Hey everyone!
I’ve been in London since the beginning of September, in case you didn’t know, and (also in case you didn’t know) have been keeping an … if I do say so myself … outstanding blog.
You can check it out here and read all about my incredibly fantasmagoric and awesome adventures.
Pour ceux qui ne sont pas sur FaceBook/For those not on FaceBook
Josh avait un séminaire avec ses collèges de Cassini à Londres. Anne-Marie en a profité pour faire un petit tour dans la capitale britannique. Par la même occasion, on s’est arrêté pour voir si notre fille serait dans des coins fréquentables en Septembre. On est rentré rassuré.
Après Londres, petite étape de rêve en Cornouailles, dans le petit port de pêche de Mevagissey avec une vue de rêve sur la baie de notre chambre de B&B. Un petit coin de paradis, et quelques jours de grand et profond repos.
Stonehenge
Mevagissey
All semester, I’ve been working on an unreasonably stressful production of Hair which opened last night, and went fantastic. Our last rehearsal on Thursday (also in front of a smaller audience) had been awful for me because - as luck would have it - I could not make any sound at all due to an untimely and drastic case of laryngitis. But! A miraculous recovery was made in time for opening night, and people loved the show!
If you’re in the LA area, come see it!
Watch this video of a local news story in LA. Aylia is about 2 minutes in.
This was a year of ups and downs, both physically and emotionally, literally and figuratively. I spent a lot of time obsessing over the presidential election. Of course, our first votes as Floridians were rendered meaningless by the Florida legislature’s decision to break party rules and hold their primary too early. As a result, no democrats campaigned here and our votes weren’t counted until the outcome was decided nearly six months later. During the relatively short general election campaign, I became a junkie of the political polling websites and analysis sites. The best for a nerd like me was www.fivethirtyeight.com with its detailed statistical analysis of every poll from every state.
Although I had decided in the summer that I could not afford the time to volunteer and would limit my contributions to monetary ones, once things got under way (and I think the selection of Sarah Palin was a big motivating factor), I hit the pavement and went door to door canvassing for the East Orlando Obama office. I even convinced Anne-Marie to join me on a couple of occasions. I am still not convinced of the effectiveness of canvassing, but it was certainly therapeutic. The ongoing senate vote count in Minnesota is providing a nice soft-landing for my political addiction of 2008. Anne-Marie celebrated Obama’s election with a trip to Disney (where else).
2008 was a record year for travel for me. I blew past the 50,000 mile threshold for United’s Premier Executive status for the first time, and had three non-United trips as well for an estimated total of about 75,000 flight miles, nearly double my previous record. This was not a good thing, though it did help us bring Aylia home with frequent flier miles for Spring Break, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and make it possible for Anne-Marie to accompany me on a trip to Montreal for a meeting there in July. The most memorable trip was the flight to Paris via Frankfurt on which I got very sick to my stomach and passed out on the way to the airplane lavatory for round three of vomiting. The fall gave me a scary-looking but superficial set of wounds around my left eye. Following a short stay at the Frankfurt airport infirmary I was off to Paris to host a workshop on Saturn’s rings which went quite well in spite of the inauspicious start. What would have been the most memorable trip in almost any other year was my return to zero-g parabolic flights with a flight on the Zero-G corporation’s plane on December 7. Ironically, unlike the Frankfurt flight, I did not get sick on this “vomit comet” trip, and I have another one slated for February 8.
We had a big Christmas gathering with the “California Colwells” arriving en masse from L.A. and a few hundred carpenter ants arriving en masse from our bedroom wall. The latter made their appearance first and complicated our house preparations and our now presumably all dead.
Aylia got to see Daniel Radcliffe in New York City and is looking forward to a semester in London next Fall, and Anne-Marie and I are making plans for a June trip to England anchored around a Cassini meeting. Cassini keeps on chugging, and we are now midway through year 5 at Saturn with a current nominal end date of September 30, 2010. What happens beyond that will, among other things, such as my tenure application, be decided in 2009.
Josh
Bonne Année à tous et à chacun de vous qui prenez le temps de venir nous lire sur notre blog.
Vous avez vu sur notre photo que nous nous portons aussi bien que possible ce qui n’est pas le cas de notre monde. Mais tous nos efforts ont finalement payé et nous espérons que l’élection de Barack Obama va faire plus que nous donner à tous du baume au coeur.
