Dear friends and family,
Our Christmas cactus is blooming on our bay window. The bare branches of the trees allow the winter sunset, gaudy blue and pink, to be seen from the kitchen. We are always late getting our holiday decorations up. We attribute that to Maryland’s long and beautiful autumn. But the wreath is up with a new gold bow to match our yellow house, and this letter is now at last started.
The highlight of the year for our family was no doubt Sarah’s graduation from the University of Maryland in College Park at the end of May. She spent nearly a year of her college time studying in Quebec province and graduated with a BA in French language and literature. We all went to the two graduation ceremonies—the large university-wide one and the small departmental one. Bruce’s parents accompanied us to the smaller ceremony, the reception, and our at-home party afterwards. A few days later Bruce and Sue, Sarah, Karin and Dan spent a long weekend in Williamsburg to continue the celebration. We shared our time between Colonial Williamsburg of the 18th century and Busch Gardens Amusement Park of the 21st. Some people went on the scary rides; others learned lots at the live animal area. Sarah is now ending her first semester as a graduate student at College Park, in Health Education. Her admin assistant job in the Dean’s office is not a barrel of giggles, but it pays well and provides free tuition. (UK translation: no fees for classes.) She comes back to Columbia to do laundry and to work in her Tae Kwon Do classes.
We all had a fun event in the spring: Karin’s friend Rena from theater camp in the early 90s, who was a bridesmaid at her wedding, came to Baltimore in a traveling show of Les Misérables. She sings beautifully. We waited outside the stage door in the rain like groupies. The big difference was that she greeted us all with a big hug and kiss.
Bruce retired from the government two years ago and continues his work with a defense contractor, with his former government employer as the principal customer. Garden, computers, and house projects seem to occupy most of the rest of the time. The woodchuck who used to eat his garden appears to have moved out of our neighborhood, but he has been replaced as principal pest with a horde of slugs, who came close to winning the battle this year. Next year’s campaign includes a counterattack with a new product, optimistically named “Escar-Go.”
Sue Anne retired from her job as a floral designer. She’d had all the fun she could take. Her thumb still hurts: it’s very demanding work physically. Still she did enjoy her year and a half making beautiful arrangements for special occasions, mostly happy, some sad. She still works at Historic Oakland, the 1811 house owned by our home-owners association. She has gone to (supervised) many weddings, concerts and parties. The acoustics at Oakland are wonderful, so she especially enjoys being paid to attend (work at) a concert. Recently she has had a very fun time designing and selling theorem paintings for Oakland’s giftshop. This type of stencil painting on fabric was popular when Oakland was built, so the historian in Sue Anne is content. It is also a form of printmaking called pochoir, so it is not far from her interests and training. These are original contemporary designs—no ‘fake folk’ here. Should you wish, you can see some of Sue’s relief prints at worldprintmakers.com.
Karin and Dan are doing well. They went to New Orleans for their first anniversary, painted their townhouse primary colors inside (it looks great), and threw a wonderful Halloween party. Karin was Cruella de Vil, Dan was a convict with bad teeth, Bruce a devil complete with horns and tail, Sue Anne went as the Berlin Wall, and Sarah as an Austin Powers girl with red snake skin dress.
Bruce and Sue Anne made their second annual trip an hour north to Pennsylvania to the Kennet Square Mushroom Festival. It is mostly a street fair, but instead of eating candy cotton or hot dogs, you eat three or four courses of gourmet mushroom treats. All the restaurants specialize in mushrooms, as there are several mushroom farms in this little town.
Bruce and Sue’s big treat this year was a week in Germany in October. They had a great time. Bruce, the computer guru from the dark ages (the 1960s) had a wonderful time researching and booking the whole thing on the Web. Karin, the new generation Web designer and travel enthusiast, found a good site for tickets and encouraged ol’ Mom and Dad to go somewhere. All the tiny, picturesque hotels were chosen and booked from the Web. They went to Goslar in the Harz Mountains, Lübeck on the Baltic Sea, Berlin, and Meissen. And rented a purple car from Ford called the “Ka,” about the size of a large shoebox. Saying “Ka” seemed very natural to their New England linguistic roots. This was their first time ever in the former East Germany and their first time back to Berlin since the Wall came down. Sarah took care of the house (and two cats and a dog) while they were gone. They communicated by e-mail (we’re bbb@acm.org), and got the yucky news that the water heater had flooded the basement while they were in Berlin. They enjoyed the rest of the trip anyway and tried not to think about water. We’ve posted copies of their daily e-mails on our Web site, bottomley.homepage.com.
During the summer we had a rolling family reunion in Connecticut and Massachusetts with Sue’s brother Ted and family and sister Aimée and family from Wisconsin, and with cousins, aunts, and uncle. People came, people left. Every day the mix was different. It was especially nice to spend several days with our nephew Nate, the mountain climber. Nate climbed several high peaks while in New England including Mt. Washington with his Uncle Ted.
We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a joyous and healthy 2001.