Well, this has been a pretty incredible year for us. In the last installment, you knew that Alan was spending most of his time in Palo Alto, California (since his job had him running an experiment there), and Sarah was spending most of her time in Boston (since that was where her job was). And you also knew that this was pretty yucky, so both of us were looking for jobs. In fact, if we recall correctly, you even knew that Alan had just landed a job at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland, and Sarah was trying to figure out what was going to happen next. And THEN you got a cryptic change of address card from us (with a great cat face on it), with no information whatsoever about the resolution! Well, you can assuage your curiosity with this very letter. In it, we will tell you about such fascinating things as what we have been doing with our free time (sleeping), what our new neighborhood is like (suburban) and what our jobs are really all about (working-- did you think it would be different???)
We decided that a chronological retelling of the year's events should allow us to remember it all. Right after Christmas last year, the one very sad event of the year happened-- Sarah's Grandmother Cole passed away (a bit unexpectedly). It was really sad, so we put it in tiny print. Then, in February (on the 14th, to be exact), Sarah's sister Jennifer married Matthew A. Dailey (aka "Panda-boy" or "Strainerhead" from the previous letter) in a lovely outdoor ceremony on the cliffs of the Pacific Coast just outside of Los Angeles (the site of which, by the way, is now a golf course). It was a really fun wedding, and it even quit raining in LA for the event (Do you find this spectacularly unsurprising? You shouldn't... Apparently it rained for about 2 months straight at the beginning of the year, so it was actually quite lucky that they weren't rained out). For added thrills, we even arranged for the requisite flat tire on our car when we were bringing Jennifer from the hotel to the wedding! (Well, maybe we didn't arrange it, but it happened anyway...)
Then, in March, Alan moved down to Maryland to start his new job. He moved into a very lovely apartment that smelled like a bachelor party (Sarah called it The Beer Soaked Apartment), and this caused him to start looking for a place to live quite quickly. (That, and the fact that Sarah kept calling and asking how he could stand to live in The Beer Soaked Apartment when it smelled so awful (Alan claims it didn't smell THAT bad).) (Oh yes, and now I remember that we might want to mention that somewhere in here (in March, to be exact), Sarah came down to interview for a post-doc in the Department of Neurology at the University of Maryland at Baltimore working with people who have difficulties processing language after brain damage (usually stroke). The interview was pretty interesting because the worst blizzard of the previous few years (although not totally impressive by this year's standards....) hit the Washington DC and Baltimore metropolitan area a couple of days before the interview (just after Sarah arrived for a house-hunting weekend), so only one person in the lab she was going to work in actually was able to even come into work the day of her interview (the whole university was shut down). Miraculously, Sarah was actually able to get to the interview (despite stranded cars and slow public transportation), so she got hired for sheer intrepidness and is now happily employed).
Right. Now back to the main story. Sarah came down for a couple of weekends to aid in the house search, and lo and behold, we found a totally great little house that we are renting in College Park. It is very small, but rather cozy, being a bungalow style house built in the 1920's. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, living room, dining room, small kitchen, small kitchen annex, tiny basement, and large (unfinished) attic. The yard is a large corner lot, with a normal size yard on one side, and a football field on the other side. Ok, so it isn't really a football field, but it is the size of an entire house lot. And it feels like a football field when you are mowing it. However, it does make for an awesome croquet and badminton court in the summer! At any rate, the neighborhood is cute -- many plastic animals in the yards, and lots of people who sit on their porches in the summer and just wait for someone to walk by so they can talk. We rather like it.
Ok. Now we had a place, and it was mid-March, so we signed a lease beginning April 4th. Sarah packed up (or, more accurately, watched some other people pack up) the apartment in Brookline, and moved in with her friend Shari Speer. This was a good thing, as Shari's husband has a job in Kansas, and since Alan had been in California so much, Sarah and Shari were kind of psyched to actually have someone to talk to in the morning. Alan, on the other hand, was left with a house full of boxes and only the cats to help him unpack. Big Drag.
