A look back at 2009

This year we did not send out a Christmas letter with our cards. This post is an attempt to remedy this deficiency, for the few of our friends and family members who might occasionally visit this blog and for the sake of reminiscing.

The year started with the two of us busy in San Francisco. I was there for the Allied Social Science Associations annual meeting, and Marianne came along to enjoy SF and our few vacation days at Applewood Inn right after the conference ended. Since we wrote about this trip at length on this very blog, I will immediately move on to subsequent happenings.

I taught a graduate course, “Mathematics for Economists II”, in the Spring, a graduate Macroeconomics course to cover for C who was on sabbatical (I did get help with guest lectures on this one), and I ran the graduate research seminar. A moderate-to-heavy schedule, made heavier in the first half of the semester by the ton of extra work relating to the hiring process. That went well, time consuming as it was, and Temple’s economics department got two great new faculty members.

A big event for me was the publication of the book I wrote together with four Temple economics graduate students. The book is called A Toolbox for Economic Design, and it was published in March by Palgrave Macmillan. We’ll have to wait a bit to see how it goes with sales, as the only report I have received from the publisher was dated April, a bit too close to the publication date to read much into it. Yet the book has already done its service for two of my co-authors, Karen and Lisa, who got a little boost in their job searches from having been co-authors.

The Spring semester also saw the graduation of my student Lisa with her shiny new economics Ph.D. She also received a job offer in the Spring, and started with her new tenure-track job at a local college in the Fall.

Near the end of April Marianne learned that she was selected Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year at Arcadia and that she received a sabbatical for the whole 2009-2010 academic year so that she can focus exclusively on her forthcoming textbook that she has under contract with Prentice Hall (a unit of Pearson these days). It was major congratulations time! Add to that the fact that Marianne’s doctor is now convinced that her past troubles are truly in the past, and it was a top-notch Marianne year!

Our main vacation in the summer was a week in Ocean City, NJ. We shared a place with dear friends and had a blast. We liked it so much that we repeated the experience on a much smaller scale in Wildwood Crest the first week of September, this time with dear family members. This was the first occasion that I drove to work from the shore to do my first class of the semester, an evening graduate Micro class, and then drove back at night.

Work held a couple of surprises for me in the Fall semester. First, a colleague who teaches the “Math for Economists I” graduate course broke his ankle and I covered his class on short notice for six weeks. Also, I applied for a sabbatical and just learned recently that my application was successful. I will be on sabbatical in Spring 2011, studying hard ways to incorporate the notion of trust in economic theory better than it has been incorporated so far.

M here. Dimitrios neglected to mention my big trip to Disney (since this was something we did not do together, it did not stand out as a highlight of the year). It all started when I mentioned to my nephew Dominick that I had never been to Disney World. So he, his wife Margherita, her mother, and their nearly 3-year old Caterina took me with them in October.

We had a fantastic time! What a great place to go to forget all your grown-up troubles.

The weather gave us a big snowstorm in December, and we went to visit our friends and neighbors Reiko and Troy for some tobogganing with them and their children in the midst of the blizzard.