First Annual Vaisselle Awards--2008

Photo credit: terren in Virginia on Flickr.

First of all, you all know you deserve a trophy. Every reader of this blog has done something praiseworthy, noble and outstanding this year. But in the interest of time and space, I'll have to limit the awards this year to my family. Nepotism raised to the extreme. Drum roll, please!

The "I Know What I Want to Be When I Grow Up" award goes to N, my oldest, who, unlike most of us, finally knows what she wants to be when she grows up and has gotten awards and entrance into grad school to prove it. Go Red!

The "Supportive Spouse" award goes to T, her husband, for going along with this new plan and agreeing to move and renovate a whole house to make it work. Whoo-hoo!

The "Don't Worry, Be Happy" award goes to M, my second, for having a baby, starting the whole family blog trend, raising kids all week without a husband, moving, traveling around the world with two toddlers and managing quite a few other stressful things this year with a calm smile on her lovely face. You rock!

The "Super Dad" award goes to N, her husband, for going beyond the call of duty to spend quality time with his kids. This includes teaching a four-year-old to fly fish. Awesome!

The "Multitasking" award goes to G, my third, for running the world's biggest Cub Pack, creating some of the world's funniest blog posts, starting her own business, ramping up her photography skills, learning to make her own patterns, taking care of her family which includes four children six and under, a husband, a cat and a dog, and making homemade Christmas presents in just one year. Amazing!

The "I Want to Live Forever" award goes to her husband, D, for getting his cholesterol checked and then amazingly lowering it with a good diet and exercising. A winner!

The "Mean Green" award to my son, Z, for building his own truck and realizing that driving a practical and energy-efficient vehicle is almost as cool as being turbocharged. Vroom, vroom!

To Michael, my sweetie, the "Norman Vincent Peale Power of Positive Thinking" award for consistently trying to see the positive side of every aspect of our gut-wrenching move and life changes this year. Couldn't have done it without you!

To my parents, the "Aging Gracefully" award for getting through a tough year with good humor, intelligence, wisdom and common sense. You rule!

Although many other extended family members deserve kudos, I must honor my cousin, J, with the "Survivor" award for looking cancer in the face and staring it down. Think pink!

And to me, (it's my blog--you didn't expect me to leave myself out, did you?) the "Thinking Outside and Inside the Box" award for getting one house so ready to sell that it got an offer the very first day it was on the market and for unpacking and setting up another house so that we manage to live comfortably with only one big closet, a one-car garage, only one living area, a one-drawer kitchen and only one and a half baths. Go me!

To the rest of you, pat yourselves on the back. It's been a great year and I wish I could honor you all. But I do wish you a 2009 that's filled with accomplishment, satisfaction and, above all, joy. To quote Ginger Rogers in "Bachelor Mother", "Appee Neu Jeer!"

Awesome Christmas present

One silver lining about feeling bad during Christmas was that one of my presents came in really handy. Michael gave me the whole set of The Thin Man movies with Myrna Loy and William Powell. If you have to be cooped up, I can't think of a better duo to be spending time with. We realized that we had never even seen the first of the series, "The Thin Man" and only pieces of the next two. We've decided to wait a while before watching number four and five. We need to save some entertainment for the rest of the long winter. Those movies haven't aged a bit. They're still just as lively and charming as they were when brand new.

They must be a bit of a culture shock to the younger generation though. In one scene, there's about fifty people and one man is on the telephone and another interrupts him to make an important call because, of course, it's the only phone line in the room. You have to wonder how many phone lines there would be available in an roomful of people today. Also, the man making the original call asks for permission to call his mother and then proceeds to call San Francisco from New York. This is supposed to be a big joke as the charges would have been enormous back in the day. I remember my dad calling his parents on Christmas Day and Mother's Day and that it was a very big deal. He'd place the call early in the morning and the operator would call back in the afternoon when there was a connection available.

I do appreciate the ease and cheapness of communication today. It's made this move much easier knowing that I can pick up the phone whenever I want to and call Texas, Utah or even the Czech Republic. I only have to worry about who's awake when.

Dave Barry and the State of the Union

The local rag printed two and a half pages of Dave Barry today. It was his month-by-month take on 2008. It was a bizarre year even by Dave Barry standards. Thanks! It made our day. The man is still right on the money and always makes me laugh. His comments on the year really put it into perspective. He said you might as well laugh at it since you paid for it. How true!

