Knutty4Knitting: My New Year Newsletter

Here is the New Year's Newsletter I sent to family and friends today:

Happy New Year!!!

I wanted to send out photos and a Christmas newsletter this year, especially since so much has happened to our family this year, but I just could not get my act together. Anyway, better late than never, so here are the highlights for your reading enjoyment :) :

A has just been accepted into several Ph.D. programs in neuroscience, including USC. She wants to be a scientist. She graduated from Barnard College/Columbia University in 2004 with a degree in psychology and is working in a laboratory here at USC, where her research focus has something to do with the brain and epilepsy. This year, A published an article and several abstracts in scientific journals (she was the first author in these and second or third author in other papers) and presented her research at a scientific conference in Atlanta, Georgia in October. A’s 25^th birthday was yesterday, New Year’s Day.

K joined the Peace Corps in June 2006 and has had a very eventful time in El Salvador thus far. She’s been bitten by a bat (not rabid, thank goodness!), contracted the dengue fever and been hospitalized for 5 days and quarantined for an additional 5 days, gotten scabies from a local who sat on her mattress (these first three were in the span of three weeks!), and now has some kind of bacterial infection that has given her extreme gastrointestinal distress (I think you know what I mean). Her latest misadventure has to do with a mentally unbalanced stalker who threw a firecracker on the roof of her house on Christmas Day and almost burned it down. I want her to come home, but she won’t because she is committed to her work there. She works as a municipal developer, helping local government officials, in a mountain village with no hot running water. I want to visit her, but she says she’s afraid I will not survive two days there. I think she might be right. K graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University with a degree in International Relations in 2005. After her stint in the Peace Corps, K plans to attend law school.

S graduated three weeks ago (December 2006) from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in Decision Sciences. He is currently interviewing for positions in the financial management field. After working for a few years and gaining work experience in the financial sector, S plans to go to business school for his MBA. He wants to be a money manager. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he spends a lot of time with his favorite uncle and aunt—P and T M****—and his cousins A and A.

I was accepted into a doctoral program at USC’s Rossier School of Education. I started last August. I love it, and of all the programs I have been in—English (undergrad), law, public health, and now education—this seems to be the best fit. I am very much interested in policy and higher education as well as student affairs, and I hope to eventually work in student affairs at a college or university. Oh, and I was in a fundraising calendar (Miss October!!!!) for my cancer support group, and also was bald for another cancer book (Turning Heads, 2006).

S (my ex-husband) is doing well, too. He spends most of his time in the Philippines and comes every two or three months to Los Angeles to visit our children. Once in a while, he brings the children to him. A returned on Christmas Day from a three week stay in the Philippines, where she stayed with her father and Grandma A, and K and S spent several weeks in Manila with their father early in 2006.

I feel very very blessed. My children are healthy, happy, and doing well. In February, I will be a 4-year cancer survivor. I think God has given me everything I have ever asked for! And I am very grateful and humbled. (though, unfortunately you can't tell from all the bragging I am doing here).

Anyway, here are a few photos of my family taken last year. It is difficult to get photos of all of us together, since we are scattered all over the United States and Central America. The one where we are all together was at Melinda’s house on S’s (their father’s) birthday. It was one of those hot sweltering summer nights, so we all look sweaty and tired, but I love this photo since we are rarely in the same city at the same time.

May you have a Prosperous and Happy New Year!!!!!