Happy x&n years to all. We had a relaxed and quiet xmas here. Except for when Aya visitied us and came back from her Salsa dances all excited, at midnight, and would start demonstrating the new moves she learned in our kitchen, including loud floor stomping and entertaining body contortions, as picture here:
As is my habit, I bought myself a Dyson vacuum for xmas. This time a space age shooter hand vac:
We drove to NH for New Years. And found lots of snow! This is Helen just before she dives into the snow to make angels:
And this is A&I making the doorman snowman:
Here it may look like we are juggling snowballs, but in truth, we are pleading the invisible tree monkeys that nobody else sees not to poop on us:
Noah received a 3 inch Bach for New Years. That little Bach guy, famous for fathering 19 children, apparently also likes to drink the champaign bubbly:
Next we have random couple we found. They look happy. Don't worry, he does not rip her ear off, as it looks like he is about to here:
And I put on skates, I think for the first time since failing badly to skate with some oversized skates in the 'Bowl' skating ring when I must have been 3 or so:
We made it back to Syracuse after a knuckle whitening 10 your snowstorm drive. Last weekend we went to Helen's delayed department xmas party at a fancy English mansion that does parties. After MUCH cajoling, her co-workers got here to shoot a few rounds of pool in the billards room. This picture is just before she misses the white ball with the stick and gives up in a cuestick waving fury, I fear never to shoot again:
Nick spent xmas with roomy George and New Years with Chloe and is now in China for a few weeks, in Shang-Hi, I think, visiting relatives with Chloe. Zach has started running, with plans to run a Marathon later this year.
Helen passed the Neurology boards she took a few months ago. Also forgot to post this radio show she did last fall .
I got a couple of awards from IBM, one in Dec and one last week. The one last week was for the work I did on the 2nd generation chip we put into the BlueGene supercomputer last year, making it 3x faster at 1/2 the power of the previous chip, which already had 1/10 the mips/watt of other supercomputers. I'm gonna use the awards monies on a vacation with Nick, Zach, and their girls down in Saint Thomas during Nick's spring break end of March.
I'm out of news. I'll post again when I get good photos of the invisible tree monkeys.
Bruce