As we look at the year in review, Michael and I were stunned to find out that our congregation added 19 or 20 new members by baptism this year. (This doesn't include children who are baptized when they turn eight.) To put this in perspective, our Texas stake (this is a whole bunch of congregations put together) had 24 baptisms in a year. It's nice to know that people here are seeking for truth. For us, it means new friends added to our church community all the time. And that's very nice.

We have been so impressed by the kindness and essential goodness of people we have met here. Sometimes when you live in Texas you start to believe that Texans are friendlier than other folks. And they are extremely friendly and nice. But we have been so well-treated here that we can't complain at all. The economy may be going to heck in a handbasket and Wall Street may have lost its moral compass, but things are doing just fine here in Wilkes-Barre. Most people are still trying to raise good kids and treat others fairly. So I'll drink sparkling grape juice to that!

Bronchitis

Need I say more? I've been sick for a week now. I can't seem to whip this even though I've though I've taken a full run of antibiotics. Which means it's probably viral and there's not much I can do. This is a new aspect of the move up north. In Texas, you could go at least go outside and warm up and dry out eventually because it never stayed cold for more than a week. But here, I'm stuck inside indefinitely. I'm afraid to go out and make this cough worse. I remember how hard it was to get rid of N's ear infections when we lived in Iowa when she was a baby. This is similar. Christmas was very quiet needless to say. But very wonderful in spite of my not feeling well. We talked with all the kids and my parents. That was glorious. And we enjoyed each other's company which was also great. The white Christmas was cool even though I couldn't get out and take a walk in it.

I heart New York

We finally made it to New York City. I had been there when I was sixteen but we spent our days in Queens at the World's Fair. So at our advanced ages, it was quite exciting to see all this stuff for the first time. We've seen so many movies about New York the places we visited seemed like old friends. And it made it even more special to see it at Christmastime.

We took the bus (which was easy) and spent the day in Manhattan on Saturday. I have bronchitis (not pneumonia) and am on antibiotics now so the trip wasn't quite as fun as it would have been if I had been well. But we had such a good time. That's me in front of Central Park right by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We mostly just walked around all day even though it was bitterly cold and windy. We did spend a few hours in the museum but I finally had to leave. There were so many paintings I had been waiting a lifetime to see that I was getting jaded. I didn't want to spoil my first impressions of the rest of them. I cried when I stood in front of that Christmas tree with the Neapolitan angels. They had music playing and the lighting on the angels was magical. I don't think I've seen many more beautiful sights in my life. We saw one of my favorite Ingres paintings (the lady in the blue dress) and two Vigee Lebrun's! Michael and I got to see lots of Degas, Renoir, Manet, Monet and Van Gogh paintings. We know that we missed tons and tons of stuff so that will be something to look forward to for our next trip.

New Yorkers were so extremely nice to us. We were astounded. One man came up to us and asked us if we needed help just because we looked confused. We asked him which way was east and he showed us and then he was off. One lady in the subway came out of her booth and talked to us for fully five minutes about what we should see and do. Incredible. People said "excuse me" and offered assistance. Not at all what we expected. We found the subways to be not half as intuitive (or as frequent) as the Metro trains in Paris. But because Manhattan is a big rock, the subway trains are not far below the surface the way they are in London or Paris. It's very easy to use a credit card and buy a one-day pass to the subway.

We walked into several hotel lobbies (which we don't ordinarily do but we weren't the only ones being touristy in New York). We saw the painting of Eloise in the Plaza. Facing the Plaza, the line to get into FAO Schwartz was halfway around the block and snaked back around itself. The Apple store also faces the Plaza and it's in a big glass box sunk into the ground. Pretty cool. We did go into Toys R Us where they had a giant ferris wheel you could ride in the foyer.

Bloomingdale's windows were awesome. They had decorated the windows to go along with a Tony Bennett CD they were selling inside. So the windows with moving characters depicted scenes from the 30s, 40s, 50s, etc. One window looked just like my Alice and Jerry reader. The Bergdorf Goodman windows were strange. Many of them were all white and they were fantasies. Ladies dressed in gorgeous gowns (one window had a man mannequin with a fox head instead of a human one) with white geese and odd and random items painted white. Bizarre. We were surprised that the Chanel, Dior and other very expensive boutiques were very understated. They didn't look Christmasy at all. Trump Tower was lit up like crazy. One building was covered with lights which made it look like a giant present with bow.

