Author: Dimitrios

So we thought the pandemic would end in 2021? Did we? Oh well. However that goes (not well, at the time of writing this), we can at least recap the year in our usual end-of-year post, starting with a photo of a red-tailed hawk captured at the Pennypack Ecological Restoration area in January (with D’s Fujifilm X-T2, equipped with the long lens D got for Christmas 2020):

January also marked the start of our second semester in which we taught completely online. It was to be just as challenging as in the fall of 2020, and not worth additional complaining about here.

We marked D’s birthday with a Zoom visit, which allowed far-flung friends Jelena and Rob to join in from Belfast, which normally would have been a very expensive proposition. It was a lovely virtual visit with lots of good friends, much appreciated.

February started with a snow storm on February 2nd and snow stayed on the ground for weeks. Neighbors down the block built a giant snowman, seen below as it was being built, and then on February 8th and February 15th.

We also made a trip with our cameras to the Morris Arboretum, where we saw a lovely snowpeople family.

Opportunities to use the long lens on the Fujifilm X-T2 were offered by birds on our bird feeders with snow in the background, like this cardinal.

Early in March, we paid another visit to the Morris Arboretum, when D played with the long lens once more, capturing a red tailed hawk in flight and then nicely posing on a tree.

A couple of days after these photos were made, the sun was out at lunch time and we we had our lunch at the top of the stairs to the porch, not missing the opportunity to take a selfie. This incidentally documents how D looked after shaving his beard to ensure N95 masks fit his face as well as possible. (Later on, he allowed a tiny part of the beard to grow again, where it would be completely covered by the mask — picture later).

A few days later, it was time for Marianne to get her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19; D followed in 8 days with his first dose of the Moderna vaccine.

April 4th was Easter. We got together outdoors in our yard with D’s former student Olena (the one was gave us outdoors broadsword lessons last summer — see our recap of 2020). We had a big, beautiful, and sturdy chocolate egg as something special for dessert. It was so sturdy that it came with a wooden hammer to break it open! It was well worth the trouble to break it open, as it was filled with candy and chocolates.

Later in April, we had the chance to see some nice tulips at the Morris Arboretum.

In early May we had our first dining out experience since March of 2020, in the outdoor “cabins” of Charlie Was A Sinner in Philadelphia. The occasion was to celebrate the birthday and make some engagement photos of D’s former student Sierra and her fiancé. Here’s us toasting them:

May also saw Arcadia University’s in-person graduation, and we hosted an outdoor party in our back yard for M’s department colleagues right after. M continued to get more settled in as department chair all year.

On the last day of May, we were delighted to be able to celebrate our dear friend Suzanne’s birthday with her, Kevin, Lily, and the latest canine family member, Talulah, in Suzanne and Kevin’s cabin in PA:

In June we enjoyed a week-long driving vacation in Germantown, NY, in the Hudson Valley. We stayed at a wonderful AirBnB and had many opportunities to be in nature and hang out with M’s brother Anthony and his wife Barbara.

Incidentally, as far as D was concerned, this was quite the year for bird photos. Here’s one that made D happy to have taken the long lens on this trip.

Near the end of June we had a quick but delightful visit by Jill who had traveled from California with her youngest son Owen to check out local colleges (he’s already at the age of college-hunting!). On one evening, we had an outdoors dinner with them and a friend of Owen’s and his mother at Tamarindo’s, and then took them to our back yard where the young people saw fireflies for the first time in their lives. It was a magical moment for all, especially when fireflies landed on them.

July started with a short staycation in Philadelphia. During these few days, we got to celebrate M’s birthday and the wedding of our friends Sierra and Jacob, and got to see the new wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In July we also had our second of three driving vacations, this one to an AirBnB on the East shore of Cayuga Lake. The less said about the quality of this AirBnB the better (in future, we are only going to consider AirBnBs whose hosts are rated as Superhosts), but we did get a nice visit to NY wine country and M’s old haunts in Ithaca and Geneva, and got to hang out with our friend Eileen, who was able to join us for a few days of wine and spirits tasting and great eating surrounded by magnificent scenery.

