Holiday 2006

February 2006

Greetings and Salutations!

First, we’d like to thank all of you who sent us holiday cards. It was great to hear from everyone. Next year we hope you send photos of the grownups too!

For the Andersons, 2005 was a year of conferences and kitties, of Heavy Dread and home repairs, of the Blue Hills and the Black Forest, of mosaic murals and another release of bubbling dub tones from the master tunesmith himself. Caryn attended no less than five conferences in 2005, presenting papers at two of them, and receiving awards and honors at one. Our dear kitties, Bert and Trixie, have grown up quite a lot – but not too much. Bert isn’t mesmerized by flushing toilets as he once was, and neither does Trixie climb in the plants, but they both still love chasing and tossing toy mice and rubber bands. And they’ve managed to melt Tyler from stubborn curmudgeon down to just a mudge. In April, Slade began a weekly DJ engagement at the Enormous Room in Cambridge, MA with his dub buddy DJ Brynmore – spinning his Burning Babylon plates, along with the ancestors of his genre, each and every Wednesday.

As many of you saw, last year started off with brightly colored walls. What you didn’t (and will probably never) see was the chimney repair, the roof repair and the new boiler – ah the glories of home ownership. We hiked the Blue Hills regularly, right here in Boston, and in late summer made our way to the Black Forest in Germany (along with England, Holland, Denmark, France and the Czech Republic in a fantastic automobile from Renault called a Scenic).

Caryn’s most glorious moment of the year was the mosaic mural she created on a building in Philadelphia with artist Isaiah Zagar, best friend Thalia, and a dozen other souls on a poetic weekend in May (story and photos). Slade’s greatest triumph was the release of "Stereo Mash Up" – another dub reggae extravaganza credited to his Burning Babylon moniker and heralded by reviewers as a "cauldron of electrical effervescence," for its "sinewy reach," "great rhythm tracks," "toe-tapping delights," and "deeply dubby excursions" – not to mention being "spacious and spacey," "crisp, contemporary," and "a collection of conscious variation and experimentation." (First of all, I’m the wife – I’m allowed to brag. Second of all, these are all real reviews. Read'em here.)

As far as our daily lives go, 2005 marked the end of the warehouse life for Slade. In mid-January he left OMS after eight years and launched himself into a fully creative life of art education and a screen-printing apprenticeship, while Caryn continues to throw her weight behind a standout effort to prepare the next generation of enlightened leadership in libraries, while continuing to build educational digital video libraries for multi-media archives and investigate sustained, cross-sectoral dialogue as a method for systemic public policy change (don’t worry Slade doesn’t know what any of that means either).

May 2006 be rewarding and full of laughter for all.

Cheers!
Caryn & Slade
Tyler, Bert & Trixie

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