We saw kids sledding in Central Park, very rich ladies walking out of Chanel and Dior boutiques, hot dog stands, fancy apartment buildings with doormen (the only buildings with no ice on the sidewalks. It's evidently no one's job in New York to clear the sidewalks so we slogged around in slush all day even though it didn't snow a bit. Just left over stuff from the day before.)Michael spotted an 80,000 dollar car. We saw art deco stuff in gorgeous architectural details especially around Rockefeller Center.

We had almost no disappointments. The only thing that wasn't as wonderful as I expected was the skating rink in front of the Prometheus statue at Rockefeller Center. It was about half the size I thought it would be. (It was about the size of the Galleria rink in Dallas.) Other than that, it was wonderful. To see so many buildings, company names, stores and landmarks all so close together was like working a jigsaw puzzle. Oh, that store goes there, right next to that park! Perhaps it was best that we came to it after a lifetime of reading books, seeing movies and learning about New York City. Every block had something that rang a bell. Sadly, even though we didn't get near Wall Street, we walked past an awful lot of financial institutions whose names have been in the news a lot lately. You can see how people with tons of money in a city that sophisticated could lose sight of what's real or important. Their greed just fed on everyone else's greed.

I'm anxious to go back but I think it will be nicer in the spring.

Peanut butter fudge

I could talk about the fact that I'm coughing and sick and that the temperature was 6 when I got up this morning (at 9:45.) But that would be way boring. Instead I'll post the peanut butter fudge recipe I promised. I found it on allrecipes.com. Have you seen this site? The comments are hilarious. "For the salad, I substituted canned spinach for fresh, I used Velveeta instead of feta and I added dill pickles instead of Calamata olives. I don't know what went wrong. It was really yucky!" Anyway, that was beside the point.I didn't follow the actual recipe because no one does! The recipe is called Easiest Peanut Butter Fudge there and, of course, everyone comments and no one follows the recipe. Here is the recipe as I made it based on a lot of the comments:

INGREDIENTS
1/2 cup butter
2 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup milk
1 cup peanut butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups confectioners' sugar

DIRECTIONS
Melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Stir in brown sugar and milk. Bring to a boil and boil for 2 minutes (I probably boiled mine a little longer but I tested it and it still wasn't soft ball stage), stirring frequently. Remove from heat. Stir in peanut butter and vanilla. Pour over confectioners' sugar in a large mixing bowl. Beat until smooth; pour into an 8x8 inch dish. Chill until firm and cut into squares.

I used unsalted butter and evap milk but would have used whole milk if I had had it. I beat it in the Kitchenaid. I put the confectioner's sugar in the Kitchenaid bowl and poured the hot mixture on top. If your confectioner's sugar was the least bit lumpy you would want to sift it. I used a really low speed to beat it. Then I got a phone call. When I got back it looked great. Unfortunately, for me, those are the best fudge instructions I can give. My fudge is always too stiff or too runny. This time it was too stiff but delicious. One of you will have to volunteer to call me the next time I make it.

Since I can't have real fudge because chocolate gives me migraines, this was an incredible substitute. Michael's suggestion. Great idea, honey!

I'm coughing and am not up to much else so I'll probably post again later today with Michael's pix of our trip to New York City on Saturday! Yes, I finally got there and the pneumonia I have today was totally worth it.

Sharing our white Christmas

Good thing no one's coming for Christmas this year. I'd be a nervous wreck about them flying in this kind of weather. I've never seen snow come down like this in my whole life. I mean it. I know what you say about rain. You say it's pouring. What do you say when the snow is pouring? I shoveled maybe six inches of snow off the driveway so that the plumber could get out and now you can hardly tell. (Plumber replaced the faucets in our bathtub. They look really good and now we have a choice other than freezing cold or scalding hot showers.) It was seriously fun shoveling and I plan to go out again later just to stomp around in it. The snow is very light and easy to shovel and it's beautiful. I know the delight won't last forever, but I sure am enjoying it now. The snow plow has already been down the street and now I can't tell where the street is. It just blends in with everyone's yard.

The photos are of our decorations which many of you will remember. But I think they look swell in the new house. The bay window with a snow scene behind the tree and the stockings on the oak staircase really look good. And how many women are lucky enough to have a train and a tuba with their tree?