In mid-August we spent a few days at a family reunion in New Hampshire, in M’s brother Jerry’s vacation rental, where we were treated to the famous Uncle Jerry breakfast, cooked on our porch at the crack of dawn. In accordance with global climate change, we were hit by an extreme heat wave. We did manage a nice outing on a not-too-stifling morning. Another way to cope with the heat was to buy two kiddie pools to put our feet into while sipping cold wine, to skip pebbles at a river, and to have ice cream for lunch.

On the way back from New Hampshire, we stayed in New Haven for a few days where we had a lovely time visiting Sierra’s family. Here’s us on a boat tour of the Thimble Islands.

Soon after our return home, it was time for us to start going to school for in-person, masked teaching. It was challenging but turned out to be less of a COVID-spreading activity than we were fearing, thanks to vaccine mandates and masking. M had to deal with including remote students via Zoom into her live classes, which proved to be an endless source of frustration. Here’s D’s first day back, waiting for the train to take him to Temple’s campus, donning the highest-quality N95 mask he could find.

September came in with a bang: a very severe storm that spawned a tornado that missed our house only by a couple of miles and that dumped a ridiculous amount of rain in the space of a couple of hours. We took our dinner to the basement to finish it, as we were under a tornado warning, and then we did a little work to help our sump pump deal with the water influx. Thankfully, we had no permanent damage, but we are well aware that our basement walls need some upgrading.

We enjoyed a weekend escape to Ocean City, NJ, on September 11-12, with Charlie and Nicki. D is partial to this photo he made of M on a boat tour of the Ocean City Bay.

Near the end of October, we took a short trip to a lovely AirBnB in Shawnee, PA, near the Delaware Water Gap. This also gave us the opportunity to visit Bushkill Falls for the first time.

We spend Halloween visiting with Suzanne and Kevin in Schnabel’s woods:

In November we continued our outings in nature and we had a lovely, intimate Thanksgiving at Suzanne and Kevin’s, among fully vaccinated and boosted friends. I can’t not include this picture of M from Bowman’s Hill Wildflower preserve:

In early December we went to see the Morris Arboretum’s Holiday Train display and to a wine tasting and outdoors hanging out by a fire event at Unionville winery in New Jersey. For Christmas, we took a short driving vacation to an AirBnB in the Rhinebeck, NY, where we were happy to be able to visit with Anthony, Barbara, their daughter and our niece April, and April’s sweet dog Cascade. Here’s a photo by M that shows the rest of the gang by Blithewood Mansion:

It’s time to end this massively lengthy post. We wish all a healthy 2022, with the pandemic receding and life returning closer to what we had been considering normal!

Another year has gone by. We have been posting annual retrospective posts here since 2009 and the post you are reading continues the tradition (which has developed into the one post that appears here every year, our “Christmas Letter”).

The year started with a cold snap. D attended the annual meetings of the American Social Science Associations, where he attended sessions that covered economic issues related to economic inequality, his new obsession.

After the conference was over, we paid a short visit to Jersey City to see Dominique, Steve, and their girls, and had the chance to see the girls in skating practice. D had a lucky shot of an incoming ship from our hotel room, in which a seagull paid a timely visit.

In February, we enjoyed a visit to Longwood Gardens with Phil and Ann for the annual orchid extravaganza, an excellent way to spend a few hours when the weather is cold.

In March, D sung for the third time in the Meet Me at the Music event organized by Music Honors students at Temple University. He performed the “measuring duet” from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro with a student soprano and a student accompanying on the piano. Here is a recording made on D’s phone by M.

We also went to Annapolis in March, on the weekend that was the bridge between our Spring breaks. We had a very nice visit with our niece Christina and her little daughter Violet.

