2008 Second Half

Barb and I continued to celebrate our 50th birthdays and our 25th anniversary. Allie started 8th grade at GCS. It continued to be a big year.


Allie spent two weeks in early July at a JHU CTY class, Whodunit? Mystery and Suspense in Literature and Film, at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. I think she enjoyed the class. I enjoyed driving up and back to Easton, a cute little town, the couple of times to deliver and retrieve her.

On Saturday, July 19, Deb Dettmer invited us to see the Orioles at Camden Yards where her daughter Lisa Miller sang the national anthem. I’m not quite sure how she got the gig — I think she just signed up for an audition at the beginning of the year. In any case, it was pretty cool. Congrats to Lisa!

For nostalgia’s sake, the O’s were playing the Detroit Tigers. The O’s lineup was pretty good, back in the day, and they eventually won 11-10 in the 10th inning. Go O’s!

The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing kicked off on August 8 with a hugely impressive opening ceremony. Watching that ceremony and seeing blanket coverage of the changes that had taken place in China firmly planted the seed of returning for our own visit the next year.

A day later, Allie and I went to Colorado to spend a week with the Embreys. We had some fun goofing around with Kristen and their new cats, Bo and Bella, and spent some time in the mountains with Joe.

After a week, Barb came out for a few days then the three of us jetted off for some more fun in Hawaii, this time exploring Maui and Kauai. See the links for full details of the trips.

After we got back from Hawaii, I started to pay much closer attention to the looming financial crisis which had been brewing for about a year and reached a head in September-October. The housing market collapse fed into failures of major financial firms including Lehman Brothers which in turn caused a downward spiral in stocks and panic on Wall Street. Lame duck President George W. Bush basically handed the problem to his Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, the only people in Washington anyone seemed to trust. The crisis pretty much sealed the fate of Republican presidential candidate John McCain who had already shot himself in the foot by choosing Sarah Palin as a running mate. The Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, offered hope, literally, but had hardly any track record. It was a scary time with no one really sure if we were headed into another Great Depression or what.

Nevertheless, in September it was back to school with Allie entering 8th grade. The year started with a formal dance; Sydney and Allie got ready at our house.

At the end of September, Allie went for a sleepover at Amy’s house, along with Sydney and Ellen. Here are some of the photos Allie brought back. I’ll spare you the giggly videos.

October was birthday time, Allie’s 13th, with a Build-a-Bear party at Columbia Mall. Our American girl.

The party migrated to the food court for pizza and an All-American cookie cake.

And finally a sleepover for a select few at home, including Ellen and Amy…but the only good photos were of Allie.

Allie showed her new bear the computer I got her the previous Christmas, the only photo I know of with the computer in operation.

What did we do for Barb’s 50th birthday? I know I got her some flowers delivered at work and we had dinner with Leila a couple of days before her birthday…but it wasn’t specifically a birthday dinner. Whatever it was, we didn’t take any pictures. We had celebrated all through the year, basically. Maybe the financial crisis made it unseemly to keep on celebrating.

By this time in 8th grade, Allie and Sydney were close friends with frequent sleepovers and pool parties. Barb and I were also good friends and frequent dinner buddies with Faith and Rick. It was great to have another GCS family we could all enjoy being with. Around this time, however, Rick and Faith started to have doubts about the suitability of GCS for Sydney’s high school years. They began actively investigating other schools and before long decided to enroll Sydney at Good Counsel for high school. It made us think about alternatives to GCS for Allie but we decided it was better for her to stay. We didn’t have the same worries about the quality of a GCS education; Allie was not Sydney and I was not Rick. I don’t regret the decision and I hope Allie doesn’t either. It would spell an eventual distancing in our relationships with their family, but for the time being we started talking about going to China together in the summer. That would bring us much closer in the near term.