For more photos, check my Flickr account by clicking on the link to the right or ask me for an invitation to see my Easyshare account to see even more. I'll be taking pictures of the whopping snowstorm when it stops.

Thanksgiving in December

Today I am cooking the Thanksgiving dinner I didn't get to cook in November because I stayed in Shreveport longer than expected. Michael's company gave everyone a turkey and, of course, gave it on the one day warm day all month when it would thaw. Every other day this month you could have thrown it in your car and not worried about it. So instead of refreezing it I let it thaw in the fridge. Today's the day it's ready to cook. We did have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with our church family, but the cornbread dressing, five cup salad and pumpkin pie were really missed. The menu for today: Turkey, cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, homemade cranberry sauce, five cup salad and pumpkin pie. Some kind of green vegetable but skipping the Brussels sprouts as we had plenty of those in November. I might even make Marjo's rolls if I really get obsessed. Seems kinda silly to cook for just the two of us but we'll have lots of leftovers I can freeze and use next week at Christmastime. Plus, I bought a big ham. We should be set even if snowed in. We realized last night that this will be the very first Christmas with just the two of us. That's in 37 years (38 if you count the one when we were engaged), mind you. I've uber-Christmased this year with lots of holiday movies, Christmas music, decorations, cooking and writing cards just to compensate for the total lack of family. Stay tuned for tomorrow's topic: new peanut butter fudge recipe that's to die for.

Warning: I'm whining about teachers' unions again

Teachers continue to strike or to threaten strikes in districts around here. It's unthinkable that the teachers who are well-paid (Trust me on that. The cost of living here isn't that much more than where I used to live but the teachers get paid a whole lot more.) and who have tenure would be striking at a time like this. The kids' parents are working hard enough just to keep their jobs most of which are lower-paying than the teachers' salaries. Now they have to worry about their kids being at home alone because how many of them can afford unexpected day care for their elementary kids? One school district has extended the school year to June 23rd just so the kids can have a few days off at Christmas. Their strike has burned up all the kids' days off between now and the end of the year. One of the big issues? The teachers are paying more for health insurance. Hello? Michael is paying more next year and he works for a health-related company. In Texas, the teachers there had to pay more every year for their insurance. In a lot of cases it just ate up their raises. But what are you going to do if health costs are outdistancing other cost increases? Another issue was having to do extras like Open House, after school tutoring and Meet the Teacher Nights. Hm-m-m. Sounds like they're really committed to the kids, doesn't it? And the standardized science scores just came out. They looked appalling to me. If their tests are anything like the ones our kids took, these districts wouldn't have a prayer in the state of Texas where we had to meet high standards not just for all kids counted together but for all subgroups as well. Not having been a teacher here, it's easy for me to rant and rave. But belonging to a union is not on my list of things to do so I guess I'll never teach in the schools here. But I am willing to bet that their challenges are no worse than ours were in Denton with large numbers of non-English speakers and a high percentage of special needs children. It literally makes me sick to my stomach that the teachers feel the need to walk the picket line in economic times like these.

Goodbye Happy Car! Hello Impreza!

Today I rented the storage building for my Miata, better known as the Happy Car. It's so short it will fit in a 10 by 15 foot unit. Michael will spray it off and we will wait until the roads have been washed off by rain before driving it to the storage facility. We don't want any of the ice melt stuff to rust my car while it's in storage. That's the whole point. It will stay there until spring has come and the roads are salt-free once more.

I will be driving the Subaru Impreza from now on. It is very comforting knowing you have all-wheel drive when you try to negotiate the five-minute drive to church or to the grocery store. There are scary, twisty mountain roads in any direction from my house.

I went to Target today for a microwave cart since our kitchen counter space is the size of a postage stamp. The essential microwave we had to buy is taking up far too much room. When I go shopping, I always park far away from other cars but today it didn't help. Someone too lazy to walk a few yards and put their cart away safely let the wind catch their cart and it rammed into our Impreza. Since the contact point was the metal base, it completely wiped out my wheel cover. Could have been worse. I could have lost a door. It wasn't even cold today or rainy. Just windy. Thanks a lot, folks. I park miles away from you so you don't ding my doors and then you let your carts ram my car. I thought it was just my Miata people were out to get. I've been hit in parking lots twice in the Happy Car and once at an intersection standing still. Now that they're hitting our Subaru, I realize that it's not the Miata, it's just me. Sadly, there are plenty of irresponsible people here in PA just as there were in Texas.

