'tis the season!

Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and now Mobile Tuesday.  Coming our way soon - I-Wednesday (where you buy for yourself) and Virtual Thursday (where you pretend to buy but you ran out of money).  Tweeting all the time, of course.

Back to Thanksgiving, after a little opening rant.  We had a wonderful one, and hope you did too.  Our brainy idea was to go back to the DC area for the holiday, sparing Joe and Margaret the headache of holiday travel, since we had more flexibility in our schedules.  And, that actually proved true, since we encountered very little problems on the road - in fact, I made it down to DC on Wednesday morning in record time, pulling up to Mary's old school by noon.  Don't ask when I started.

The only challenge with our plan was:  where to stay and where to have the big meal.  Details.  Both Joe and Margaret extended generous and welcome offers of hospitality, but Mary backed into an invitation from Gerry, her friend from the 1970s and Annie's godmother for both a bunk and a meal for all of us!  So, off to the races.  

Mary went down by plane on Monday, to connect with her Peru friends and with her old school colleagues and students.  I joined a couple days later and we had a traditional pre-Thanksgiving dinner in Chinatown with Joe, Margaret and Andrew.

 Traditions have to start somewhere.  We had a terrific Thursday with everyone pitching in to prepare, purchase, arrange etc. for the meal.  Annie called during the meal, and we all shouted into the speaker phone at once.  And, the football on TV was even good!  Go Pats.

Friday, we got an insider's tour of the Treasury Department from Joe (very impressive) and met up with Margaret and Andrew for the new Bond movie (fun).  In between, we joined our Peace Corps friends in town at the only bar in central DC that was open (also fun).  

It was only a few days later that we received the really big news for the family, from a different kind of season.  CLAIRE GOT INTO COLLEGE!   She received two acceptances, from Ripon and from Knox.  With even a nice chunk of scholarship money.  Way to go!  She is still applying to a bunch of other colleges, so we expect her list of acceptances to grow.  Other news from Dundee is that Daniel made the freshman basketball team, and is on pace to become the tallest Dickson ever!

Other Thanksgiving nuggets we picked up:  Jeffrey and Melodie braved the traffic to go to Fairport and joined Matthew, Tina and Oliver and Tina's parents for Thanksgiving at David and Paula's.  Andrew and Lur had the Knaak gang over.  And Annie was going to have Thanksgiving on Sunday with her friends.  Dannie went out to Denver to spend Thanksgiving with Patrick, who was in a local theater production!  And, we saw a couple of photos of John and Marilyn's Thanksgiving with their whole gang!  

We spoke to Annie a few times, and she is in the process of applying to grad schools, in New York and Boston. She's hoping to leave Beijing in her final few months and go to the province of Yunnan and get a different China experience.  Maybe teach English to get a little cash as well.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, Mary's niece Maura and her two-year old daughter Elsie descended on us.  Oh how we forget the gear and the food and the energy of young children.  Elsie's a cutie, who loved our kitty, but it was unrequited love.  Our kitty didn't love being chased around HIS house so much.

And, the weekend before that we headed to Princeton to check in on Peter and Janet.  Janet was in the early days without her cast and was just starting to put full weight on her leg.  She's doing well.  We got a first-hand glimpse of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, an hour's drive from the shore.  Debris that people had been cleaning up were lining the streets of Princeton; just down the road from Peter and Janet's house dozens of trees had come down.

Mary and I then went to Philadelphia to meet up with a friend from Peace Corps who lives in Hawaii, and we did the historic tour of central Philadelphia.  It's a worthwhile visit.  

This weekend, we actually are home.  Phew.  But not next weekend or the week after.  Back to DC and then to New York.  Frequent driving miles?  

Mary has started tutoring an adult man who never learned to read and can't really write his own name.  I am in the final throes of the semester, which means two big papers and a bunch of other things.  Churning them out.  

With all this news we have a couple of photos.

And we're off to December.  Love from over here! 

Happy Thanksgiving

> We're down in the nation's capital for Thanksgiving and last weekend we were in 2 of our former capitals.

> Have a wonderful family, turkey, football, parade day. Love

Oh, and ...

I returned the wheelchair today!

THANK YOU!

This is a big thank you.  Through all our trials and tribulations you have called and emailed to offer your emotional support and encouragement and sometimes much more.  It means a great deal to both of us.  In my professional capacity as a lawyer, I get to see families at their worst; some have more than a passing resemblance to our background and social setting, but somehow they just turned out very differently than we did.  We have many many things to thank Mom and Pop for, but I think this sense of being centered and cohesive is the best.  It's all the more remarkable considering their own fractured, perhaps even Gothic, family histories.  But thank you so much for all the calls and emails and other help.

