Even Dave found a spot of shade to hide from the too-bright New Mexico sun at this Leathers playground.


Here are some pictures of all of us at the Robert Leathers playground in Las Cruces. There are over 1600 playgrounds around the world that this guy has inspired and worked on, all community built. We love some of the fun kid-sized crawl spaces. These playgrounds are for kids of all ages---witness Josh and Leah having fun as well as Calvin and Isabel.

We had a good trip to New Mexico. It was a relief that my mom didn't have ovarian cancer. Just the radical hysterectomy was enough to get through. The kids had a good time playing at her house and swimming. Isabel had no trouble getting into the pool. Another week later and it would have been easier for me to get in.

(Calvin insisted on taking everything off but the goggles. )

We also got to see Josh and Leah, who are now officially engaged to be married. They have a cute little dog, part Dalmatian, named Tope as in Spanish for speed bump, a good name for a dog. They seem happy, which makes me happy.

My mom got amazing flowers from our cousing Liz in California. Isabel posed with them, looking like some art-deco goddess in a 1920's painting.

And we got to visit some interesting sites in Albuquerque in the Old Town area. More on this later.

Albany -- Sarah writes:

This year has been one of the best of my life. It's strange that I should feel this way doing lab research, of all things, but I think it's because both at work and at home, in my neighborhood, I feel part of a community. And it's not as though its been a cake walk. There are lots of different personalities at work, and we've had to work hard at times to understand each other and to learn to work together at solving problems that come up both technically and interpersonally. With the guidance of Prof. H.V.B. Hirsch, the fly daddy of the lab, we have done great things together, and had a lot of fun. Here's a picture of him with his son, and one with me -- just for the record. While I'm looking forward to moving on to continue my studies in Syracuse, I'm going to miss the lab too.

We went to Ithaca this weekend and stayed with Brad Edmondson and his wife Tania at their house on 106 Short Street. The excuse for going was meeting up with Chris Schaeffer, who is getting divorced after a long effort at keeping a difficult marriage together. It was a fabulous weekend of catching up with friends. As a bonus we got to see Shep Smith, who still remembers a weeklong hike at Deep Springs with Dave as one of the best times of his life. We hope to get our families together one of these years. Here's a picture of the kids throwing rocks at Fall Creek. And one of me and Chris pre-race.

On the road Calvin said some funny things, one of which was "Please may I be excused from the car," a novel way of saying "are we there yet?" ingeniously extrapolated from his previous training in table manners. When the sun was setting he said something else that struck us poetic: "My eyes are in the dark."

It's so much fun listening to the way both Isabel and Calvin express the way they experience the world. It makes me realize how much I take for granted that because we use the same words we understand things in the same way. So often we really don't, even though we think we do because we use a common vocabulary. This "common" language is still full of nuances and shades of meaning that makes true understanding more an art than a science.