the third year that we’ve spent Christmas in the subtropical weather of the Captiva / Sanibel islands. We had a lovely time, enjoyed the warmth while our own neighborhood was freezing, and made some photos. We paid two visits to the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge this year (up from one last year), and also rented a telephoto lens to help us photograph birds there. Here is a selection of our photos, starting with four of D’s and ending with three of M’s. You can see more of our photos on Facebook, of course, and M has not finished editing her complete set, so look out for more later.

Pink shell

Playful dolphin pair

D chasing the perfect pelican photo

 

Categories
Life

Looking back at 2016

January

We celebrated our anniversary in Philadelphia, with a tasty dinner at the chef’s table in a.kitchen.
Later in the month, we visited Baltimore, MD, with nephew Dominick and his wife Margherita and their daughter Caterina. I was lucky enough to capture a nice image of the Inner Harbor, which became part of our first joint photo exhibit (about which you can read a bit later in this post):
Baltimore Inner Harbor
Near the end of the month, we had a substantial snowstorm that forced Lyric Fest’s Brahms concert to be rescheduled. As it happened, we then attended that great concert on D’s birthday, and at the reception he (and Laura Ward, the Lyric Fest cofounder and brilliant accompanist who shares her birthday with D) were serenaded by some superb singers and offered delicious cakes. No photos to share from the reception, but here is one to indicate the snow level (that is our car there in the driveway under a mound of snow):

Snow! 2016-01-24

Snow does make for some nice glowing sunrises though:

Snowy sunrise. 2016-01-26

February

The big event on February came on the 25th, when D sang in an event sponsored by the Temple University Honors program and organized by Temple University Honors music students. The event is called Meet me at the Music, and it brings together Temple University faculty members who have some performing skills and Temple Honors music students for brief performances on the stage of Rock Hall. D was hesitant to accept the invitation to participate, as he had not sang in public since 2010, but he did accept, had a voice lesson with Suzanne to dust off some technique, warmed up his voice every morning for a few weeks, and did sing well two pieces, a song by Schubert from the Winterreise song cycle, and a really fun aria from the Abduction from the Seraglio by Mozart, “O wie will ich triumphieren!”. D is really proud to have (1) made the audience laugh at the end of the Mozart aria, and (2) to be told by the soon-to-retire former Honors Program head, Dieter, that he has such a deep voice that Dieter would hire D as his henchman, should the need for a henchman arise.

March – April

Starting in January, a very time-consuming aspect of D’s role as the graduate director of the economics department of his university really heated up in February and March and caused him stress: admissions. It is perhaps surprising for those not in the know how hard it is to attract a good cohort of graduate students when one has only a very few teaching assistant positions to offer. After causing D a lot of stress (along with some other, very unpleasant, aspects of the graduate directorship), most of the admissions job was finally done by mid-April.

May

May saw the end of the Spring semester for both M and D. One more academic year became a memory. M had her graduating students over for a backyard party, which was a very nice occasion, as they were nice, sociable, and interesting people, even from the point of view of D, as an outsider.

D continued to sporadically make photos of the sunset from the back windows, keeping up his photography skills. Here is a decent one:

May was also when we discovered a new place to visit nature and make photos, Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve. A couple of sample images D made:

And here is a yellow lady slipper orchid, captured by M:

Near the end of May, we had a wonderful lunch in Center City, and on the way back to the train station the sky presented an irresistible spectacle that D captured with his iPhone, not having the big camera with him. This photo was well liked online and was even selected out of thousands of entries to be part of an iPhone photo exhibit and competition a few months later.

For Memorial Day we spent a few days in Ocean City, NJ. Here is a street musician on the boardwalk, by M:

June

June saw the beginning of a still secret online writing project by D, which will take years to complete. The mystery will be lifted in good time. But we can reveal already that the project will be an effort to convey some of the hard-won knowledge of economics D has acquired over the decades in a form easily digestible by everyone.

June also saw a momentous even in our new and ardent hobby of photography: our first joint photography exhibit! This was the outcome of chance conversations D had with the good people who run and work in Elcy’s Cafe in Glenside, where D often takes a few minutes to enjoy a coffee before taking a train to the office on weekdays. To cut the story short, we knew that Elcy’s often runs art shows, and indeed we purchased a beautiful collage of Philadelphia several months ago from one such show. So D asked and found out who is in charge of these shows, back in March, we met with her, and together we all decided on 25 photos by M and D to be shown from June 24 to early August. It was a bit hectic getting the photos printed and preparing our artists’ statements, SmugMug accounts, and business cards (!) and M did a tremendous amount of work framing photos. We were ready on time (with not a day to spare).