Janet is certainly on the mend and making very good progress and working very hard at it.  Her doctor was rather surprised that she went back to work so quickly, since apparently most people just stay home.  She is now helping out with many of the chores, and we (I?) are looking forward to more of that.

My overwhelming sense of the whole episode is one of a big blank space in our lives.  All the things that we could normally do we couldn't.  No matter how "accessible" some place might be, the accommodations are usually second rate and it takes longer to get to them.  So you're just forced to stay at home.  I don't mean that there haven't been many positives, because there have been (see first and second paragraphs), but you just have to forego or put on hold so many things.  The effective loss of my law partner since July and still ongoing hasn't helped at all, and his sense of doom and depression about his situation is a pretty strong contrast to Janet's grit.

In the midst of all this, or actually towards the end, we got Sandied.  That upsets things, too: if we have no power, we have nothing: no heat, water, hot water, very limited septic (a pump pushes stuff out to the septic field), and (for me) worst of all, no television or internet.  That really hurts for news junkies like me, and it was interesting to learn that this is what I missed the most.  Mom and Pop's old generator powered our sump pump and fridge, and a lamp or two and the microwave when we needed it, and I did buy a very small capacity heater the last day we had no power and it could operate as well.  So it's an old machine and drinks about five or more gallons of gas a day, but it works.  The sense of disruption is complete: I had to spend three hours one day just to get more gas for the generator (it actually went out while I was gone).  Still today there are roads closed, so you never know if you can get where you're going.  Lots of stores were closed for a long time, courts were closed all week, schools were closed,   We didn't get hammered anywhere near as badly as many, many others, but boy, I do not ever want to go through this again.

It's been a time of reflection.  I've learned I still fall very short in the patience department, and I'd better get that fixed for the years to come.  But I've also appreciated how much we all care about each other.  That wasn't in any doubt, but it helped us get through it all.

Winter

It's a little early.  We have a fire in the fireplace and a fair amount of smoke smell throughout the house.  Hmm.  Grandma wouldn't like it. 

Our first snowstorm has begun, although it's mostly flurries right now.  The temperatures are certainly winter-like.  Mary, we're not in Maryland any more!

It was cold yesterday for voting as well.  Fortunately, there were plenty of voting stations in Pittsfield so there were no lines, early for Mary or late for me.  How about with you all?  Heard around Amherst there were two hour waits.  Committed.

Of course, we stayed up late, and we know via Twitter and text messaging a number of you all did as well.  Peter, Janet and Johanna were up for the weekend and the elections took up a lot of our conversation.  Peter was reading a book by Nate Silver, a NYT pollster, who was supremely confident in his predictions.  I repeated that confidence at the university yesterday and people thought I was nuts.  Turns out Nate Silver was accurate.

The best news is I will be getting fewer e-mails.  I did forward one which I got from Barack shortly after 11pm.  He graciously thanked me for my help....and then asked for money!!

The bigger news though may have been that Peter and Janet got power back.  We felt so bad for them as they were leaving on Sunday, not knowing if they were going back to a house without power.  And, when they walked in the door, they had no power.  It did come back on later that night.

We had a nice weekend with them.  Janet is cast-less, and on the long road to recovery.  She is religious about her exercises, and we saw her even take a few steps.  

The girls went to Great Barrington and the boys went for a walk in the woods.  We watched a movie about Marilyn Monroe, which was actually better than we all thought.  We listened to the Princeton football game, which we narrowly lost on some bad calls at the end of the game.  They always seem to go against us.

Earlier in the week, John and Marilyn came over as they were without power.  They watched us have dinner and then we saw the news together/  By the time they got home, their power had been restored.

Other news: Mary is getting over a long, bad, lingering cold.  She seems to be finally on the mend.  We watched a little of another big college game, which we know Joe was also taking in: Alabama-LSU.  Margaret and Andrew were "Back to the Future" for Halloween.  (We didn't have any trick-or-treaters, but we fortunately had only bought a few small bags to eat on our own.)

Mary joined me at UMass last week for a lecture on the Greensboro NC truth and reconciliation process.  We were unaware of KKK shootings there in 1979, where perpetrators were aquitted even though there was video of them shooting.  One of the survivors was there, and was still severely disabled.  And understandably bitter and vengeful.

We think Annie had a GRE test about now.  Hope it went well.  Love from up here.

And hope you all are well.