Barb and I got ready to celebrate our 50th birthdays and our 25th anniversary. Allie continued with 7th grade at GCS. It was a big year.
We started the new year with an open house party for friends and neighbors at our house on January 5. I think this was the second of these annual parties that we threw. There were no pictures because I was running around serving food and drinks while Barb and Allie did most of the entertaining. These get togethers were a nice chance to see people but they were a lot of work, both to clean the house and prepare the food. They didn’t last much longer, particularly after I got involved with robotics which had its own early January events. This party featured a big pot of my White Chili which Faith enjoyed so much she asked for the recipe. I didn’t really have a recipe but put one together for her.
We had gotten to be good friends with Faith, Rick and Sydney Speizman by this point, regularly going to dinners together and discussing vacation plans. Faith and I also got more involved with MYPIC activities and grant writing. It was very nice to find a family at GCS we could get along with.
A week later we visited Chris Garwood in her new apartment in Owings Mills to meet her new puppy, a King Charles Spaniel named Ruby. Chris was in a new apartment with a new dog because she and Gerard had gotten or were still getting a divorce. It was too bad they couldn’t stay together but while we liked both Gerard and Chris, we mostly had sympathy with Chris for putting up with Gerard and his quirks for many years.
On January 17 we had a good dumping of snow, one of our biggest so far at Paddington. Our still-new trees could barely stand it.
In early March, Allie got her science fair poster ready. This year’s topic: The Human Genome Project. Even Georgie was impressed.
Later in March, we took a Spring Break trip to Paris (covered in one post), Normandy and the Loire Valley (covered in a second post). We packed a lot into those 7 days…read all about it!
On April 4 we drove up to Philadelphia (West Chester, to be specific) to see Kristen and Joe who were in town for a hockey tournament. It was great to see them. We didn’t watch any hockey but had a nice lunch together in beautiful downtown West Chester. Go Kristen!
Springtime at Pfefferkorn with the first blooms of our baby trees. April can bring some beautiful days.
A week later, on a particularly nice mid-April day, I walked up the road to attempt some artsy photos of our neighbor’s field dappled with buttercups and cows. They turned out to be some of my favorite photos of our neighborhood…so I’ve included them all. The cows never looked better. I ended up using one of the shots for years as my home screen background and the online profile picture for my Live in Howard County blog and years later for my BillzDaze site.
On April 18, after dozens (and dozens) of emails to coordinate everyone’s comings and goings, Gerard, Tony, Larry, Marcus, Tom Coons and I went to see the U2 3D concert film in the IMAX theater at the Maryland Science Center. It was one of the few times we were able to coordinate something among the six of us. It took so much effort I don’t think we did anything like it again until Barb’s retirement dinner (minus Gerard). The movie wasn’t all that good, either. We evidently had dinner together afterwards at Tabrizi’s, a longtime Middle Eastern restaurant in Baltimore, though frankly I have no memory of that.
In May we celebrated our 25th anniversary with a return to the Inn at Little Washington. This was the third time for Barb and me (our 10th and 20th anniversaries previously) and the second for Allie, though this would be the first time she ate the full gourmet dinner. The whole dinner was wonderful but the thing we remembered the most was an amuse bouche, “The World’s Smallest Baked Potato” loaded with all the trimmings, one of Chef Patrick O’Connell’s signature whimsies.
Allie and I participated in a second year of MYPIC, the Maryland Youth Partners in Change, the non-profit collaboration between Glenelg Country School and Barclay Elementary/Middle School from Baltimore City. I was even more involved, chaperoning most of the field trips and working with Faith Horowitz (Speizman) on several funding proposals, including this one (plus attachments) to the Goldsmith Family Foundation (it worked…Mr. Weeks got a grant from them). I also put together another year-end slide summary. It’s fair to say at this point I was getting more out of the program than Allie. Unfortunately, Allie mostly learned cynical lessons about wealth, class, and racial disparities between and among the students, and well-intentioned but ineffective efforts to bridge them by do-good adults.
Later in May, Allie had a Spanish project with her classmate Katie Friedman. The girls made a video in Spanish showing how to make chocolate chip cookies. I have the raw outtakes filmed at Katie’s house, of which here are a few, but so far I have not been able to find the edited final version. While I think these videos may make Aunt Laurie and Cousin Maggie cringe on many levels — and probably Allie and Katie as well — Julia Child has nothing to fear.
The introduction:
Katie’s brother interrupts a take:
The longest of the videos, mostly a matter of running the blender.
Adding the chocolate chips.
Cookies go in the over, and a fancy handoff of the camera.
The final taste.
At the end of May, Allie attended Katie’s Bat Mitzva. Everyone was growing up…sorta.
In June, Allie and I embarked on her class trip adventure to Argentina. This turned out to be quite a fun trip for both the kids and the parents that went along. The trip took up to Buenos Aires, Iguazu Falls, and Mendoza (a last-minute substitute in place of Bariloche which was off-limits due to an ash-spewing Chilean volcano).
Allie and I extended our South American adventure with a stop in the Galapagos to see my niece (and Allie’s cousin) Jill.
This combined journey to Argentina and the Galapagos ended up being one of the finest trips of my life. Experiencing the roaring majesty of Iguazu Falls, the deep blue sky over the white Andes near Mendoza, the diverse and special wildlife of the Galapagos, and sharing the whole journey with Allie made this a very special trip.
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