Holiday Greetings from the Nation’s Capitol!
It’s been yet another busy year. Regarding home impro
vement, we finally finished re-doing the stairs. Beyond that, we don’t have much to show except for new paint in the living and dining rooms. The dining room has no wood trim – that’s Edward’s next project. The painting project took so long because Edward had to reconstruct various parts of the walls in the dining area, including one area twice, after having to rip out the new drywall so that we could have (totally wacky) plumbers install new pipes for an outside faucet in the front (so Dawn doesn’t have to drag the hose from the backyard through the house). And then Edward had to replace a few broken or rotted floorboards. This all took several months. Dawn was very exasperated about not having a dining room table for all that time except for the weekend when her dad came to visit.
Our sad news is that our evil-but-beloved cat Louise (picture at left) died in April, at the ripe old age of 18. We had her cremated and buried her in the backyard with her Mr. Mousie, in a grand ceremony with a home-made gravestone. In May, we got another cat, a pretty white female with blue eyes and gray tabby markings. Her name is Evie, and she’s both adorable and a little on the crazy-obsessive side. She’s spent much of her time with us in an Elizabethan collar, first because of an eye infection and then because she developed a strange insistence upon licking her inner thighs raw and bloody. She’s already cost us more in vet bills than Louise and Gwen combined during their entire lives. Evie’s favorite hobbies are tormenting Gwen, playing with her toy mousies, and eating. She’d be quite the little tub o’ lard, but we ration her kibbles to try and keep her stomach from dragging on the ground. We thought Gwen would enjoy being the alpha cat for once, but Evie turns out to be the pushy one – the confidence of youth! See the picture of Evie with Dawn below from her early days with us, slender and complete with shaved belly (from spaying) and Elizabethan collar.
We finally went on a vacation this year – our first non-family vacation since our honeymoon. We went to Boston in early May. We drove there, and it was just amazing to see how late spring comes in New England. Although the temperatures were in the 80s, the forsythia was still blooming and the trees were just starting to get their leaves. We had a wonderful time. Boston’s a beautiful city. We walked everywhere, even to Harvard, which turned out to be a bit further away than we were expecting! Edward went to see the USS Constitution (a famous old wooden Navy ship) twice, once with Dawn and once on his own, while Dawn was visiting the librarians at her new firm. Which brings us to our next news item…
Dawn has a new job. She’s now the D.C. Li
brary Manager for Ropes & Gray, a Boston-based firm. She likes her new job, but doesn’t like having to travel to Boston and New York on a regular basis for meetings and HR training. She especially enjoys making more money than Edward once again! Edward is still at the American Society of Hematology. He has to go work their annual conference for the first time this year, so he’ll be gone to Atlanta for 10 days in December, which is why we’re getting the Christmas tree up and the Christmas cards out before he goes!
We bought new bikes this year and have been riding them a lot. We got Bianchi commuter bikes, so they’re sturdy but not remarkably speedy. Dawn rides to work almost every day and Edward rides about once a week. Dawn likes not having to wait for Edward (who’s almost always running late) to come pick her up from ballet or the gym in the evenings. We try to go for at least one long ride together on the weekends. We rode to Mt. Vernon one Thursday when we had the day off. That’s forty miles, round trip! When we got home we were so exhausted we went straight to bed. Dawn’s planning to get a road bike next year so she can zip on ahead of Edward on those long rides. Edward’s long legs and bigger tires make him much faster than Dawn, but he likes to go slow and not get sweaty so he usually lets Dawn go first.
We wish you all a blessed holiday season and a very Happy New Year!
Dawn & Edward & Gwen & Evie