2006 Season’s Greetings to our Friends and Family

Jim and Barb Miller

We hope the season finds you well. For those who are interested in our activities during 2006, here is a summary.

On New Year’s Day we began the first overseas trip Barb has taken since we went to Italy in September of 2001. This trip took us to Cambridge and London in the U.K., where we saw as much theatre as possible and visited a few friends. The London plays we saw included: Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, Schiller’s Mary Stuart, and Heroes, a translation/adaptation by Tom Stoppard of Le Vent des Peupliers, by Gerald Sibleyras. We also experienced two instances of the traditional Christmas pantomime, one a standard production by the Cambridge Arts Theatre, very focused on the children in the audience, and the second the West End celebration of the art form, with Ian McKellan playing the Widow Twankey in Aladdin. Our trip continued from London to Jerusalem, where we visited Jim’s relatives and hooked up with Zion Walking Tours to try to make some sense of that amazing city. After a week in Jerusalem, we stopped off in Zurich to visit more friends and experience a beautiful hike up a small Alp outside Zurich by twilight and the light of the full moon on the snow.

In April, we went to Turkey for a month-long tour. (It had been delayed due to Jim’s sciatica surgery last year, which was successful at curing the condition). We have gathered Jim’s daily email journal with pictures onto our little web site. (http://home.comcast.net/~bmill07/ )

In June, Barb returned to the Near East once again to participate in an archaeological dig in Israel. Her experiences registering artifacts for the dig and incidentally witnessing the beginning of the Israel-Lebanon conflict are recorded in a weblog at http://barbatqana.spaces.live.com/.

Shorter trips included a reunion in Vancouver with members of the Scheme Team, with whom Jim worked in the 80’s at MIT, and a visit to the Bay area in June to see family and friends, and to hear two recitals by Thomas Hampson. The first, in San Jose, was the final stop on a tour sponsored by the Library of Congress to present American art song. We celebrated our 27^th wedding anniversary in November in New York City seeing the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia and the first of the three plays in Tom Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia.

Barb continues to write CD reviews for OperaToday.com (search on “Barbara Miller”).

Barb also participated in a project to organize some literature discussions for the Northwest Classics Society in Bellevue (typically the group’s activities are in Seattle). The group discussed the Kalevala and the Song of Hiawatha this fall). A discussion group on the Epic of Gilgamesh is planned for this spring.

We “finished” our home renovation this year when we had the back yard landscaped, replacing the remnants of the construction site and overgrown grass with paths, dry streams, and a “water feature”.

Frequent absences have limited the number of mediations Barb was able to do this year, but she has been active in the Bellevue Mediation Program’s book group. Two interesting books included Influence: The Art and Science of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, and On Apology by Aaron Lazare.

Having dealt somewhat with her fear of conflict by learning mediation techniques, Barb has moved on to address another lifelong fear: that of water. Since October she has been taking swimming classes in hopes of joining that happy portion of the human race who see the water as their friend.

Jim continues to enjoy working at Microsoft; he was promoted to the position of partner, which is roughly the equivalent of tenure at a university, as it had to be approved by Steve Ballmer. In addition to continuing work on the Common Language Runtime, he is now coordinating architecture groups across the division.

We both continue to sing, although we have not done much performing in public. Barb is preparing a recital and Jim looks forward to being in the choruses of some opera productions in 2007.

We wish you all a safe and healthy 2007.