On a different topic, in September and October, Sue opened the discussion among family members about what to do about Mom and Dad’s living conditions and plans for the future. She broached the possibility of having them move to Gainesville and investigate assisted living facilities. Sue had an opening discussion with Mom and Dad and it went about as well as could be expected. Mom was vaguely open to the ideas; Dad was less enthusiastic but didn’t dismiss the discussion outright. More to come on this topic, but credit to Sue for getting the ball rolling and being willing and interested in having them near her in Gainesville.

And on yet another topic, in October of 2008 I started Live in Howard County, my blog about restaurants and activities in our fair county. It was an interesting experiment to get my toes wet in a new medium.

A random photo of Allie from mid-October…maybe reacting to my becoming a blogger.

At the end of October we installed our solar panel battery backup system. I took advantage of various state and county tax credits to install the original solar array in May 2008 for very little direct cost. The tax breaks basically paid for this small one-kilowatt system. It only generated about 10-15% of the electricity we used in a month, but it was something. The battery backup proved to be very reliable addition offering peace of mind power for a set of critical circuits, enough power for short outages. And short outages were all that we have experienced, knock on wood. You can read more about our solar experience in a series of posts on Live in Howard County.

Allie was on the GCS field hockey team with many of her friends for this 8th grade season. Here are a couple of the dozens of mugging photos we have from various bus trips to away games. No photos of the actual games, just the bus trips. And only one photo with Allie in it. But she was on the team!

Photo taken in the hallway at GCS in mid-November. Not sure of the occasion.

Leila arranged a 50th Birthday party in early November for Barb at her house just for the ladies from work. Let’s see how many of them I can name. And the cake was from Sugarbaker’s, Barb’s favorite.

Allie was a cheerleader in a school production of High School Musical that featured Sydney (note she has the headset microphone) and many of the 8th grade girls. Allie choreographed a dance number. Go Team!

Also in November, Allie went into work one day (probably a Saturday) with Barb. We get to see Barb’s office!

At the end of November, one of Barb’s colleagues, Paul stopped by with his new (used) Ferrari. He took Barb for a spin. It’s the last we saw of him, though he did drop Barb off before he rode into the sunset.

We settled on the basic itinerary of our summer 2009 trip to China with the Spiezmans, making airline reservations. I leaned on the good graces of Chris Hunsberger, the husband of Barb’s colleague Amy, to get us upgraded reservations at the Four Seasons hotels in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

The first weekend in December we were invited to celebrate the first birthday of Vishnu, son of Barb’s colleague Arathi and her husband Eric. They had become neighbors, moving into a house about a 1/2 mile from ours. We thought we might become closer family friends but it was not to be. Among the other attendees were Barb’s colleague Amy and her husband, Mike Rosenbaum, who later surprised us by making a quixotic quixotic bid for Maryland governor in 2022.

On December 15 we hosted a combined office holiday and retirement party for Barb’s colleague, Jeff Golland.

Holiday photo op! Got to get things ready for our holiday newsletter.

Having just been in the Galapgos in June and with a big trip to China in the works for the next summer, we decided not to join in the festivities for Jill and Javier’s wedding in December, but a fine time seem to have been had by those who attended, including Sue, Keri, Susanna, Laurie and Maggie and even cousins from Valdosta.

After Christmas, Allie and I took a busy day to explore museums in DC, including the National Portrait Gallery to see the Stephen Colbert portrait in its place of honor near the bathroom, the American History Museum for the First Ladies’ gowns (looking for Michelle Obama’s but it wasn’t there yet), and the Air and Space Museum with evidently an emphasis on Mars rovers and robot explorers…perhaps a premonition of my adventures in robotics that would start the next year.

To wrap up the year and as a final anniversary present, I created a 25th Anniversary book in Shutterfly, my first such effort. As of 2023, Shutterfly is threatening to delete the online project so I’ve shot photos of each page, even though it’s pretty much redundant with this whole site. Still, it’s a nice little book, so for posterity, here it is. I can understand the appeal of both digital and hardcover formats (though my clear preference is digital).

In 2011, we created a similar book for Grandmom’s 90th Birthday. I recently ordered a new copy of it and will have to give it the same treatment, eventually.

Next Post: 2009 First Half

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