December, 2001

Hello, and happy holidays from the Soldans.

Alice and I have been cutting Christmas trees, making decorations, shopping, and generally getting into the holiday mood, but we are missing one important ingredient this year… snow. It has been a very warm fall this year. We have had a couple of decent snowfalls, but each has mostly melted, leaving actual bare spots all over the place. I can’t remember so much bare ground this late in December in all my years in the Copper Country. Regardless of the weather, though, we are anticipating another great family holiday season again this year.

Steve is a senior at Macalester this year. He is just finishing his last Fall Semester at "Mac, and has had a busy and productive year. He worked part time in the theatre scene shop, and performed in several plays, including Hamlet, and Laughter on the 23^rd Floor. His advanced directing project, Samuel Beckett’s one act play, What When, opened December 15^th, 2001. Alice and I have been lucky enough to be in the audience for each of these performances. Steve worked this summer as a door-to-door fund raiser for the Sierra Club, and the Human Rights Campaign, a job I am not sure I would have the nerve to do. He told us that lots of people try that kind of work, but very few are successful at it, and he gathered quite a few stories about dealing with ‘Joe Q. Public’. We were lucky enough to visit him during a rally the Sierra Club held to protest oil drilling in the ANWR, and we were both reminded of our hippie years.

Alice had another busy professional year. Transition 2000, MTU’s first academic year in its switch to semesters, was completed in the first half of this year. This was an enormous project including a redesign of the entire curriculum, and a great deal of individual advising. The greatest challenge has been to make sure the students caught between terms and semesters take the required courses, but still are able to graduate on time in spite of the complete overhaul of the academic year. Additionally, Alice has developed a routine of working out at our local fitness center several times each week. She also had a busy summer in the garden, where she, as well as the local deer population, harvested several months worth of tasty fruits and vegetables.

I have started to settle in to my new job in the Fine Arts Department at MTU. My major challenge has been to adjust myself to people with a different concept of time than I have. Artists seem to view time and deadlines with more fluidity than the computer guy I was trained to be. Such adjustments, I keep telling myself, are good for a person’s development. In addition to running the theatre scene shop, I am also in charge of the department’s computers. I have never had my own department before, and have had some catching up to do. Since the theatre season mostly coincides with the academic year, I was able to devote a good chunk of the summer to learning what I needed to know to effectively run my department’s servers and desktop computers. While there have been some rocky stretches, I feel I am catching my stride. The set design for our Winter Carnival play, A Chorus Line, is just leaving the drawing board and entering the building stage.

Alice and I took our first ever just-the-two-of-us vacation this summer. I have been lucky enough on trips out West, to visit some beautiful parks. So Alice and I planned a trip to see some of the same sights together. We went the last two weeks of May, and did a little over 50 miles of day hiking in that time. First we flew to Las Vegas on the red-eye special, grabbed a rental car and drove to our hotel. In the morning, we left for Zion park in southern Utah where we camped for 3 beautiful days. The park had had some rare rain during our stay, and one hike to a place called the Upper Emerald Pool earned us the sight of a 100’ waterfall that only awakens a few times per year. We both made the strenuous climb up to Angel’s Landing which requires the use of a guard chain and small footholds for the last segment. Alice was pretty proud of herself for being brave enough to make it to the top. Not too shabby for someone over 50. Next we drove to Bryce Canyon, where we stayed in a cabin for 3 nights. We hiked the park each day, and returned in the evening to eat pizza and watch TV. During this part we also drove to Lower Calf Creek in the Escalante Grand Staircase park, where we took a beautiful day hike along the creek to another beautiful waterfall. The contrast of all that water in such a barren dry landscape amazed us both. From Bryce, we drove to Arizona, and spent 4 wonderful days on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. We did several day hikes, and one long hike from the rim to Roaring Springs and back, a 9 ½ mile hike. The trail to Roaring Springs is what you see snaking diagonally down this photo. It took twice as long to come up as it did to go down, and the temperature for the last half of the hike hovered around 100 degrees. We drank a lot of water, and Alice did a great job keeping up with my long legs. Roaring Springs, by the way, is a place in the canyon where water gushes out of the canyon walls, enough to supply the needs of both rims with fresh water. After visiting the Grand Canyon, we drove back to Nevada to Laughlin, where we spent 3 more days lounging on the banks of the Colorado River enjoying the scenery, the quiet, and the food that casino’s are famous for. Then we drove back to Las Vegas, returned the car, and flew home, again on the red-eye special. Steve stayed at home to take care of our pets, and to pick us up from the Marquette Airport, since the Houghton Co. Airport runway was being re-surfaced, and planes couldn’t land. It was strange to have HIM waiting for US, instead of the other way around for a change. Hmmm, what’s wrong with this picture? I think we could easily get used to this chauffeur stuff.

Steve was finding he had use for a vehicle in order to make it to his summer job, so we made him a deal. We would give him our faithful 1990 Honda Civic (170,000 miles), and buy ourselves a new car. After thinking about it (for about 30 seconds) , he said ok J We searched many sources, including the Consumer Reports online archive, and found a car we both liked, the VW Golf Diesel. We ordered the car in April, and learned they were a little backed up at the factory. It took until late July for the car to come. The color we ordered was not available, so we took red, and what we got was real RED! We have to make sure we drive the speed limit, because we really stick out in this car. We have about 7,000 miles on it already, and we both love it. It came with an option we both thought would be silly in the extreme – heated seats. I am here to tell you that heated seats during a Copper Country winter is a great idea! I have a feeling future cars of ours will have a similar feature. We also replaced the standard radio with a CD/MP3 player which I bought and installed myself. Using my computer and a CD burner, I can put around 15 CDs on one disk, which allows us to listen to a large assortment of music on our travels.

Best wishes. Ted, Alice, and Steve