Happy Holidays and Peace in 2010
And to really give Siri the north woods experience, we went snow shoeing on New Year's Day. Thank you Lynn and Mark for inviting us and supplying all the equipment. What a great day.
Dave and I made our first annual trip down south to visit our friends Kris and Carolyn in January (of course we only went to Rochester, MN but it was warmer than Duluth). And then in February they came up to visit for Lynn's cabin party. Really great times with these folks.
May was a busy month for us. I took another 4 day intensive training with Susi Hately Aldous in therapeutic yoga. We also hosted Susi at our house for the time of the training.
We also attended the Cirque de la Symphonie - a combo act which included the DSSO and Cirque du Soleil type performance artists including aerial flyers, acrobats, contortionists, dancers, jugglers, balancers, and strongmen. It was soooo cool and kinda yucky at the same time. The strong men and the contortionist make me cringe a little, worrying about what they are doing to their bodies. But it was super fun to watch.
Finally, we filmed Deborah, the author of our newest book, The Yamas & Niyamas, for a bunch of short YouTube instructional videos.
In July we had a family gathering here in Duluth. Siri, Deborah, Noah, Laurel, Stephen and Golda all stayed with us. We were very lucky with the weather. It was sunny and warmish the whole time they were here (I say lucky because the rest of the summer was fairly cool and rainy). Joan and Robin also visited at this same time and stayed out at my mom's. We all had a wonderful visit. Lots of catching up to be done. I detailed this gathering in the post "Family Reunion."
In August Dave went on his annual pilgrimage to GenCon, the world's biggest gaming convention, with his friends Tom and Jerry. They met some other friends there and Dave was also able to make some connections with some of the fellows he worked with at Wizards of the Coast when he was designing on-line content for Axis & Allies. Maybe some work will come out of it and maybe it won't but either way, he had fun and he also won a prize for best unit history in the Flames of War tournament.
In September, my Aunt Sally and Uncle Joe visited for a few days. They stayed with my mom for a day or two and then with us for a day before heading back to MO.
At the end of September, Petra had to have surgery on her rear, left knee. She had a dislocated kneecap due to the wearing down of the groove in her tibia that should have held her knee cap in place. Instead it had slipped over to the inner leg. Her whole left hind quarter got shaved bare and her stitches were metal staples. Plus she has pins in her leg and since her leg is so tiny the pins stick up - they tent up her skin. Not nice. She had Franken-leg. Poor little thing. The pet PT came once a week for at least a month, maybe 6 weeks, then we tapered off to every other week and now we are at once a month. Petra is healing well, her fur is growing back and she has been using her leg.Petra had a little set back yesterday - she tweaked her leg some how - but we think she will be as good as new in no time because she had been using her leg consistently; walking and running. It's been pretty hard to see our little dog go through such a trauma as this major leg surgery but we think she will be better for having had it.
In October we hosted Oktoberfest. We had a beer tasting (thank you Kris for bring all the beer) and ate homemade pretzels (YUM) to start, then ate the amazing meal Dave had prepared and finished up with Black Forest Cake and some after-dinner liqueurs: Kirsch and Barenjager. Please click here to read the blog post and to see the pictures of the evening.
In November we attended our 4th annual Cultural Night at UWS. Our friend Mark (of Lynn and Mark) is the foreign exchange student recruiter for UWS. He invited us to attend a few years ago and ever since, we are sold. It's basically a student run, variety show which also includes a multi-cultural dinner at the cafeteria. There's always a few good dishes and lots of beautiful outfits.
Happy holidays and may you find peace in the new year.
Sara, Dave & Petra
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