Most of the "bad words" (paralaccia) in English are 4 letter words, so "becoming a four letter word" is like putting it into that bad word category of "swear words". Good luck, my Italian friends, at understanding this year's theme.
ObamaCare (a 5 letter name attached to a 4 letter word), the derogatory nickname conservatives nailed on the Affordable Care Act, seemed to be the biggest issue of the year in the USA until the NSA Big Brother spying action took over some attention thanks to revelations made earlier by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Republicans hated this old style Republican private health insurance plan so much they shut down The Government (you know, the leader of the free world organization). Then the key step forward of the Affordable Care Act�the grand opening of the federal health care insurance exchange website in November—was bungled by incompetent private contractors, delaying access to the public by about a month. We missed the December 24 Christmas eve deadline this year for the first time since our wedding in 1992 when we were still bogged down in thank you note writing.
Meanwhile Obama continues waging war on whistleblowers and open government. Deports lots more immigrants. His drone warfare continues even more insidiously, racking up more and more civilian victims and turning an increasing number of targeted populations against the USA. And his war in Afganistan just won't go according to plan.
The Syrian birthplaces of Ani (Damascus) and her mom Isgouhi (Aleppo) are both embroiled in a brutal conflict between two evil groups which have no regard for the innocent civilians caught in the middle, while the world looks on stalemated by geopolitics of Russia, China and the USA.
Okay, we stole this Santa Obama sketch from last year (Bad Santa, Worse Santa), but it seemed so appropriate and we had no other ideas. And we ran out of time. Now Bad Santa is a worse Santa.
page 1: our first selfies taken after the 2013 Mendel Award Dinner 2013 dressup event.
page 2: An memorable overnight visit to Siena in July.
Predinner drinks at our Rome home with Fabrizio the day after Ferragosto. Photo by Fabrizio.
Our first real vacation in 5 years, and we finally found the destination of our dreams, Radisson Blu Resort just 10 minutes north of Grand Case, St Martin, hidden in its own secluded white sand beach calm water cove. Mid-October fall break.
bonus photos:
Sunday lunch with deliciously cheap French rose wine in nearly deserted
Marigot, St Martin.The annual fight with Microsoft products continues. The card was designed in Microsoft Expression Web, the successor to Microsoft FrontPage, its discontinued but still useful web editing software (which does not seem to run under Windows 8, on our home desktop, hence we moved on to MEW). But when you try to print the page to PDF, the spacing is all lost and each very nicely designed page spills over onto multiple pages. I transferred the file back to my Windows 7 laptop where I still use FP, and printed to PDF, but somehow the photos on screen looked all choppy and filesizes were way bigger than the sum of the graphics files, although it seemed to print okay on paper. My final idea was to copy the page from MEW into MS Word with minimal margins, and save as PDF, which resulted in a file so small it seemed magic (compared to the original photo sizes). The only hitch was that in Word it is impossible for an amateur like me to insert spaces between the photos like in my original web page. Why can't Microsoft deliver better service for relatively simple tasks like this?
For photos of our summers 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 in Italy, check out our collection of Facebook uploaded photos. Lots of Italian food shots! Too many food shots.You should see bob's photo archive! Food, food, food and more food. Our talents in the kitchen at least keep us relatively happy together.
Etc.:
the dr bob negative profit corporation lost:
360x $0.46+150x$1.10
= $332.35 (okay, we had a few stamps leftover)
$128.26 for 500 Kinko colored paper BW copies with Z-fold (okay, we had twenty some left over)
$23.09 No 10 Window 241b gummed envelopes shipped from Staples.com
Total: $483.70. (okay, we had some leftovers).
sending smiles around the world is serious business...
This is for later maybe...