It’s time for the yearly retrospective post again. This time, because previous such posts on this blog often seemed to bog down when trying to display the many photos in them, we made a separate album on Flickr with a selection of photos with captions, as they would normally appear embedded in this post.
You can view the album at https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjB8BcV. It is set to appear in a separate tab of your browser, which we hope will make it easier to go back and forth between this text and the photos. In any case, the text in this post and the captions of the photos should make following the album easy. One video of the many we made with the GoPro during our USVI St. Thomas trip is worth sharing separately. It is a video made by M off St. John, during our snorkeling cruise, showing a Manta Ray: https://gopro.com/v/QoGveNwQDZ5EP
On with the story!
January found us visiting Longwood Gardens. We had spent New Year’s Eve with our friends Ellen and Jim at their house, joined by Reiko, Troy, and their kids Jordan and Kitt. In anticipation of this, we had booked an AirBnB in West Chester, so it was easy to pop in to Longwood Gardens to spend New Year’s Day. We had dinner at their 1906 restaurant and went around their Christmas light display.
Soon after, we went to Mohonk Mountain House to celebrate our anniversary. There was massive fog around the mountain which led to some very moody pictures but prevented us from getting interesting views from the path around the mountain during a guided hike. We retreated indoors and enjoyed a bit of archery (see photos).
Near the end of February we attended an impressive Lyric Fest concert, Cotton, at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral. It was a multimedia event with commissioned songs and photos of cotton by Philadelphia artist John Dowell. Details here: https://lyricfest.org/commissions/cotton/
In March we again did not have the same Spring break, as we have not had in many years, but we at least had an overlapping weekend. We went to Mohonk Mountain House once again, where we found very pretty snowy scenes (see photos). We also took part in a cocktail competition by Mohonk employees, which was great fun. Upon our return home, we had opportunities to hang out with D’s brother Kostas, who was visiting the US to collaborate with a coauthor of his, while on sabbatical. We showed him a number of our favorite spots, such as New Hope and the Washington Crossing State Park. In the photos, you can see a pic of Kostas and M during a wine tasting at Terhune Orchards in New Jersey.
An event D enjoyed a lot in April was the induction ceremony for the International Honor Society Omicron Delta Epsilon, of whose Temple University chapter D is the academic advisor. We included a photo of D speaking at the ceremony, taken by our friend and D’s colleague Charlie. Also memorable in April was yet another Lyric Fest concert, the first one to be presented in Longwood Gardens, in their music series, on Earth Day. The concert was named The Metamorphosis of Plants, and it was another multimedia affair, in which photos of flowers were projected while the singers performed. Thanks to our dear friend Suzanne, cofounder of Lyric Fest, photos by both of us were included in the event, alongside photos by a few other photographers. You can see us in the photo album in front of a screen that shows some of the flower photos. It was kind of mind-blowing to see your Very Own Photos on a large screen.
May found us being social butterflies and enjoying yet more musical events, including a performance by Itzhak Perlman in the Kimmel Center with friends Nicki and Charlie, and, later, a great Piffaro concert, “Entre Dos Alamos”.
There is not very much to say about our Spring semesters at work. D had a chance to teach Game Theory (first time was in Spring 2022) and had a strong contingent of students at the top of the class, but the rest showed the terrible effects of COVID on students: a lot of them seem to have forgotten how to study and have lost the motivation to do so. D also had a section of Microeconomic Principles, where the terrible effects of COVID were even more pronounced. M’s semester was only ok, for many of the same COVID-related reasons along with the ups and downs of being Departmental Chair.
June started spectacularly with a week-long trip to St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. In preparation, we had bought a GoPro camera (these cameras are waterproof and perfect for underwater photos and videos). There was good snorkeling there, and we also took a sunset cruise and ate at some really good restaurants, as well as enjoying the pool and bar of our resort. (We stayed at the Margaritaville — it was a very affordable option and we have to confess we had fun with the frozen concoction maker in our room.) The album linked above has a photo from our snorkeling and the link below the album link will take you to a video of a Manta Ray M made on a snorkeling trip we took. In the album you can also see an action shot of M from the snorkeling trip.
We packed another trip in June, this one to Connecticut, to check out the Madison Beach hotel, visit our friends Sierra and Jacob and Sierra’s family, and stay once more at the Thimble Islands Bed and Breakfast. The beach of the Madison Beach hotel is very nice and it has drinks and snacks service. However, the weather was unseasonably cool and very windy, so we didn’t really have a beach time there. We did get to see a cool double rainbow while there, though, and visited some great restaurants and the Book Barn in Niantic, which we were introduced to on our first visit to the area.