In April, D was lucky enough to have a photo he took the previous December in Florida included in the annual John James Audubon Center exhibit (the photo is at the level of his hands in this snapshot):

Near the end of April we paid a visit to Longwood Gardens with our good friend, PhD advisee of D from some time ago, Emina. We saw the great tulip exhibit there and had an excellent lunch at the 1906 restaurant there. Check out that “flower pot” dessert, which is entirely edible:

M had two gorgeous photos of hers included in a curated exhibit in the Wayne Art Center in May.

Our big summer trip was to Paris. We timed it to surround M’s birthday. We encountered a ridiculously hot spell while in Paris, which was a bit of a problem without AC in our AirBnB studio apartment, but we survived the heat and accumulated many happy memories and nice photos.

For many more photos from our visit to Paris and vicinity, here is an album that we have curated from the hundreds of photos we each made.

We did manage two short trips to Ocean City, NJ. Here’s a photo of a radiant M from one of these trips.

In early August, we made a short road trip to Aurora, NY. We stayed in the Aurora Inn, right on the side of Cayuga lake. On the last full day of our visit, we had fun taking a winery tour by boat, visiting three wineries by the lake with our friend Rebecca, who lives near Aurora.

In the fall, M joined a family reunion in New Hampshire and a high school reunion, while D stayed home to keep working on his teaching and projects.

For both M and D, school work all year went well and was unremarkable.

Near the end of December we had excellent news about M’s health from her latest tests and the doctor’s examination.

We are looking forward to whatever new adventures 2019 will bring!

January

We celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary with a great dinner at La Croix.

The weather was snowy for much of the month.

Our semesters started uneventfully this time, in contrast to the weather disaster that greeted the first day of school for Dimitrios last year.

We celebrated Dimitrios’s birthday both with an intimate dinner at Suzanne and Kevin’s and then a small gathering of good friend at our house. The following mirthful “selfie^2” from the latter gathering makes us smile every time we see it again.

February – March

We finally took the plunge and arranged with a travel agent the longest and most expensive vacation trip of our lives so far. In the spirit of seizing the day and overcoming inhibitions (D’s dread of long airplane flights), we planned a trip to Sonoma, CA, Oahu, HI, and Bali, Indonesia, with short stops at Narita, Japan, on the way to and from Bali. We coordinated with our photographer friend, Novita Listyani, who lives in Bali via the Web, and were hoping we would not be too much of a burden to her and her family when we arrived in Bali. Although we had been considering her a good friend for some time, we still had never met face to face.

Another important event happened in late March: a young man Dimitrios knows since he was a baby had his graduation recital at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, where Marianne was an undergraduate and Dimitrios was a PhD student. We flew to Rochester for a couple of days and had an excellent time reconnecting with good friends, attending the recital, and also visiting for the first time ever (!) the Eastman Kodak museum. Oh, and we had a little snow storm there too, naturally.

April

April’s notable events included a nice Easter celebration at Suzanne’s, but then a stomach virus attack on Dimitrios. The weekend after Easter we were able to spend a few days with our good friends in Ocean City.

May

The latter half of May and the first 10 days of June are when our big trip happened. Brace yourself: this section of the retrospective is long!

Dimitrios’s digestion was giving him trouble, usually in the form of pain in the middle of the night, but also frequently after meals. There was a veritable paroxysm of this right before we left on our grand vacation, but the GI specialist gave Dimitrios just the right medicine the day before departure. To this day, the medicine is doing its job and Dimitrios’s health is back to a good steady state.

On May 17, very early in the morning, we got on a plane to San Francisco at the Philadelphia airport. Although we had packed everything (!) in carry-on bags, the flight was so full that the airline asked for volunteers to check bags free of charge, so we did that.

Once in Sonoma, we started the process of unwinding from the stress of the academic year that just ended and Dimitrios’s GI troubles (which we were not quite sure yet were ending). Scenery like this helped:

Visits to various wineries and excellent restaurants also helped us unwind.

After Sonoma, we flew to Oahu for a week in Waikiki Beach in the Royal Hawaiian hotel. We had an excellent time in Oahu, starting with a sobering visit to the Pearl Harbor memorial.

