Smale Christmas 2010

Season's Greetings, and welcome to the Smale Christmas Letter 2010, where we summarize a year of singing, travel, working, writing and other escapades into two pages of text and a plethora of pictures.

This was the year that Christmas just kept going, all the way to July. Our big annual festive-season Chromatics gig at the Greenbelt Arts Center got weathered out by Snowpocalypse 2009 and was rescheduled for New Year's Day. And after that we headed into the recording studio to get going on our long-awaited new Christmas CD. After spending many evenings singing on-key and at exactly the right tempo in Jan-Mar, and several more frowning, mixing and mastering in Apr-Jun, the first pressing of "Wassailicious" came to pass in July, just in time for us to be the big musical guests at Shore Leave science fiction convention, singing at the Saturday night Masquerade. Yep, SF people will buy Christmas CDs in July. They're used to thinking outside the box. But rest assured that the real CD release party is this December, where it's supposed to be.

Other highlights of our Chromatic year included singing at New York City's American Museum of Natural History, right underneath the Hayden Planetarium, followed by happy chats and an interview with Neil Tyson; an a cappella festival in Virginia with some impressive local talent; the National Association of Science Writers in Connecticut; various public and private gigs in Pennsylvania; and opening the Festival of Lights at Brookside Gardens, actually in our own home state. Oddly, these highlights all happened within the same two-month period, since the group took a hiatus over the summer while one of us gave birth. (No, wait; not actually one of us - Padi Boyd, the Chromie Music Director, welcomed Braden into the world in May, an event we were privileged to be present at the hospital for.) So, between that and various acts of Travel, it was actually a relatively quiet year for the group.

See what I did there? I segued into Travel. Little writer trick.

In April we went on the first of our two foreign trips, a National Geographic tour of Morocco. After our highly successful trip to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia in 2008, we realized that the Sahara had to be next on the list. Someday we will figure out how come we're desert people, but not really beach people. Anyway, we had a great time in Morocco, with visits to the mosques, monuments and medinas of Casablanca, Marrakech, and Fes, and a great deal of the countryside in between. We enjoyed the High Atlas mountains and penetrating deep into Berber country. In the Sahara we stayed in a Berber tent camp. We arrived during a sandstorm for maximum dramatic effect, but fortunately the conditions improved enough for us to go camel-riding out on the dunes, and to get up early the next morning for a hike during the golden Sahara dawn. The Sahara, our visit to the Kasbah at Ait Benhaddou, and our forays into the twisty, turny medieval maze of the Fes medina were the most spectacular parts of the trip, but we also saw a lot of gorgeous scenery including extensive Roman ruins in lush, fertile valleys, and the undulating, dynamic charms of several rather good belly-dancers.

Our second offshore trip took us to England for a week in August, to visit with Alan's parents in Leeds, see the countryside, and spend a few days in London. We stayed in the heart of the city, right by Trafalgar Square, and spent a lot of time walking around the sights. We crossed the Millennium Bridge for the first time, hit the Tate Gallery and the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and had some really good meals.

Closer to home (or at least in the North American continent), we had our 20th Anniversary celebration in St. Michael's, MD, spent a relaxing weekend in a friend's beach house in Salvo, NC, also in September, and went to visit Karen's parents in Tucson, AZ in November, where we did a good amount of hiking, making us feel somewhat fit for that brief moment in time. In addition, Alan spent a week in sunny Boston, MA in July at a conference about accretion disks.

Alan is still gainfully employed at the Goddard Space Flight Center as Director of the HEASARC, NASA's high energy data archive, and doing a couple of research projects using archival X-ray data from RXTE and new optical data from the Kepler mission. Wearing his writer hat (now sporting an unhealthy number of vodka stains plus the detritus from various brain explosions), he had quite a good year. While coming a very, very long way away from winning a Nebula award for last year's "Delusion's Song", he did at least get some votes. In April two podcasts of his stories were released, "Kristen, with Caprice" on Podcastle and "Wearing the Dead" on Pseudopod, and in September within a couple of days of each other, "Saint's-Paw" was published in Realms of Fantasy and "A Clash of Eagles" in the novella anthology Panverse Two, followed shortly by "High Art", online at Abyss & Apex. Particularly enjoyable was being a writer guest at CapClave 2010, where he moderated a panel discussing "History in Science Fiction" with Connie Willis, which required him to think really quickly to keep up.

Karen continues as Editor-in-Chief of the Science websites at NASA/Goddard. While still heavily involved in developing a unified web presence for the science organizations, she's also been tasked with cleaning up the entire web presence - all 600+ web sites. Job security is what that's called. In her spare time, Karen tries not to think too much about work and is creating an ever-lengthening list of hobbies and home improvements she'd like to do whenever she can spare the time.

Moving from Experiences to Possessions, we are now the proud owners of a new washer and dryer, a shiny new space-age grill that looks as if it could achieve orbit under its own power if only we could figure out which combination of switches to press, a new water heater, and new trees. Snowpocalypse and Snowmageddon (and Snoverkill) really inflicted a world of harsh on the Leyland cypresses that used to line our property and so they all had to go, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth (ours, not theirs). In their place we now have a neat row of Arborvitae, which we hope will not get hammered by infestations or heavily salted and pounded by snow clearing vehicles anytime soon, please? Thanks.

And that was our year, in just over a thousand words.