December 20,2015

Dear Everyone,

I’m eating some left over black olive/jalapeno pizza while taping the Bears game, and waiting for our time slot to go to the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens.  The pizza was ordered in honor of Lucas, who returned last night from six months in Europe, primarily Italy, but also Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Tunisia (with Tunisia, Lucas has been on every continent except Antarctica!).  Lucas seems much the same, but, in my opinion, I think his time in Italy was overly sequestered with other students in his program, and it was less of a cultural exchange than courses on history and art history.  I hope, but fear that this is due to the ever growing security fears of our Orwellian world.  I know when I was in France in the late seventies (when the Italian Red Brigade was at its infamous peak) no one thought much about bombs or kidnappings – certainly innocent bystanders did not seem to be at risk.  Maybe if I had been in Northern Ireland I would have a different opinion. Anyway, don’t try out your Italian on him in Mexico.  Cindy keeps pointing out that the program is NOT billed as a cultural exchange, but an opportunity for Classics, Art History and Archaeology majors to study on site.  Unlike many term abroad programs that have classes only a few times per week, Lucas was in the classroom, museum or historical site 3-6 hours per day.

As everyone who gets this letter knows, Jasper was accepted to Carnegie Mellon by early decision, so he is definitely going to be in Pittsburgh next year.  We are all pretty excited, and I don’t know who feels more relief – Jasper or Cindy.  As Cindy put it on her Facebook page (I paraphrase) three kids, multiple college trips, many applications (I would add 23 years of raising them), and it’s finally over. We still have a lot of friends in Pittsburgh to look out for Jasper if necessary, and I hope I can get him up to my old aikido club once in a while to participate in their Iaido practice.  We’ll see if he has the will and the time.

I often communicate with Joey and Aaron about recent books that I liked, so I won’t discuss these here, other than these two: Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by ‘David Wong’, the author of John Dies At the End (we are going to try to watch this on Netflix), and Crooked by Austin Grossman - - a great read for anyone who remembers the sixties, and Joey informed me that the book on tape uses a character actor who sounds like Nixon - - totally over the top. .  I did see a recent Netflix series, Jessica Jones, which I liked a lot.  Also, the Syfy channel is going to have a series based on Lev Grossman’s The Magicians.  There was a sneak preview I saw last week; this series looks pretty good if you enjoyed his books.

Nothing much is new at work.  Now that Jasper is in swim practice or at swim meets most Saturday mornings, I have been going into work to help out the pathologist on call.  Often, the weekend workload is more than any other day of the week, and it seems stupid to make one person shoulder all of it.  We are having a ‘Secret Santa’ party at work; by chance I selected Jami Walloch, so I got him a fitness kit for the older than 60 set: ibuprofen, ben-gay, Band-Aids, etc.

I hope you all have a good time in Cancun!

Love, H.