Speaking of our SmugMug accounts, here they are: Marianne’s and Dimitrios’s.

This album, captured in haste under difficult lighting conditions, shows the show right after it was set up, while this album shows photos from the opening party on June 26, taken by friends. The party was a blast, and several of our photos were sold. During the rest of the time the show was open, several of the notecards with M’s photos that were part of the show sold as well.

We also enjoyed the backyard gazebo with the good weather of June. Here is a sneaky capture by M of D reading there in the evening:

July

July started with us and friends and family spending two weeks in Ocean City, NJ. We had a great time, felt refreshed, and also had the chance to make some good photos (sense a theme?). The sunset of July 5 proved especially beautiful:

After our return home, D moved to a great big office that will be his until he steps down as graduate director of his department at the end of June 2017 (he cannot wait, despite the niceness of this office, as the job is just too tedious and stressful, as he never tires telling people, and he has a very capable colleague ready to take the reins).

For M, it was a very exciting time, with her having two photos accepted for an exhibit at the venerable Philadelphia Sketch Club. Here are her two photos and M at the awards party, where she inexplicably (says D emphatically) did not receive any award.

August

Rarely has a month started as well as this one. On August 2, M went for one of her periodic checkups with Dr. Hanjani, who, for the first time ever, said that it “may be that you are cured”. He has been studiously avoiding even hinting at such a possibility since M was diagnosed in 2000, and he was careful to insert that “may”, but we certainly took heart from this statement and went off to celebrate a bit (at Krater, in New Hope):

The month continued to offer goodness, with a road trip to Quebec City in Canada, to visit Dominick, Margherita, and Caterina in their apartment there. On the way to Canada, we stopped for two days in Lake George, where we had a nice time and photo opportunities, before our few days of running around Quebec City and the Ile d’Orleans, with some seriously delicious eats and beautiful views. M caught a great image of the bounty of the earth:

September

Another academic year started. We had a fun weekend in Ocean City with Dominique, Steve, and their girls. This was the weekend of the annual air show that is held there, and D was lucky enough to catch a clear photo of two Navy jets:

At the end of the month we visited Maryland for a baby shower for Marianne’s niece Christina and a small Miserandino family reunion.

October

Work continued to keep us busy, but we had time to enjoy some great concerts by Lyric Fest and Piffaro. Late in the month we escaped to the Eastern shore of Maryland for a weekend of exploration, where we were able to see some beautiful nature, such as this beautiful butterfly that M captured:

November

November was the month M’s photography class at the University of the Arts ended. M’s final project was a documentary photo essay about Elcy’s coffee shop, the very one where we had our joint photo exhibit in the summer. Here is one M’s photos for her final project:

We joined Suzanne and her family and our mutual friends for Thanksgiving, having a fantastic time as always catching up with dear people and meeting new friends. The Saturday after we paid a visit to Dominique and Steve’s in Jersey City, where we had a “leftovers dinner” with them, M’s brother Anthony and his wife Barbara and daughter April, as well as nephew Dominick and Margherita and Caterina, whom we had visited in Quebec City in August.

December

The last month of 2016 was a bit hectic until just about Christmas, as both of our academic schedules had us grading exams and papers right up to the 22nd. But we were able to make our escape to Florida’s Sanibel Island from the 23d to the 28th, where we enjoyed catching up with some sunny warmth, the beach, and dolphins and beautiful birds.

We are looking forward to 2017 hoping it will bring us and everyone continuing good health and our country and the world less acrimony and more freedom and progress, especially in human rights and the environment.

Categories
Life Photos vacation

Retrospective 2015 Postscriptum

As mentioned at the end of the previous post, we paid a visit to Florida, namely Captiva Island, from December 23 to 28. It was really relaxing, and filled with beautiful sights. We were both happy to have our cameras with us. Without further ado, here are a couple of ways to view my album of “only” 74 photos I made and edited (if you think that’s too many, it is a small subset of the 889 photos I actually shot with my camera, and there were also a couple of dozen with my iPhone which are not in this album). Both links have the same photos, but the Dropbox one has my quirky names of the photos, too. Both links will let you download photos if you want to. Oh, and enjoy this little animation of a jumping dolphin.

In Google Photos

On Dropbox