What a year! We were a family on three continents last
spring: Africa, Europe and North America.
Jean did a semester abroad in
Botswana, Africa,
where she lived with three different families in three different settings
(rural village, town and capitol city).
She learned the local language, Setswana, and
helped in medical clinics. This
experience and her years of AIDS activism seemed to have tipped the scale
toward a career in medicine. She will be
graduating in May, 2006, with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and hopes to
work in a lab for a year or two before tackling med school.
David stayed “home” (North
America) and is now a sophomore at Washington
University in St. Louis.
He’s really grown and come into his own as a business and computer
science student. He’s even putting his
computer skills to good use working this summer as a programmer for Walt’s
company, Psychology Software Tools, and at school as a web developer for the
University’s student computer technical assistance program. When he’s not studying or working, he has
been spotted Swing dancing or tossing a Frisbee for the intramural team.
With both kids away from
home, Walt took a sabbatical in Holland at the University of Maastricht. I went along to keep him company—and for the
adventure! We were able to do a lot of
traveling on the weekends, so saw several cities in Holland,
Belgium, Germany, France
and even Spain (when we got
tired of being too cold in northern Europe). Art museums (Paris’
Louvre, Madrid’s Prado
and Berlin’s Pergamon, just to name a few) were lifetime highlights for
me. I didn’t paint as much as I had
hoped—but I saw a WHOLE LOT of great art!
My sister and her husband spent a month with us—which gave us even more
reasons to travel—including a Rhine river
cruise and castle hunting. When Jean
finished her time in Botswana,
she met us in Paris—where we celebrated her
twenty-first birthday with a champagne toast under the glittering Eiffel Tower.
Come June, however, we were
glad to return home and settle back in Pittsburgh. The waterfall project of last year has become
“Lake Schneider”. Walt and his new buddy,
Mike the Excavator, moved 132 tons of dirt to build up the shoreline. Over Thanksgiving weekend, we were finally
able to fill the pond. It will certainly
be beautiful come spring—adding a new dimension to our little homestead.
Since October, I have been
volunteering three days a week at Ten Thousand Villages’ two Pittsburgh stores—long hours, but I really
enjoy helping the artisans and our customers.
I’ll go back to once a week after the holidays, which should give me
more time to do my own artwork.
If a picture is worth a
thousand words, we have written an encyclopedia with our camera this year. Way more photos than you would ever want to
see are available at http://schneider.lrdc.pitt.edu/family.htm
Walt’s
research went in new places and new directions this year. On sabbatical in Maastricht, Netherlands
he worked with host Rainer Goebel
and was able to do real-time brain imaging while showing subjects the activity
of critical parts of the brain with a 2 second delay. Walt has a large exciting new grant project
(see http://www.ebc.pitt.edu) that involves
tracing the brain of subjects as they watch movies and identifying parts of the
brain that represent information (e.g., faces, tools) and control information
(attention, emotional coding). Walt has
turned over the management of Psychology Software Tools to partner Tony Zuccolotto.
PST is doing well under this new management model and Walt has more time
for research.
We wish you all good
adventures and much happiness in the coming year.
We
love to hear from you!
Phone:
412-242-6751
Email: sues1514@hotmail.com
The Puzzler: Sudoku
The rules of Sudoku are
simple. Enter digits from 1 to 9 into
the blank spaces. Every row must contain
one of each digit. So must every column, as must every 3x3 square. Each Sudoku has a unique solution that can be
reached logically without guessing. Give
this “easy” one a try. (Average time to
solve is reported to be under 10 minutes...) If you
like these, there are lots more available at www.websudoku.com
(where I got this one).
