Dear friends and family,
The past year has been an eventful one for us. The biggest change is that we got married last December! We exchanged vows in front of a small group of family and friends, and then had a wonderful honeymoon in Victoria, British Columbia (which included having tea at the historic Empress Hotel).
This year, Chris has been a visiting assistant professor in the mathematics department at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, while Sarah has been a postdocotral researcher in high-energy physics at Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago. Living apart has been hard for us, but we are both on the job market this year and are hoping to solve our two-body problem (i.e. find two academic jobs in the same geographical location).
In addition to getting married, we had a lot of great adventures this year. In March, we had a very brief (about 35 hours, in Chris’s case) visit to Portland, during which we saw Chris’s cousin Ashley get married, and Chris’s brother Pete and sister-in-law Alex have their first child, Hendrik. In April, we journeyed to Ithaca, New York so we could eat at the famous Moosewood Restaurant. For Easter, we met up in Toledo, Ohio (roughly halfway between Lewisburg and Chicagoland) and took a daytrip to Windsor, Ontario to eat some Kinder Eggs, which cannot be found (legally) in the U.S. (By the way, border guards are always a bit skeptical when you tell them you are married but live in separate states.)
Our adventures continued over the summer. In May, we had a great road trip in which we saw our nation’s capital, including the National Cryptologic Museum (adjacent to, and run by, the NSA). We also saw Colonial Williamsburg.
Chris spent most of summer break living at Sarah’s apartment in Illinois. We had many Chicago adventures, including going to Chris’s first Cubs game. We attended a renn faire in Bristol, Wisconsin. We also visited Chicago’s Chinatown a number of times. We went camping near Holland, Michigan as well as near the Illinois-Iowa border. (That second camping trip culminated in a visit to a Maid-Rite in the Quad Cities area.) We visited Portland again in August for the wedding of Sarah’s childhood friend Lucy (something must be in the water this year!), and Chris stayed an extra week to camp with his family in the Mount Hood National Forest.
In September, Sarah’s parents visited her in Chicago and the three of them took a family vacation to Springfield, Illinois. Then, in November, Sarah attended a conference in Portland. While she was there, she was able to visit family and friends, and have a birthday party. Later that month, Sarah’s parents and Chris travelled to Sarah’s apartment for Thanksgiving, and we enjoyed a fresh family-farm-raised turkey! This fall, Sarah joined a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Naperville, Illinois.
We hope you have a wonderful holiday season and wish you the best in the coming year.
Love,
Sarah and Chris
December 2011