La famille Colwell a passé une bonne année 2008 malgré les grincements de Josh. Aylia est devenue très indépendante et vit sa vie à Los Angeles. Elle manque beaucoup à ses parents qui s’habituent petit à petit à son absence et sa famille lui manque beaucoup (on n’est pas vraiment sur qui lui manque le plus: ses parents ou ses animaux!) Mais elle reste bien occupée par ses activités artistiques et son théatre. Elle a finit l’année en jouant 2 rôles dans “Saint Joan”, une loooongue pièce de G. Bernard Shaw qui parle de la vie de Jeanne d’Arc. C’est ainsi qu’elle découvre l’histoire de France.
Josh vit au rythme de son travail et ne prend guère de vacances, mais il a commencé à prendre un peu de recul et on espère prendre du temps en 2009 juste pour respirer. De mon côté, en Janvier 08 j’ai eu le privilège de me faire embaucher par ce petit musée local où je travaille les week-ends. Ca me donne le temps et le loisir de m’occuper de notre famille, notre maison et ma peinture. Si vous ne l’avez pas encore vue, vous pouvez aller sur www.bluetangoartfactory.com avoir une idée de ce que je fais.
Nous avons fait pas mal de voyages cette année, surtout Josh pour satisfaire ses responsibilités professionnelles. Je suis allée avec lui découvrir Montréal où je me suis sentie tout de suite à l’aise et ne rêve que de pouvoir y retourner vite y faire un stage artistique. En Mai, j’avais traversé une fois de plus l’Atlantique pour aller fêter les 80 ans de Maman dans les Pyrénées. En Octobre, toute notre petite famille a fêté mon anniversaire à New York. Quelle ville!!!
L’année s’achève entourée de tous les Colwells. De monde, mais bien des rires.
Nous pensons à tout le monde et envoyons nos voeux de paix, de prospérité, de santé et de bonheur.
Anne-Marie
I flew on the Zero-G corporation’s plane today on a flight for teachers. I did a test run of a modified microgravity impact experiment. I have not had a chance to check the results yet, but I managed the flight (ZG-210) without getting sick, though if it had gone much more beyond the 15 parabolas that we did, I probably would have lost it. Nevertheless, that brings me to 262 lifetime parabolas. The barf count is unknown, but also unchanged.
Some pictures can be found here.
Anne-Marie and I just got back from a great show by Jimmy Fallon at the UCF arena. Tickets were free thanks to the Campus Activities Board. We had excellent seats on the floor. The warm-up act was Matt Kirshen, a finalist from season 5 of Last Comic Standing. He was quite funny, particularly when showing his American audience their image as seen through the eyes of a Brit. (We are, apparently, a polite people, except when we don’t get our way.) Fallon was impressive. He moved between impersonations, comedic retooling of pop songs, and funny anecdotes with amazing speed and talent. We had a great time. This clip captures the tone of some of his musical interludes, but the medley we saw was about green songs (Snoop Dogg singing about his ethanol-burning car, for example).
And there was much rejoicing. The campus is littered with chalk exclamations of joy: “Obama!”, “My President is Black!”, “Change we can believe in”, and - of course - “YES WE CAN”
Indeed we can. And we are.
There are people filming for PBS on Oxy campus, doing a piece on our President Elect, interviewing people and exploring the dorm hall where he used to live, and every other person is wearing an Obama shirt. I also happen to know that Mr and Mrs Colwell are out late celebrating every night since the staggering results were announced at 8 pm Pacific time, 11 pm Eastern time.
Our country has hope once again.
This Hallowe’en was an eventful one on Occidental Campus, though the holiday is evidently not a big enough deal for teachers to cut us slack. I had a two hour long presentation in my Acting I class called the Zoo Project. All of us in that class studied an animal in the zoo for about a month, and were to behave as that animal for two hours in Keck Theatre while other people on campus came and watched.
Quite a feat, I must say.
That evening, also for Acting I, we all went to go see Spring Awakening, a Tony Award Winning Musical. Very good. Meeting the cast was better. 
And then came the Hallowe’en fun! I spent the whole day dressed as Peter Pan - and that included meeting the cast in costume.
Anne-Marie en pleine inspiration pour une démonstration lors de la convention Create Chaos (graphic designers en tous genres) à Orlando en Octobre 2008. Elle travaille sur sa toile “Bouteille à la mer”. On peut voir sa toile terminée sur son site www.bluetangoartfactory.com
