As I’ve tooled about town thinking on this letter, I’ve wondered if it’s even possible for a family with active Facebook, Picasa, and Vimeo accounts to write an original Holiday missive anymore. With the tid-bits of our lives published in other more pithy and colorful media, does this embarrassingly tenuous tradition (note our two-year lapse in production) stand a chance?
For those of you that don’t keep up with our online proxies (see appendix B) here’s a little something:
Eleanor is almost 6 years old, she’s lost her two bottom-front teeth, she’s reading (a little, and it seems to wear her out), and her sense of humor is blossoming. She’s got a solid grasp on genuine jokes (see appendix A) and those moments when she deviates from standard form are truly delighting. But still, in her own words, “funny adults are confusing.” I get that. Fifteen months ago Eleanor started Suzuki method violin and she’s proud enough of her hard work to love performing for visitors. (For those of you that know Suzuki code, she is at “Go Tell Aunt Rhody”.) I think it’s worth noting for posterity that at the age of almost 6, Eleanor can stand up for herself and, conversely, be flexible -- both are issues I’ve worried about in turn. I’d also like to note she is a kind friend to her fellow kindergartners.
Mike still loves his job. This year he spent two weeks at an Intel site in Israel, a week at one in Austin, and a couple of weeks at sites in California… which really isn’t much traveling relative to someone who travels, but still, we miss him terribly when he is gone because we all do better together. Sometime since we last chatted, he was given the title of Principal Engineer at Intel, an honor second only to his recent promotion to Accompanist to Eleanor. It’s a treat to see them perform together (and you can, because there is a Vimeo video for this).
I continue to divide my time between Eleanor, Arm Bibs and volunteer community organizing. Since our last letter, I’ve had the rare experience of seeing one of my volunteer projects really take off -- greeted with great enthusiasm, in its first few months Solarize Portland more than tripled the number of residential solar-PV installations in Portland. It has since spread around the state, and the City of Portland is now licensing the name from me and doing the heavy lifting. Help me remember this success as I bang my head against a wall for the next decade or so on other projects.
Now for the rest of our update which, for many of you, holds the only “news” to be had in this letter. There are two small moments from our year I’d like to tuck safely in these lines for a future unearthing. Their print worthiness is debatable, but still…
- The rain’s edge. One fairly ordinary day we found ourselves sitting, quite extraordinarily, at the rain’s edge. After marveling at an unusually hard rain coming down over our back yard, Eleanor and I wandered by the windows in the front of the house only to find Mike casually moving the trash cans as if nothing was pelting him in the head. And nothing was! With a visit to the driveway we found our house sitting at the very place where the rain stops. Or starts, I guess. Clearly this is happening all over the world, all of the time, but it was the first time any of us had seen such a border up close and so precise. It was something.
- Caterpillars poop. Worried about a lack-luster crop yield from the Red Currant bush the previous Spring, Eleanor and I set out to inspect the thing early this Spring and we found it covered in iridescent green caterpillars. Covered. Alarmingly so. The ensuing investigation as to the intentions of these little guys involved some *careful* caterpillar observation, during which we noticed a growing number of teeny-tiny, royal-blue beads collecting around them. Speculation varied, but the origin of these beads was settled when we witnessed one actually emerging from the back end of a caterpillar… ploop! Tiny, royal-blue, caterpillar poop, right in our own hands. Ok, so having put that down on the page it seems a little lame, and quite possibly inappropriate for a holiday letter. But really. At the time it seemed like great luck to witness such a small and fleeting moment.
There you have it, one moment as big as the whole sky and one moment as small as a bead, heretofore un-posted in any media at all. We wish everyone a year of good health and great peace.
Love, Stephanie + Mike + Eleanor