Why bother?

So if they're having a white Christmas in New Orleans, why bother moving to Pennsylvania? Seriously!

We have got about an inch today but my brother on the left got far more in Baton Rouge. For great pix of the snow in Baton Rouge, check out the Baton Rouge Advocate website at 2theadvocate.com. Sorry I can't link you there. Blogger isn't working well for me today.

Going to a party in the snow tonight. I think I'll be a lot less excited about the snow when I can't look out at it past my Christmas tree.

Tear my heart out

My daughter just posted the first closeup I've seen of my new granddaughter. Knowing that I'm missing out on all that beauty is almost more than I can bear. She's glorious and if they made a china doll based on her face they would sell a million copies. I'm so excited for her sister who gets to go meet the new one and help out with the new baby adjustment period and visit the beautiful city of Prague.

This is not to discourage my daughter from sending me pictures. It's far worse not knowing what E looks like than seeing how precious she really is. So keep 'em coming.

This really isn't a move to Pennsylvania issue. We were even farther away in Texas from this daughter. But it is a "I live so far away from my family" issue.

My talented and bubbly real estate agent came by the other day to drop off a lovely ornament for our tree. (Glad I decided to put one up!) She complained about the grayness of the weather. It was four o'clock in the afternoon but it looked like nine it was so dark. She said that it looked like a horror movie outside. So I'm guessing that this weather is a little unusual. Even so, I'm dealing with it. Yesterday I got busy and went out in the pouring cold rain to do all my errands because the alternative was going out in the icy rain and sleet today and tomorrow. It's all relative. The happy car hasn't gone into storage yet but I think I've found a nice home for it. But it looks happy in the snow picture, doesn't it? I love the way Miatas smile.

How many porches do you have?

I received a call yesterday from my firstborn, N, who was wondering what had happened to a package she and her husband had sent. According to UPS, they had delivered it to my porch on the 4th and knowing her mom the way she does, she knew I would call her immediately on receipt to squeal in her ear about how excited I was to receive it. Michael was home while I was talking to her and he wandered around looking for this missing package while I tried to think of more places to look. After he checked inside the sun porch, outside the sun porch, under the sun porch furniture and outside the back door it occurred to me that we do have a front door and it actually has a porch. So Michael opened the front door which no one uses because there is no walkway leading up to it, and, lo and behold, my wonderful new Harry Potter book was sitting there all nice and dry even though it had snowed for the past two days. Naomi finally asked how many porches we have. Two, I realize now. And we have four entrances to the house, one for each side. Doorbells on three entrances. Well, I guess you can't say we aren't welcoming. You can break into our house from any direction.

A new Harry Potter book is always a good thing. This one is a very nice addition to the collection. Thanks, N and T. You're great!

Church canceled?

Yesterday morning, there was only one other car in the church parking lot when I arrived. I couldn't figure it out. I wasn't early for my meeting but just right on time. Where were the others? I walked around the building in my snow boots looking for an open door since someone else was obviously there. My snow boots which I was wearing for the first time leave a cute hobnail pattern and I was having fun crunching along trying to see which door was open. As I walked I noticed tracks and realized that a deer had walked the entire perimeter of the church in the wee hours. Eating shrubs I guess. So there were my footprints and the deer's but that was all. No one else's and no open doors either. It occurred to me that maybe church was canceled since the parking lot was over an inch deep in snow that had fallen in the night. Some of our church members live even higher up in the mountains than I do so they must have had lots more snow. In Denton, Texas they would have at least considered canceling with that kind of road conditions.

By the time I got back to my car another car drove up and then another. I realized three things. One is, you don't cancel church for a little snow around here. Almost all the roads had been plowed and sanded in the short distance I had to drive to church. The other is that the next door neighbors to the church must be using our lot for additional parking for their Beemer. The third is that I should consider whether arriving on time for my 8:15 meeting is worth it since I seem to be the only one who gets there on time.

