A Pilgrim and a Stranger

No, actually, just Dan and Eva, for all y'all trav'lin' throooooough this werisom blog. (I think that's the song we were just finishing.) Here's a picture from our Thanksgiving gathering (thanks Jonina!) to go along with our Christmas letter for the year.

Dear Friends and Family, December 17, 2007
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Dan continues to build experiments in the Yale Physics department, where he was promoted to associate professor this year. The grant-writing, student-managing, and conference-attending continue unabated, but this year he can now brag that one of his experiments collected new data on the Dark Matter of the Universe. He was even quoted in Discover magazine—in which he drops big names, like Copernicus (but they haven’t even met). To relax, he plays basketball and his guitar, which he’s had for one year. He is pretty good already, and Eva likes to sing along.
Eva spent the spring semester teaching a survey of Western Art and working on her dissertation on triumphal processions in Renaissance multi-block prints. In the summer, she took Intensive Latin, which somehow inspired nausea and the need to constantly snack. Then, despite a growing girth, she made research trips to Venice, London, and Berlin, where in addition to seeing loads of artwork, she was able to enjoy with abandon gelato, scones with clotted cream, and German cake and schnitzel. She has now returned home, where she has decommissioned her normal wardrobe and spends time writing, nesting, and sleeping, in alternate preparation and denial of a proverbial bundle of joy the stork has scheduled for an early February delivery.
Both Eva and Dan happily anticipate the arrival of a bambino in the household but wonder how the cats Calamity and Cyrano will adjust to a demotion to second-class citizenship. So far, they adopt oblivion, and anyway all can be forgiven with the mystical appearance of the laser pointer.
May this small letter find you happy and healthy in the holiday season. We hope that you come to New Haven to see us! Less satisfactorily, you can visit and comment on our humble blog, to see (only) slightly more frequent updates but also a few pictures: www.evadan.blogspot.com .
Love from Eva, Dan, and “Primo Chidler”