Happy 2023 from the ClarkenSteins! Hope you and yours are having a great start to the new year. We’re wishing we had snow but also deciding we might as well enjoy the weirdly warm weather.
Looking back, 2022 feels like a blur of school and extracurricular activities occasionally interrupted by work and sleep. Lev is now in K5 (age 6) and Misha is in fifth grade (age 11), and they’re pretty busy: Misha is taking piano lessons and violin lessons and he’s at swim practice at seemingly all other times. Lev is also taking piano and swimming and is starting ballet.
We were fortunate to get to travel this year. In addition to our regular Door County trip we took an Amtrak to Washington D.C., and then went on to New York City. We saw all the things and relied almost entirely on trains, subways, and walking.
Back at home, Dave continued his work co-leading the Division of Enrollment Management and Student Success, occasionally dipping a toe into actual teaching and research but mostly going to meetings. Natalia finished a long stint as a Post Doc at the Medical College of Wisconsin and is now working towards a new career in bioinformatics.
Oh, and we played board games. Lots of board games. These boys aren’t as digitally oriented as I would have guessed, perhaps in reaction to the pandemic. Paper books, cardboard puzzles, and Clue Junior.
Hope that the world is being kind to you. Here in SE Wisconsin we could use some real snow, dammit.