July started with a dinner at Vernick for M’s birthday and on the 2nd we attended Melanie and Gavin’s wedding at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Melanie is the daughter of our dear friends Mike and Eva. It was a wonderfully spirited celebration, one of the most exciting and uplifting weddings we have attended. In the photo album you can see our Photo Booth contribution to their guest book.
Before our Fall semesters started, we paid a visit to Longwood Gardens again (photo in album) and we had one last hurrah of a vacation, this time in Cape May, NJ. We had a number of beach visits, nice dinners, and a spirits tasting (photo in the album).
September started with a visit to Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ. We had been there only once, many years ago, and we really liked wandering around and admiring the sculptures. We also had a lovely lunch at their unfortunately named restaurant “Rats” (photo) unless you are a fan of the Wind in the Willows and are familiar with the character Rat.
We planned two trips to get photos of Fall foliage in October. The first was in mid-October, once more to Mohonk Mountain House (our third visit there in the year). In the album, you can see two photos, one of Mohonk lake and the resort at the far left, taken from the most remote part of the hike around the lake, and then one photo of M at the top of the mountain, near an artificial pond. The second leaf-peeping trip was at the very end of the month, together with Mike and Eva, to Shawnee, PA where record highs in the upper 70s were reached on Saturday while we were hiking. You can see three photos from this trip in the album, at Dingman’s Falls, at the Silverback Distillery (we two are fans and went for a tasting and some purchasing, Mike and Eva gamely joined us and Mike was our driver, since he didn’t drink), and at Hidden Lake. The leaf report from those trips is that we were too early for peak conditions at Mohonk and a little too late in Shawnee but we were not deterred by this and got some fabulous photos in both locations.
November found us paying several visits to the Morris Arboretum, still in search of Fall foliage, and we have included a photo from one of these visits in the album, where you can see a strikingly red canopy. We had Thanksgiving at Suzanne and Kevin’s, continuing a tradition (that goes back to 1995 for D) where we chatted with Suzanne and Kevin’s daughters Mei and Lily, whom we see less frequently these days than we’d like, and their partners’ lovely families. We also had a lovely conversation with Charlotte, a recent voice student of Suzanne’s at Bryn Mawr and currently a graduate student at MIT in atomic physics. We had seen her before at Suzanne’s parties and we always appreciate chances to catch up with her.
December came with the end of the Fall semester (both of us had to wait until the 20th to be done with grading) and one extraordinary Lyric Fest concert of Benjamin Perry Wenzelberg’s winter cantata, commissioned by Lyric Fest, on poems by Jeanne Minahan. Benjy is a remarkable 24-year old composer and conductor, and we are very happy to have been able to sponsor one of the songs in the cantata, Winter’s Antidote, an ode to hot chocolate. You can find more information about this concert at https://lyricfest.org/concerts/any-of-those-decembers/ and a video excerpt just appeared a few hours before the writing of this sentence, at https://youtu.be/kyiOqR_y6nE?feature=shared. On Christmas, we were lucky enough to spend the evening having dinner with Suzanne, Kevin, and Charlotte (last photo in the album). For New Year’s Eve, tomorrow, we are looking forward to a repeat of the gathering at Ellen and Jim’s.
In terms of our teaching work, in the summer we were both hit by the Generative AI tsunami that threatens to negate the value of the college essay (by making it easy for students to outsource most of the writing to ChatGPT) and to make the life of everyone in the “knowledge professions” massively interesting, to say the least. M attended seminars on this in the summer, got D interested about it, and we both did our best to adapt our course assignments in the Fall semester to be impervious to AI cheating. For D, this worked OK in his economics of risk and uncertainty class, where he decided to make the “homework” be in-class exercises once a week, but it caused a big problem in his writing-intensive economic inequality class, where his modification of the paper requirements to make them AI-proof made the course too hard for most of the students. M became an expert of sorts on AI at her University and led faculty workshops and small group discussions. She also finished her term as Chair.
In the Spring semester of 2024, we both have sabbaticals. We are looking forward to doing our sabbatical projects and doing some traveling, including a short trip to Cincinnati to see the total solar eclipse in early April and a visit with Jelena and Rob in Belfast in May (hopefully!).
We wish everybody peace and health for 2024!
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