Joey's had a pretty eventful couple of years. He was awarded his Boy Scout Eagle rank (see picture) earlier in the year (Kerry: Tell Joel that if he has any Boy Scout related questions, Joey will be happy to chat with him.) This summer, he worked at the Northeast Region FAA office that works on airport planning. As part of that internship, he visited about ten local airports on inspections of various types. Between such field trips, he did all kinds of office work for them. Earlier in the year he went on a school trip to France for ten days, where he lived for a few days with a French family.
Michael (age 14) will be entering high school this fall (see picture for some shots of Michael, Joey and Tori at Tori's brother's recent wedding). He played both football and lacrosse in middle school, and he plans to play those plus wrestle in high school. We encourage him to play sports because when he's playing he gets tired and stays out of trouble. Michael spends most of the rest of his time emailing, calling, IMing and hanging out with girls. The ones that Tori and I have met are very sweet, but we remain concerned about how frequently he is exceeding his SMS messaging quota on the cell phone.
Tori graduated with a master's degree in education, passed her state licensing tests, and completed her first year of teaching second grade at a local Jewish day school. She found it quite challenging to pack an entire secular curriculum plus all the Jewish/Hebrew instruction into each eight-hour day. She's returning to the same place this fall; hopefully, it will be easier the second time around (she routinely worked 60-hour weeks last year).
Work at Lincoln is good. I continue to lead a group of about 30 researchers doing wideband tactical networking work mainly for the Army. I do get to go on some neat field trips. For example, this spring I spent a week in the field at Ft. Benning with recruits completing their last week of basic training. We were able to participate in various kinds of infantry missions (e.g. an ambush, a raid, etc. with real weapons firing blanks... basically a big game of laser tag.) They wanted us dressed in Army camos, so I had to break down and buy some ACUs (see picture). At the end of the week, we did some live fire (see picture) with M-4s, M240B (machine gun), and even the big gun on a Bradley vehicle. Separately, we had some work to do in Denver, which allowed me to do some spring skiing at Vail (my first time skiing west of the Mississippi). We definitely plan to repeat that trip this coming year. My synagogue softball team had a 7-4 record this year... our first winning season, but not good enough for the playoffs.
It's been fun connecting with all the usual suspects in the Boston area. We see the Levitins, Hirschticks, Karps and Eppingers at our Passover seders. We also run into the Kravitzes, Novicks, and Bill Rubin from time to time. Bill Kelley and I do similar kinds of work, so he visits Lincoln and I visit GD once or twice a year. During a family visit to Albuquerque last summer, we got a chance to spend some time with Dave and Jill Wheeler. At a recent birthday party for Joe Zahavi, a bunch of us sat around smoking cigars, drinking vodka et. al. and remembering all the great signs we took over the years (I brought a few pictures and other artifacts). Tori, the boys and I also enjoyed hosting Megan Hughes, Sandy (Bevins) Hughes's 14-year-old daughter, during her recent week-long trip to Boston. I'm looking forward to eating lunch with Jack McCrae in two weeks at Wright Patterson AFB (Ohio). Congratulations are due to Jack, who was just promoted to full-bird colonel in the AF (not many officers make it that far... next step is brigadier general!).
If you find yourself in Boston, please stop by for dinner. As always, I appreciate your cooperation in helping me assemble this newsletter. Talk to you again in 2008, if not before.
Marc
