To keep up with the new tradition of virtually saving our holiday letter, here’s the 2019 letter:
Hello from NJ! Our annual highlights include work travel and new appliances!
We kicked off 2019 by readjusting to our time zone after our December 2018 UK visit (which included watching Crystal Palace, our English Premier League team of choice, at Selhurst Park, and seeing Hadestown, a musical we’ve seen in three iterations on two continents).
As usual, we headed to NOLA in January for the Crescent City Cup Scrabble tournament that Kate co-hosts. This was the only tournament she played this year, but we enjoyed excellent Scrabble socializing, especially at Scrabble weddings in Seattle (congrats, Jen and Evans!) and NJ (congrats, Mina and Cesar!)—also in friend news, Kurt moved to NYC for a job at NYU (congrats, Kurt!) and has been a bad? good? influence on our theater habits. Shows and concerts seen this year number about 50 (?!), with at least two more to come (West Side Story on Broadway and Moby Dick at ART in Boston).
When we weren’t traveling back and forth to NYC, we took longer trips for work and family milestones. Kate spent a few days in Grenada on a medical school visit (occasional travel to Caribbean resorts is a job perk). Tim had no interest in sandy beaches, but his annual professional conference took us to exotic Oklahoma City, which was actually a pretty cute place to spend a couple of days (and to see our friend Nadine before she moved to Australia). Overall though, Tim wins the best work travel location by scoring a two-week teaching gig in Japan in June. The schedule only required classroom time on weekends, so Kate joined him in Tokyo for a week before he went on to Osaka, then extended his trip to see Nadine in Brisbane with a brief layover in Taipei (while Kate had to return to real life, alas). The adventures are captured pretty well on Facebook—lots of food, kabuki theater, shrines and temples. We are scheming about how to return to Asia ASAP (potentially this coming summer)...
A Kate conference took us to Chicago for a few days in March, and we returned to the city in November to say goodbye to Kate’s childhood home and help her parents pack up for their big retirement move to North Las Vegas. Just before our trip to Japan, we headed to California for another family event: Tim’s grandmother’s funeral--we enjoyed reminiscing with all of the family who convened to celebrate her 99-year life. Our most recent family trip was to Urbana, Maryland, where we shared Thanksgiving dinner with Becca and her family.
At home, this July, we welcomed a new, somewhat antisocial but entertaining feline housemate named Clyde (www.instagram.com/clydesquatch/) who negotiates cat tree perches with Squeaky and Charlie. He came with a human named Conor, who is a somewhat more social and also useful in that he can pay some rent. Said rent has helped subsidize a new washing dryer, a new water heater, and a new French Door refrigerator—this has been on Kate’s wish list for years (and was also subsidized by Tim’s parents as a Christmas gift—thanks parents!).
For the first time ever, we’re spending Christmas at home rather than traveling to family or abroad. While we’ll miss seeing people or new places, we’re pretty excited to have some quality couch time. Tim was awarded a $2.5 million grant this semester and has been working extra hard to get the project up and running; one of Kate’s colleagues left for a job in Seattle, so she has been working extra hard to make up for being understaffed.
As always, we welcome all visitors! We still have plenty of space in the house (and extra space in the new and improved fridge), plus Conor and Clyde brought us about 600 board games, so there are plenty of games for the playing and cats for the petting! Happy holidays and stay in touch!
