Dear friends and family,
Greetings from the island city of Winona, Minnesota, situated on the banks of the Upper Mississippi River! It has been another eventful year for us. We have become homeowners! In July, we bought a lovely four-bedroom home within walking distance of Winona State University, where both of us work as professors. We have enjoyed learning about homeownership, and have become acquainted with power tools.
Also, we are about to become parents! We are expecting our first child, a boy, in late January. We have had much fun getting ready for our baby, including buying furniture for the nursery. Our unborn son’s hobbies appear to include sucking his thumb and kicking his mom. Sarah and the baby are doing well.
We also had some fun adventures this year. In March, we visited the Leinenkugel brewery in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. In May, Sarah’s sister Mary Beth visited us in Winona, and the three of us headed south. We visited Springfield, Illinois, including Abraham Lincoln’s home and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. We made a stop in Metropolis, Illinois, where we saw a giant Superman statue. We also visited Memphis, where we saw Graceland, the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, and Beale Street. On the way back, we stopped at James T. Kirk’s future birthplace in Riverside, Iowa, and a Laura Ingalls Wilder museum in Burr Oak, Iowa.
In June, we drove back to Oregon to visit family. On the way out to Oregon, we stopped at Mount Rushmore. While in Oregon, we spend some time on Oregon Coast and also went to Crater Lake. We also spent some time up on the Lewis & Clark College campus at our ten-year college reunion.
Much of the summer, we lived at Fermilab, in the Chicago suburbs. There, Sarah continued her research on neutrinos at Fermilab and at Argonne National Laboratory. Chris spent the time biking around the Fermilab site and exploring the Chicago suburbs.
We returned to Winona in the late summer, where we have had a pretty busy fall semester with work and getting moved in to our new home. Our friends Chris and Ashley were the first visitors to our new home, coming all the way from British Columbia. We are sticking around Minnesota this winter break, enjoying the first Christmas (and real Christmas tree) in our house.
Best wishes for the coming year,
Chris Phan & Sarah Phan-Budd
December 2013
Winona, Minnesota
(Click on each photo to enlarge.)