Snow is pretty

Who knew that I would wait until it started snowing before I went running my errands? I'm usually the one hunkered down in my house refusing to drive in any kind of icy or snowy weather. But it was so pretty coming down (and since it wasn't sticking to the roads at all) and since I now have an all wheel drive vehicle, I decided to do the post office and bank run in the snow. I wore my Santa hat which gets mostly stares around here. (Maybe it's too early, but it's December and it was snowing for Pete's sake!) I wonder if they wore Halloween costumes here to go to the grocery store? I'm guessing not. I was in Utah so I don't know what they did here. Early on Halloween day in Provo, the grocery store was packed with people dressed in costumes when I visited my daughter. And in Texas, a Santa hat or a Halloween costume wouldn't surprise anyone, I don't think. But here in Pennsylvania we are rawther conservative. Oh dear!

Dressing up is one of the things I miss most about being a kid. So I think we adults should take full advantage of the clothing possibilities at Halloween and Christmas.

About this time last year

About this time last year, we found out Michael had the chance to be transferred to Wilkes-Barre. What a difference a year makes! As I look back on the past year, the hardest thing was just deciding to move so far away from family and friends. The second hardest was getting our house ready to sell. It's still daunting looking back on the amount of cleaning out, painting, and fixing up we had to do to get it ready. At least I spent a lot of my last winter in Texas outside enjoying the sunshine. The third hardest thing was getting this house organized and livable (an ongoing project.)

I've swung violently from pessimism to optimism all year. I tend to be optimistic about the big things working out (health, my children's happiness, my long term goals, my marriage) and tend to be pessimistic about the small items (the seriousness of the leak in the laundry room, the possibility of losing my luggage when I fly, the chances of finding what I want at the grocery store.) I must drive my family crazy.

Here's what I expected that came true: Our new ward (church congregation) is full of great people. I have to spend a lot of time in airplanes going to visit family members. My parents have needed me to be there for them. I miss the sunshine. I hate being so far away from my children and grandchildren. Living in new part of the United States is exciting.

Here's what I expected that didn't come true: I would hate the cold. (So far so good. It really hasn't been that bad. Down coats help a lot.) We would find people to be less friendly than in Texas. (They're actually very friendly and very nice.) We would have trouble living in such a small house. (I have learned to love my well-organized small kitchen and downsizing has not been bad at all.) I would lose contact with my friends and former students. (I actually have more contact with my students through Facebook and by emailing, calling and writing blog posts, I've kept close to friends.)

Here's what I didn't expect at all: Michael works so many hours and so many days of the week now that we don't get to do as many fun things as we want. We haven't been to Manhattan yet! The summer offered us the most beautiful weather imaginable. I'm the only organist in the ward and the best pianist by far so I play all the time. My writing career has come to a complete standstill. It's really hard to get a teaching job here if I decide I want to go back into the classroom. People are begging me to teach piano lessons. We haven't been to one musical concert since we moved. I've gotten excited about cooking again. My children and parents seem to be closer to me than ever before. Even though Pennsylvania is beginning to feel like home, it's so beautiful here, I still feel like I'm on vacation all the time.

Wow, that was probably way more info than you needed.

Thanks for the memories

One advantage of getting older is having a lot more memories than the young. You may not know who these folks are, but I remember them all well and in 2008 we had to say goodbye. I'd like to say thank you to the following folks who lived long upon the earth and who made it a better place. You made me laugh or cry or raised my hopes and dreams:
Thanks to:
Michael Crichton for bringing dinosaurs to life
Tony Hillerman for introducing us to the Navaho world
Edie Adams for creating some of the silliest TV and movies ever
Bill Melendez for the Peanuts Christmas special
Phil Hill for being a hero to my Michael
Louis Teicher for thrilling piano music
Jo Stafford for Louisiana songs
George Carlin for weather reports
Sydney Pollack for the way we were
Dick Martin for the Farkle family
Kermit Love for designing Big Bird
Tasha Tudor for making precious books that my children loved
Cyd Charisse for other-worldly dancing
Bo Diddley for the beat
Yves St. Laurent for making women look beautiful
Mel Ferrer for making Toulouse Lautrec live
Suzanne Pleshette for believably putting up with Bob Newhart
John Stewart for one third of the Kingston Trio's music
Paul Scofield for brilliant acting
Aime Cesaire for creating poetry that lifted a whole continent
Paul Newman for lots and lots of reasons
and
Edmund Hillary for redefining what mankind can achieve.

Old acquaintance isn't forgotten.