Happy 2012, everyone!  Here's wishing you all the best.

Me and my "altera sorora" Jeanne

This year, I actually rang in the New Year in Santa Cruz!  Last year, I was visiting my family for Christmas and was supposed to be back for New Year, but the weather gods had other opinions.  So instead I rang in the new year in New York with my sister - and got to catch up with my "other sister" Jeanne, who always manages to keep things from becoming too serious.  We couldn't have that...  I also got the pleasure of skiing with her son Nate, my favorite (not so) little man.  If the best skier on the hill is the one having the most fun, then Nate seriously outclassed all the other skiers, including me!

A summertime food festival in Vienna

On the serious side, I'm still working at UCSC, with as many as four jobs crammed into an alleged forty hour workweek. Jorge says that my abundance of jobs makes me economic recovery plan personified!  I'm now down to three jobs (insert heavy sigh of relief!).  Nowadays, when I'm not studying alternative splicing regulation, or annotating the genes in the human genome, I'm curating genomic annotation data for cancer researchers, or doing some side work at predicting which genomic mutations might lead to disease.  All of it is fun and interesting.  I'm still one of the lucky people who don't really mind going to work.

Outside of work, I have enjoyed lots of travel and sports.

A miracle: at the Charles Bridge at 6am without coffee!

This year, work took me to Vienna to give a presentation at a conference. Vienna itself is a great city, but what made the visit even better was the opportunity to catch up with my old friends Hanna and Klaus and their beautiful daughter Nora. On the way to Vienna, Jorge and I tacked on a vacation in the Czech Republic. We spent a few days in Prague with Jorge's old friend Gerardo. I was happy for Gerardo's company the day Jorge led us on a marathon hike through the city in search of absurdist art, including: the moving statue of two men peeing, and the statue of a car on legs visible from the woods behind the Swiss embassy. Jorge insists that Gerardo and I lack appreciation of true art.

In Český Krumlov, Jorge and I enjoyed an entertaining canoe trip down the Vltava River, in the company of many Czechs on their summer drinking trips (which they refer to less accurately as "river trips"). The river was full of riverside cafes and bars you could paddle right up to for your next "pivo".  In Tabor, we stayed in a hostel that was left deserted when the owner went on holiday, and the staff apparently decided to take a holiday as well. We were able to check in by sheer chance: we approached a guy serving beer at a cafe in the plaza, asked him where we might find a public phone to call the hostel, and discovered that his girlfriend was one of the (absentee) hostel employees. Late that night, we were surprised when an off-the-records guest showed up to stay in our room. After we took the intrusion in stride and told her to just take one of the empty beds, she invited us to the Medieval faire that she was in town organizing. This faire proved to be the only thing going on in a town that had emptied out for the summer holidays, which just underscores how the most interesting travel opportunities are often the surprises.

As avid skiers, Jorge and I both enjoyed

Trying out new skiing attire at the  Bear Valley Telly Fest

California's outstanding snowpack during the 2010-2011 ski season. In addition to many superb ski days in California, we spent a week visiting our friend Brooke and her parents in Salt Lake City and getting spoiled by sublime champagne powder in the Wasatch range. The trip ended on a down note when Jorge injured his shoulder, and ultimately had to have surgery later that summer. While he was recuperating, I was off to enjoy my other favorite sport, mountain biking, at the annual Tahoe trip of Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz (MBOSC). Jorge told me to go have fun and not worry about nursing him - but didn't have to tell me that twice.

Fat Tire Girls showing off scraped knees on the Flume trail

My love of mountain biking has branched into community service as I've become treasurer of Trips For Kids Santa Cruz, an organization that introduces disadvantaged, at-risk youths to mountain biking in a supportive environment. Despite having a lot of start-up work to do this year, we managed to get about twenty kids out on seven rides. The impact is evident on one kid who's come to trust and respect the trip leaders, and has been making wiser choices in his life thanks in part to their guidance. In recognition of his progress, we're awarding him his own bike for Christmas. For anyone looking for a good cause, we could use both volunteer labor and financial support - and thanks for your support.

A lush garden after the wet winter

 Jorge and I have both been healthy this year, give or take a shoulder injury or two. My sister is doing well, and my parents are in amazing health for folks in their eighties. But my cat Neige has been to the vet so many times this year that we coined a new term: Neige-xpensive. This term describes something that isn't merely pricey, it's also expensive beyond expectations - anyone who's ever been through home remodeling will know this concept well. If the cost of Neige's health is the bad news, the good news is the state of her health. In October, we celebrated that she's cancer-free, two years since she lost her leg to vaccine-associated sarcoma, and is now an official "long term survivor". She has mild asthma, currently under control. She also has a mild case of hyperthyroidism, and is scheduled to go to "the spa" in January for radioactive iodine treatment. She also has a pet health insurance policy now. It won't pay for conditions that are pre-existing within the last eighteen months, but that still leaves so many possibilities!

When Neige comes home from the radiation spa, she'll still be a bit hot, enough that I've got special instructions on limiting physical contact at first and special instructions for disposing of her kitty litter.  Nerd that I am, when I look at this situation, I see all sorts of things that would be fun to measure and graph!  Thanks to one of my amazing co-workers, I have a geiger counter on loan so I can measure the cat's radioactivity over the next weeks.  I took my first background measures of her tonight.  She wondered what I was doing coming near her with this thing that wasn't food.

In 2012, I'm looking forward to a river cruise with my mother in Provence - and I'm hoping that it will snow in California one of these days!

All the best - Melissa