Did we mention that in this very same month (le 3rd d'Avril, to be exact), Alan's brother Kelvin got married to Susan Stice in a very lovely, and eminently danceable (to very fine big band music) ceremony in Austin Texas? So we flew down for the weekend, and returned to our separate cities.
Things got rather calm for the next month and a half, and on June 1st, Sarah moved down to College Park. (We neglect to mention the car trip from hell where Alan drives for 8 to 9 hours straight in a car with one howling (Stilgar) and one relatively quiet (Rusty) cat. Or the other car trip when Alan brought a ferret from Maryland to Massachusetts for a friend of Sarah's. Alan is truly a hero of the revolution, Sarah thinks.)
So by June, we were both officially living in Maryland. And at the beginning of the month, Sarah took two weeks unpaid vacation in order to help Alan with unpacking, and Alan left for a week on a run to Belgium to pick up chocolates (or to go to some physics weenie conference, depending on your point of view). And Sarah discovers just how different gardening is in Maryland (use a machéte for best results) and Massachusetts (use a greenhouse). Oh yes, and did we mention poison ivy? And how the poison ivy found in the west (where Sarah grew up) looks a little different from the poison ivy found on the east coast (where our yard is)? Right. Well, no pictures were taken, but let's just say that Sarah discovered how effective Benadryl is on the hives formed by the unbelievably different looking poison ivy in our yard. Did we mention that we hired someone to care for our lawn?
So then Sarah starts work (shortly before the poison ivy episode, thereby making her new job even more interesting...), and works for two weeks, and heads to Lake Tahoe to attend a cognitive neuroscience weenie conference (or to get some fine looking geodes for Alan, depending on your point of view.) Upon return, life returns to a normal state (sort of hard to believe after all this time).
Here's our typical day. Wake up at 6 am (puh!), pound on the alarm clock for 15 minutes, and try to catch Sarah's train to Baltimore at 7:30 am (we haven't missed it yet, although we have tried very, very hard on some mornings.) Then Alan drives for 45 minutes to Gaithersburg on the Beltway (Boston driving has provided him with the necessary driving skills for coping with the traffic. In other words, he takes as many back streets as possible in order to avoid the beltway, and as a result, is a much happier person.) Sarah sleeps or reads on the train. We both arrive at work around 8:30 am, and merrily work our way through the day until 5:15. At this point, Sarah runs for the 5:40 train (last one back). Then she sleeps or reads (depending on how hard the day was) for the 50 minute train ride home, while Alan braves the beltway traffic to pick her up at 6:30. Sarah walks home from train station (a 15 minute walk) while Alan sweats bullets on the beltway. Arrive home around 6:45 or 7:00. Fix and eat dinner, do random things and talk about Star Trek episodes we haven't yet watched. Go to bed at 10 or so. Repeat ad nauseaum. Very nice. Notice that we actually get to eat two (count them, TWO) meals a day together. And we get to sleep in the same bed! Why, we can even talk to each other after dinner for longer than half an hour! Very, very nice, indeed.
Other things that we haven't mentioned are the great numbers of visitors we have had (NOTE: we now have a metro stop a fifteen minute walk from our house -- it is very easy to get into town now!) since moving to the DC area, and fact that Alan's mother responded to her chemo enough to be able to travel to Colorado and the Pacific Northwest this summer.
All in all, it has been a very good year for us. Over the years, we have come to realize that the bad stuff really makes you appreciate the good stuff, and right now we are rather enjoying the good stuff.
So, in conclusion, may your new year be filled with good stuff that you appreciate!
Sarah Wayland & Alan Thompson, 5008 Eutaw Place, College Park, MD 20740 (301) 474-3039 e-mail: swayland@umab.umd.edu or akt@rrdstrad.nist.gov
These e-mail addresses are out of date -- use twacks@his.com instead