Holiday 2005

February 2005

Greetings at last!

Perhaps you thought this letter would never come? While our dear friend Bob Fornaro has for years unfailingly offered the first Holiday greetings of the season, and so many of our friends with children have put us way out of the contest for the cutest card, the only recognizable title left is to be the latest. But this is certainly not for lack of news. 2004 has been an incredible year for us.

Slade saw his first professional release for Burning Babylon. I received my Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. We became aunt and uncle – twice over for our twin nieces Whitney and Skyler. And we bought our first house – eek! If that wasn’t enough, the very, very latest news …as of two days ago we are now the proud adoptive parents of two adorable kitties – a brother and sister pair named Bert and Trixie. What a year!

April brought the long-awaited release of "Knives to the Treble," the latest and finest collection of musical adventures produced under Slade’s dub reggae moniker of "Burning Babylon." At first sold only by one major outlet in the U.S. (Ernie B.'s Reggae), Ernie soon called for another shipment, and another, and we began seeing the album popping up for sale in England, Netherlands, Germany, Japan and elsewhere. Then the reviews started slowly trickling in – "entertaining dub excursion," "shouldn’t be missed," "heavy dope beats and hypnotic organ and synthie sound carpets, yeah," "a tasty dub soup," "a shifting, kaleidoscopic welter of dubwise reggae sounds," "super heavyweight rhythms," an "Essential Pick!" The limited edition, hand-numbered colored vinyl copies sold fast to dub enthusiasts and collectors, while the album itself (in CD and LP form) has been turning up on a variety of radio playlists and reggae house parties from what we hear. Walboomers, a big music distributor for dub music in Europe, based in the Netherlands, is so interested in Slade’s stuff that they have been asking if they can start pressing some of Slade’s back catalog of material for additional release in Europe. He’s also teaming up again with his original visionary partner, Tim Downie, to put the next Burning Babylon album out on the streets in 2005.

December brought the final days of my whirlwind Masters program in Library and Information Science. Boy I sure learned a lot, and all the hard work that has kept me in hiding for much of the past two years has paid off as a degree with highest honors. Before I even finished, one of my professors asked me to come work with him on a grant he received to create a toolkit for building online video digital libraries. He had built the Open Video project, which makes video publicly available on the web, and so many people (particularly museums and libraries with video collections) keep asking him for his code and files to make their own that he got a federal grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to write the code and documentation and tutorials and I’m on board to help through 2006, and maybe beyond. It’s very exciting to be a part of something that has the potential to become a standard tool in the field.

My other work now is evolving out of what started as an independent study project and internship this past year. There was no product in the library market for keeping track of all the statistics that tracked the usage of different electronic databases, journals and reference resources. Hundreds of companies supply statistics on their own products, and I began working with staff at Simmons to develop our own product to put them all together for easier analysis. Apparently we are not the only school with such a need, and now the project has developed into a partnership with Trinity College and Villanova University, and just last week I got an e-mail from the folks who are developing national standards for electronic resource management. They want to talk to me about a possible collaboration with the ERUS Project. Very exciting for me.

Finally, my ongoing work with Australian scholar and Harvard fellow Dr. Gabriele Bammer on the development of a new specialization called Integration and Implementation Sciences continues to be extremely inspiring. She is coordinating the principles of systems theory and complexity science, with participatory methods and knowledge management, exchange and implementation to devise better theories and methods for solving large-scale complex problems like sustainable development, global public health, international security and multi-party conflict resolution. While that may sound dull to some, it thrills me to be a part of solving these big problems.

Oh dear, I’ve talked too long about me – it’s just all so fascinating to me. Okay, on to the house. What an adventure. We passed papers on the 4th of January – thanks to invalvuable help from my real estate broker mother. It’s a single family home in Roslindale, Massachusetts, just about 3 miles away from our old apartment in Jamaica Plain. It’s a colonial-ish style, with a light green clapboard exterior, white trim and black shutters. There isn’t much of a yard and no driveway, but it’s got 8 rooms and a cellar so there is plenty of space for Slade to have a music studio and an art studio and for me to have my own office (very important now that I’m working from home).

We were pretty amazed that we could afford a house this big, but the furnace is old (probably will need a new one in the next 2-3 years) and the kitchen and bath need to be gutted. One of the rooms in the attic has no heat, so we use it for a bedroom and Slade wears a ski hat to bed! :) And now that we’ve moved in we are discovering all the little things... cold air pouring in through the outlets, unlevel floors (our frig and stove list), doors that don’t work, etc. – ah the joys of home ownership. We’ve been to Home Depot so many times in the past month that some people there greet us when we arrive. (How scary is that?)

We’ve got the living room/dining room painted (Kermit green!), as well as my office (lavender) and Slade’s music studio (which we have taken to calling The Lounge due to its extremely groovy nature – it’s like being in an orange cloud). We’ve still got some more to do, but we figure another month will be enough to get ourselves reasonably settled in.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yeah - babies!! Slade’s sister Elisabeth and husband Darin had twin girls, Whitney Hughes and Skyler Slade, in early September. How fun is that? (well, not so much for them – twice the crying, half the sleep, and twice as much poo - but fun for us!) And of course we can count on Liz to always have them in absolutely the most adorable outfits you’ve ever seen. But that’s not all. Mike and Laurie had sweet Ella Grace in July, and Karl and Justina had a son the same day. His name is Truman Tangeni (a marvelous name from his mother’s Namibian homeland) and he is full of smiles and laughter already. With no children of our own, we are looking forward to babysitting for Truman now that we’ve moved in just up the street. But we couldn’t totally resist the baby urge, and, true to our de facto motto of "cats not kids," we’ve adopted two of the cutest kitties you could ever imagine. We found them via petfinder.com. There were so many cats needing homes, we were agonized that we could only take two. We encourage you to adopt if you are thinking about a new pet. While there could never be a replacement for Roscoe, Bert and Trixie have already won our hearts in just a few days and we couldn’t imagine life without them. Even old Uncle Grumbles himself (Tyler) is warming up to the little ones (albeit slowly). See more photos on the Cats page.

May 2005 be full of laughter for all!

Top of Page