Newell Ann and Van's Holiday Newsletter
2001
Holiday greetings from the Northwest!
It has been a good year for the four of us, and as the year draws to an end we find that there is plenty of joy in our lives and we have very much to be thankful for. Our two little ones, Clara and Oliver, are growing like weeds.
Clara is four and a half, and is in preschool this year. She is our little "dress-up" queen: she has an enormous box of dress-up clothes and loves nothing better than to put them all on at once, six skirts, three sashes and five headbands in her hair. She also enjoys hiking (particularly terrifying her parents by scrambling up steep rock scrabble) and pedaling a bicycle that hasn't quite lost its training wheels yet. She can't actually read yet, but she has memorized plenty of her picture books, and loves reading them out loud, especially to her baby brother Oliver.
Oliver, or "Ollers" as we call him, is one and a half. He gave up crawling on his first birthday last April, and his vocabulary is increasing daily. His first word was "uh-oh" - not a very auspicious beginning! We still hear that word a lot. Another early word was "Caa," his name for his beloved big sister Clara. And then two weeks ago, his first sentence, also directed at his sister, a very clear "Go away!" He is into everything, including his sister's toys; we are sure we know who he learned this sentence from. Now that he can walk and talk, we probably should call him a toddler, but he is still very much a baby to us.
We had a very moderate Christmas, just exactly what we wanted. One of the highlights for us was seeing Oliver's face when he saw our old Lionel train puffing around the Christmas tree in our very own home. He started wildly gesticulating and then broke into a little dance. He really wanted to say something about it, but he didn't know how. Squealing noises were about all we heard. Clara was also very excited, but in a much more mature four-and-a-half year-old way.
Van is still working at Verizon (formerly GTE) designing data networks. He spent many days in Spokane working on a Voice Over IP telephone install. He also designed a brand-spanking-new data network for Washington's only working nuclear power plant and took a whole bunch of Cisco tests. Fortunately, he was not "downsized", although he did pick up some extra work from those who were.
Van loves his work, loves it so much that he's even devoted a third of our (large) kitchen to his ever-expanding home network. To Newell Ann's delight, Van has set up VANNET right in the house, with 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps Ethernet. He has 7 nodes, including 3 servers in the kitchen. Featured operating systems include Linux (2.4 kernel), Linux (2.2 kernel), Solaris 8, BeOS, Windows 98, and Windows 2000. There was also a brief experiment with Free BSD, which will perhaps turn into a regular server once hardware is available. In the barn, there is a Mac SE/30 project waiting for a software upgrade and an Ethernet card.
Newell Ann is still, yes still ABD (all but dissertation) at the University of Washington. This year has been very accurately described as "the year of servitude". I don't expect to get very much of my dissertation done this year, as I am teaching all three quarters. In the Fall Quarter, I taught an undergraduate class called "The Chinese Language" for a faculty member who is on leave this year. It was a basic introduction to the linguistic study of Chinese: dialects, history of the language, origins and development of the writing system, and other such topics. I learned a tremendous amount, and I think my students did too. Winter Quarter and Spring Quarter I will be teaching Classical Chinese to undergraduates and grad students. Teaching is taking a tremendous amount of time and energy, but it has been extremely rewarding. Although I won't be making any "progress" on my dissertation research this year, I don't have any regrets, as I am certainly making progress of another type, and both teaching and research are important components of my career track.
In addition to teaching, I also presented a paper at the 4th International Conference for Classical Chinese Grammar in Vancouver, BC. Van tagged along with the kids, and afterwards we took a short holiday north of Vancouver.
We have mostly stayed near home this year, and let our little grandparent magnets draw the visitors to us. We enjoyed visits from both sets of grandparents, and also from NA's Aunt Susie, Uncle Larry, and cousins Sarah and Sam, as well as aunt and uncle Joanna and Lee and cousin Jeff, here to visit Lee & Jo's daughter Shanna. For one brief year we had the luxury of having family living nearby, while Shanna and Trevor were living up here, but they have moved back to the desert in West Texas. We are sad to see them go but Terlinqua is the place for them to be right now.
We did manage to make it out of state a few times, up to BC, and once all the way down to Texas so Clara and Oliver could visit with their great-grandparents, Great-grandmother Emery and Great-grandfather Carr. We are hoping to venture as far away as the east coast, Richmond, Virginia, to visit Newell Ann's parents and brother next spring.
We wish you the very best in the coming year. Please stay in touch!
May you enjoy
Happiness, Health and Good Fortune in 2002,
the Year of the Horse.
Van, Newell Ann, Clara and Oliver
