MERRY MAYA

CHRISTMAS 2012

Phew! We made it through the Maya apocalypse! Or was that just a transition from one age to another? If it was the latter, the Maya were really on to something: We've seen a few transitions over the past year, so many that we couldn't write them down in the annual letter until we flipped our own calendar to 2013. But for posterity's sake, here are the high points from the past year. (Click on the pictures to see larger versions.)

Happy Holidays from Tonia, Evan, Natalie (with Rosie in her arms) and Alan!

Alan is still writing about science and space for one of the country's top news websites, but the operation's name has changed from MSNBC.com to NBC News Digital. NBC purchased Microsoft's half-share of the venture, and the center of the operation is shifting to 30 Rock in New York. Alan and some other folks from the newsroom will remain in the Seattle area, although the office won't be on the Microsoft campus anymore. The year's biggest highlight was Alan and Tonia's trip to Australia and New Zealand in November – to see a total solar eclipse from a cruise ship called the Dawn Princess, and then to see Kiwi hot spots such as Hobbiton, the Waitomo glowworm caves, Auckland and Wellington. (Here you see Alan peeking out from a hobbit hole at Hobbiton.) Three of Alan's siblings (Dave, Donna and Steve) and sister-in-law Joan went on the adventure as well. Also in 2012, Alan covered May's annular solar eclipse in California as well as August's Mars rover landing from JPL in Pasadena, Calif., and participated in a panel at the Mars Society conference.

Tonia finally stepped down from the presidency of the Hoe and Hope Garden Club after three years in office, and has been working on redesigning three areas of the yard. She had an apple, pear and plum tree removed and has replanted two areas so far – one as a perennial garden, another as a drought-tolerant garden with large decorative rocks. Lots of canning was done from midsummer through fall as usual. Homemade blackberry brandy and citrus liquor are just now coming of age: They'll be ready to make their debut at a special occasion. And no sooner was Christmas over than the seed catalogs started arriving in the mailbox, in time to start planning 2013’s vegetable garden. Yahoo!

Natalie finished up her master's degree in entomology at Washington State University in Pullman this year and went right on to the Ph.D. program. She had been studying how pesticides affect honeybee colonies, but after lugging around all those beehives for a couple of years, she has switched to a different breed of bees that don't live in hives: alfalfa leafcutting bees. Natalie is looking into new ways to track those bees as they migrate, using fluorescent dyes. (A fluorescent pink bee can be seen at the left edge of this picture.) In August, she and some of her colleagues were featured in a Seattle Times article about a project aimed at keeping alkali bees from becoming roadkill. The year hasn't been totally about the bees, though: Natalie got in some relaxation time in New York, Chicago, Seattle, Bellingham and her other favorite haunts.

Evan is due to graduate in 2013 from the University of Washington with his bachelor's degree in microbiology and biochemistry. He's already hard at work at UW's Shendure Lab, which has been involved in groundbreaking research ranging from new prenatal genetic tests to high-quality DNA sequences for the mysterious Denisovan human species. Evan received a Washington Research Foundation Fellowship to work on new methods for DNA sequence analysis over the summer, and he's now part of a research team looking into genetic factors that may be associated with prostate cancer. He's planning to stay with the Shendure Lab after graduation and do some additional research ... into where he'll go for graduate school.

Rosie and Bijou, our Cavalier King Charles spaniel and Tibetan spaniel, are thrilled to have made it through another year. The high point would have to be June's vacation in Oregon, during which they got in plenty of beach time and took in the 2012 Cannon Beach Sand Castle Contest (along with Alan and Tonia). The low point would be Bijou's rear-end surgery – but the less said about that, the better.

As we start in on the front end of 2013, we're wishing you a happy, prosperous and peaceful year – and hoping that the next holiday letter won't be quite as late as this one!