The oil still seeping from the submerged USS Arizona gives a special somber note to the memorial.

We took part in two tours of note while in Oahu. The first was a photography tour. The second was a food tour. Both were great, but the photo tour gave us more opportunities for photo-taking, naturally, so here is a tiny sample of the ones we made on that tour.

In the rest of our stay in Waikiki beach we had some fabulous dinners, walks on the beach and a some swimming, and a nice sunset cruise on a catamaran.

After that sunset, we got on a plane to Narita, the large airport near Tokyo. Our friend Mike Leeds met us there, which was a great comfort especially given the culture shock. We went to visit a shrine in Narita and spent the night at the Narita Hilton, where we also experienced an earthquake, which was not severe, but was large enough to wake us at 2 am. The next morning, we boarded a Garuda Indonesia flight to Bali, and discovered that Garuda’s economy class richly deserves the international accolades it has received.

The second morning in Sanur we were picked up by our friend Novita and her daughter Seraphine for a sunrise photo shoot in Serangan Island, a short drive from our hotel. Seraphine, Novita and later her hubby were extremely nice to us and we can honestly say we fell in love with that family during our trip to Bali, where they drove us everywhere and endured all sorts of hardships like very early mornings and traffic jams to show us Bali from the eyes of artistically super-talented insiders. We have now a lingering nostalgia for those days of bonding with them.

And here is the lovely welcoming post by Novita, with her version of this very sunrise: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+NovitaListyani/posts/HPupvddRyZA

June

Dogs are free to roam everywhere in Bali, and are quite nice to strangers. Here is a photo of a horse rider with horse and curious dogs in Kuta Beach:

On the next day, we were in Kuta beach for an afternoon swim and sunset photography. That was one spectacular sunset. Here are only two views of it; it was really hard to select only two.

Sunrise was often stunning when viewed from our hotel balcony, too:

The banner image of this blog is also taken from a photo of the same sunrise.

Our visit to Bali came at the end of the Durian season. This famously ill-smelling fruit (although we did not think it smelled all that badly) is a surprisingly delicious treat, with the texture of soft-serve ice cream, once you get inside its prickly, hard shell. Where do you find it? At roadside, in the evening. Novita’s hubby drove up and down Denpasar, the capital of Bali, several times until he spotted this vendor’s truck and we all split one Durian. Here is a photo of us that Novita took with my iPhone, which clearly had some focusing issues in the low light.

And here is Marianne with an expression of sheer delight doing some body surfing:

After five nights in the Fairmount Sanur hotel, we went to Ubud and checked in at the Maya resort for four nights. Here is a photo of us Novita took in front of the rice terraces of Ubud.

Later that same afternoon, we went to a rice field to see the arrival of thousands of white cattle herons to net on the treetops after a long day of flying all over the island in search of food. Novita let me use her camera and instructed me on the use of the servo auto-focus mode so I could capture the birds flying overhead. Here is one of the hundreds of photos of herons I made that afternoon.

And here is Dimitrios ready for action:

During our wait in the field for the arrival of the herons, Novita made some fabulous portraits of Marianne. Example:

And when I was photographing herons flying overhead, Marianne was photographing two charming boys who were playing with a kite that was bigger than themselves.

The next day our indefatigable hosts drove us to Bedugul Botanical Gardens, a gigantic garden at the top of a mountain.

The gardens have an extensive orchid exhibit and Seraphine, being a big fan of orchids and an avid learner of anything nature-related, taught us a lot of things about orchids we did not know.

Before we left the gardens, we had a picnic on a grassy slope overlooking one of the three lakes in the immediate area where we saw a monkey cavorting in the trees in the distance. Even though there were clouds over the lake, it still was quite the sight to behold.

The next day was a Saturday. Our hosts took a break from driving us around Bali and we took the hotel shuttle to the town of Ubud where we wandered about, had a nice dinner, and attended a classical dance performance accompanied by a gamelan orchestra, before taking a cab back to the hotel.

