Dancing to Music

Pan-pan loved to dance. Whenever we started some music on our players, she would begin her own movements. It did not matter what kind of music. She would make her dance keep time with it, doing what she considered fitting. Of course, she liked the faster and  louder sounds better, but slower and classical music would be ok as well. Even at that time, she already made some of her movements on the ground, see pictures below. We did not allow her to watch TV yet, she did not learn the movements from any one. It was her creation.

We love to take a bath!

Our new place at West Maple Street, Johnson City, TN had a big bath tub. Both Pan-pan and Steven liked to take a bath and play in the water. It was fun for mother too. So this was a regular event, taking a bath, alone or together. It started in Taiwan. Pan-pan took a bath in a basin there, and we continued to give her a quick bath in a wash basin. Steven liked it too. Bath time was play time! Later we let them take a bath together so they could play for a while in the water.

 

Driving Uncle Ed back!

After the winter break, we drove Uncle Ed back to his graduate school In Morgantown, WV. By this time, Pan-pan was very used to having fun at Christmas time. She was very familiar with having many visitors, both friends and relatives, during the holiday season, and she anticipated many gifts and goodies to eat. Steven was just getting used to all the attention he got and he was learning by watching Pan-pan’s enjoyment. Ed was the third member of the Huang family to come to the USA for graduate school. Kai was the only sibling left in Taiwan, studying in college, while Dean and I had just started our careers in the USA. The pattern seemed to have been established that after first coming here for graduate education after college, then we would find some work in the US. Our trip to take Ed back was quite brief. We got into town, dropped him at the dorm and drove back. These were our pictures of the event:

            

Old Snow Suit

Janice’s Grandma, Baba, made a complete winter suit for her when she was four or five. Quite a while ago, after we were married, Janice showed me the suit. I was very impressed and told her that she had to keep it. Later when we found a custom “Frame it” store in Johnson City, Tennessee, we decided to have it framed. We then hung it in our home as decoration. It is now again hanging in our bedroom in Delaware:

As you can see, it is a well made, complete snow suit, including a hat, for Janice. I always wondered how Janice looked with this suit. Believe it or not, among one of the old pictures left in our possession, I was able to crop out a picture of Janice wearing the suit. I am not as impressed as I was in my imagination, perhaps because it is black and white! What do you think?

           

More Old Pictures

It is not surprising to find more old pictures from Janice’s father’s collection. We have piles of stuff left by Janice’s parents, after they passed away. We had not touched them for so long that we really forgot what we had! The following five pictures deserve to be collected here. The top one is Janice’s mother in a studio picture, which is the only one we have done by a professional photographer. I assume that it was for some special occasion, but we no longer could verify this. Janice’s mother was quite young, and the picture was done carefully by a very skillful person! As a fellow photographer, I am very impressed by the professionalism of this person. 

        

The other four pictures below were done, I believe, by Janice’s father. After many years, at least sixty, they are still very clear, no sign of yellow stains, and no sign of fading. It is clear that Janice’s father had much better equipment than the ones I first used when I was in Junior High School! The first picture is of Janice’s mother and her sister Dot as young girls. The following ones include Janice and her sister Shari and brother Greg.

           

              

           

More Wedding Pictures!

Quite a while ago, I talked about the wedding pictures of my parents and our children. See post on April 6th, 2010 at this blog, 
At that time, I did not have wedding pictures of Janice’s parents. A couple of their wedding pictures have just become available to us. I had them scanned and I would like to post them now. Clearly, their wedding pictures were a lot more informal than my parents.  They did not go to a studio to have their picture taken. They were just outside in the yard with a few of their relatives and friends. All four grand parents of Janice were in the picture. Her father’s parents were Merritt Lyndon and Margaret Howard Grant Fernald and her mother’s were Earl and Margaret Ellen Smith Wyer. Merritt Fernald was a well known biologist who taught at Harvard University. Earl Wyer was descended from a whaling family who lived on Nantucket. He drove a trolley car in Boston. Margaret Wyer was born in Nova Scotia. Janice’s mother’s cousin, Marjorie, was at the wedding as the flower girl. Aunt Dot (her mother’s sister), who was the maid of honor, and her husband Fran, the very tall man, were also there. Janice does not know who the name of the best man. Her father’s sister, Katherine, is in the picture. Since they were not allowed to be married inside the church, they were outside the rectory taking these pictures, we believe. Two women in the second picture might be friends of Janice’s mother, whom we could not identify.

Holiday Greeting Cards

At this time of the year, we see a lot of Holiday Greeting Cards. There are dozens of card-making stores offering a variety of choices to make cards for you at a big range of prices. All of them provide you with something suitable for your taste. We make our own cards. This is no longer as fashionable as before, as it is time consuming and expensive. The following two pictures show our cards printed on both sides of one sheet of paper. When it is folded it becomes a half page card. Usually I do the pictures and Janice writes the poem as a message.

   When we looked at some old pictures left by Janice’s father, we found some old Greeting Cards. I can tell you that he spent a lot more time to prepare Holiday cards than we did. The pictures below represent two of them, made when Janice was a very young child. Of course they were black and white, and they were printed on very thick photo paper. They might not look very fancy by modern standards, but Janice’s father printed them ALL by himself. That meant that he had to prepare the solutions first, both developing and fixing solutions. After getting the children ready to take pictures, he had to take a number of them, which Janice remembers as a chore they did not look forward to! It could take a whole day and be a dreaded experience for the kids. Then Janice’s father had to develop the film, after making the cards by free-hand. After taking another picture of the cards, he developed the result and waited for it to dry. Imagine how much effort had to be invested for the following cards:

Very few people did their greeting cards as shown above by themselves, as Janice's father did. Just the investment to have a darkroom to develop pictures was both costly and labor intensive!

Winter Break

One of the advantages of working in the academic field is that it provides extra holidays. The winter break, including the Christmas holidays, is my favorite, as we generally had about two weeks without classes. It gave me a needed time to refresh my teaching and research spirits. It gave me time to reconsider or to do more evaluation of my work and projects. It also gave us time to renew our friendship with old friends and to compare our experiences about our projects. Somehow the break became an important part of our lives.

Janice’s college friend, Liz, came for a visit in 1971 during the winter break. Adriane, who was Janice’s roommate during her first two-years of graduate school, also came with her husband, Larry, to renew our friendship. It was a very typical winter break. We never had enough time to do all that we liked to do! It is very nice to see the pictures below, as they give us many good memories: