David and Janna Christmas Letter 2014

Lei. Viking hat. Fabergé egg. Guiness. Gondola. Pintxos. Moose. Sauna. Gaucho. Sphynx.

These were just a few of the representative items we encountered during a year full of amazing travel. More on that below (so you may want to scoop up your "Happy Holiday" greeting from us quickly and get back to baking cookies).

Happy Holidays. We hope this has been a good year for you, even if sad events might have crowded around the happier moments. Life is like that, and the challenge seems to be to learn how to deal with both joy and loss. We had many joyful moments, most of them centered around Kirk (who still loves his job teaching science at the School for the Arts in Charleston, in part, we suspect, because of the stunningly smart and beautiful Katherine who has entered his life...), Krista and Chad (she has "retired" from Outback, but then took a job helping a friend get a restaurant up and running; Chad continues to do important number stuff and special projects for Allscripts in Raleigh), and of course, the World's Most Adorable Grandchildren, Austin (4) and Emma (2).

Back to the travel, most of it for professional reasons, all of it exhilirating. We started out sailing with Semester at Sea for 10 days from San Diego to Hawaii (administration prep for our summer voyage), then stayed 4 extra days in a breathtaking condo on the beach in Maui. A conference in Verona allowed us to decamp for a few days to Vicenza and Venice. A keynote to the Argentine Association of Hispanists took David to Buenos Aires and Santa Fe (Argentina, natch). Then, 10 1/2 glorious weeks sailing as Dean of Semester at Sea (Janna served as textbook coordinator and Overall Cheerful Slacker Spouse) to England, Spain (pintxos!), Portugal, Scotland, Ireland, Russia, Norway, Sweden (Kirk joined us for three weeks from Dublin to Stockholm), Finland, Estonia, and Poland. In November, the Arab Association of Hispanists invited David to help inaugurate their first international conference in Cairo. (David is the President of the world association, hence so many Hispanists!). We rounded it off with a week in Christmas-decked New York.

If you are at all curious/interested in some pix from our summer adventure, copy and paste this link: http://davidandjanna2014.blogspot.com/2014_06_01_archive.html.

Janna's sisters all converged in Seattle to celebrate mother Helen's 95th. Go, Helen! Our Holiday greeting would not be complete without our Silly Moments of Gratuitous Celebrity Worship section, so here goes. Can you identify them?

1. Pianist of the Beijing Olympics (came to the Paramount!)

2. Drummer, Dave Matthews Band

3. "What a Fool Believes...."

4. Shaft!

5. Virginia Senator

6. House of Cards. Answers (if you need them): Lang Lang, Carter Beauford, Michael McDonald, Richard Roundtree, Mark Warner, Kevin Spacey. Please stay in touch; it's friends and family that make it all worthwhile, and we love hearing your news. David and Janna