The next day we visited Tulamben for snorkeling and, on the way back, stopped at a tourist attraction built about 50 years ago, the Water Castle.

Seraphine made several short videos of the snorkeling adventure with a GoPro camera. Here is one of them: Seraphine’s snorkeling video clip

The next day we all went to Tanah Lot, where Novita had booked a double suite for all of us for our last night in Bali.

Our last day in Bali was June 9th. We spent the morning at the Tanah Lot resort, with Marianne and Seraphine having fun in the pool and water slide, and Dimitrios and Novita taking it easy but also making photos and videos. We caught one more sunset in the Club 66 area of the long beach that contains Kuta beach and Seminyak. Here is Novita’s capture of that sunset and warm words of farewell: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+NovitaListyani/posts/LLXtqJxGmFS

Our flight to Tokyo left at 12:30 am (!) on June 10. It was hard to stay awake at the airport but we managed. On arrival we were greeted by our friend Eva, Mike’s wife, who had by now joined Mike in Tokyo. She guided us to Tokyo on the train, we visited their apartment for a quick lunch, and then we visited the Mori tower and the Imperial Gardens, had a light dinner nearby, and managed (after some trouble; Japanese addresses are practically indecipherable to anyone who is not a trained Japanese postal service worker) to find Yuga Kurita‘s photo exhibit at the Island Gallery, where we admired the amazing photos of Fuji and nightscape this photographer has created and bought a small print to bring home. If it were not for Novita’s notice to us via Google+ which we read on arrival in Narita, we would not have known about this exhibit at all.

Shortly after returning home, we bought a new car, about a year ahead of schedule. Our old car was involved in an accident while parked (nobody was hurt) the day before we left on our big trip, so it was time to replace it.

July

At the end of June we started a two-week stay at a big rental beach house in Ocean City, NJ, with many friends, continuing a tradition we started in 2007. A great time was had by all and our eyes and cameras feasted on some more good views.

As a belated birthday present, I got Marianne a big girl camera. Here she is on our first photography excursion with the new camera.

August-September-October

During August and also September and October, we kept doing excursions for photography to hone our skills, and we also took photography classes. Since this post is already photo-heavy, here are some of our social media posts with our photography from this period. The one from August 7 is special: our first photo walk, in Philadelphia, organized by Trey Ratcliff, a very successful globe-trotting photographer.

D’s photos from the Philly photo walk

D’s photos from a visit to the Morris Arboretum

One of D’s photos from the photo walk, after some editing

M’s evening photos from Arcadia University

D’s photo from Meadowbrook Farms

M’s photos from Bryn Athyn

D’s photos from Bryn Athyn

October started with a very nice event for Dimitrios. His first doctoral student, Jeff Coons, has succeeded very well in finance, having become president of a successful financial institution. Temple University honored Jeff in its annual Gallery of Success event that honors alumni that make the university proud.

November

The big event every November is the Thanksgiving dinner at Suzanne and Kevin’s. This year was no different, but on November 15 there was a new kind of happy event involving Suzanne: she had her first solo exhibit of her oil paintings at the Jenkins Arboretum and Gardens. We were delighted to attend and to be able to buy some of her beautiful artwork. We also took the opportunity to make some photos in the arboretum, and some of them turned out OK, despite the lateness of the season.

Marianne at the Jenkins Arboretum

Some photos by Dimitrios at the Jenkins Arboretum

After Thanksgiving, we were again able to go for a long weekend in Ocean City with good friends. Some photos from this follow. The deserted beach and boardwalk are quite strikingly different from what we normally see in Ocean City.

December

December came with exceptionally warm weather, as did November as a matter of fact. We finally wrapped up our courses for the semester and, as I am writing these words, Marianne is doing some final grading. Tomorrow we are scheduled to fly to Florida for a first for us: a Christmas in a warm place, just the two of us. I expect to make another post here before the year is out with some photos from this trip.

For now, I leave you with this photo of a tree decorated with beautiful light spheres in Longwood Gardens, taken a couple of weeks ago.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!