Email Quote of Note
A correspondent, commenting on our purchase of a TV, our first since the Nixon Administration, "Careful now. If you advance culturally too fast, you're likely to sprain something."

Site Seeing
In September the Cassini satillite observed an eclipse of the sun by the planet Saturn. Check out this amazing photograph!

Thanks for clicking on our page. Check it out. After you look at our latest news, send us email and tell us your news. As you probably know, our address is: snydder -- that's with two d's, one for Dan and one for Dave -- @earthlink.net. Of course, the stuff in italics isn't part of the email address, it's just in there to fool email address scavengers.

It was an enjoyable holiday season, although it was a little different from recent years. Our "Christmas Trip" this year did not require a passport: The five of us toured Chicago for a few days, and then we came back to Seattle for the rest of the holiday.

On Christmas Eve it was time to break out the Champagne!

News and Notes

• While in Chicago we stopped at the Field Museum so Dan could return some fossils that he had borrowed for his PhD dissertation. Checking out fossils is better than checking out books -- there are no fines if the fossils become overdue. After all, they've been sitting around unused for millions of years already.

  

  The elephants are an icon of the Field Museum, but there are many other wonderful exhibits. They have Sue, the most complete T. rex dinosaur skeleton. But our favorite was an accurate computer animation of ocean life in the Cambrian period at the time of the Burgess shale fossils. It's very bizarre!

• We also visited the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is one of our favorites. The MCA served as the venue for the monthly poetry reading series hosted by Powells Book Store. It is curated by Dave and his former professor, Dan Beachy-Quick. The reading was fascinating.

  

  The staircase is an icon of the MCA, as is their gift shop, which we seem to visit too often.

• Check out our Iron Chef page!

• We need to show off two more pictures of our kids from 2006. The first is Dan and Tomoko at the Knox College football game this fall. Cute, aren't they?

  

  The other is Dave on Christmas morning after assembling a wire-and-marble puzzle. Cute again, right?

  

  These last two photos make up for the fuzzy pictures elsewhere in this issue!

Directory of Pages

Recent Pages ...
Page Parody	Dave, Tomoko & Dan Spoof Our Oct. 30 Page, 1 page
Tee Shirts	Help us fill out our World Tour tee shirt archive, 1 page
Solid Gold ...
Wedding	Tomoko & Dan Celebrate Their Marriage, 1 page
Fishing + Fire	When the fish don't bite, we watch the fire, 1 page
Cutting Trees	Our family meets in MT on US Thanksgiving, 1 page
Garden Tour	Join the tour with Takashi Kawamoto, 1 long page
Shanghai	The most populous country's most populous city, 4 pages
Antipasti	Julie & Shelley reveal their recipe, 1 page
Garden News	Moss, compost & building the garden paths, 1 page
The Gates	A quick trip to NYC to see Christo's Gates, 1 page
Haida Gwaii	Exploring Canada's Queen Charlottes Is, 4 pages
Freedom Trail	Tour of Western US in our red Jeep, 5 pages
'Round the World	The 2001/2002 sabbatical, 43 pages