December 3, 2007
Column 308
A Holiday Greeting to Dartoid’s World Readers
Dear Friends…
It is that time of year again to share with you Mrs. Dartoid’s and my adventures in this journey we call life. 2007 has been another year of magic and wonder…
Lori, who we adopted from Argentina in January, is almost three and quite a talker. She continues to amaze the professors at the university with her aptitude for foreign languages. It was fun for her to serve as official translator for Condoleezza Rice during her recent visit to Iraq. She plans to spend this holiday transcribing War and Peace into Arabic and Cantonese.
Chris, who we adopted from China in 2005, is now five and growing by leaps and bounds. When he got his first set of building blocks he seemed to really take to them. In April he designed his first skyscraper and ground was broken in Seoul for the new Itaewon Towers. It is great to have a budding architect at home as he made a new addition to our 8,000 square foot house and a wonderful gazebo for our garden by the koi pond and waterfall.
Adopted son Dave was immersed with his graduate school studies, and managed to co-author a paper on Multidimensional Customer Attribute Analysis by Conjoint Survey and accept a Nobel Prize for his discoveries in Quantum Physics. Along the way he took three startups through their IPO. We are proud of his work serving on the Board of Directors of IBM, Coca-Cola and Walt Disney.
Our daughter Jami had another very busy year. In between her work as president of the American Cancer Society and senior partner of Goldman Sachs, she published two novels and introduced a line of hand made active-wear. She remains active as a key political advisor to Hillary Clinton. We are particularly proud of her having just earned a spot as a starting forward representing the United States in the next World Cup. Probably you already know that she won this season’s America’s Next Top Model.
Bentley, our golden retriever, learned to speak Latin.
Mrs. Dartoid and I were able to squeeze in a little traveling this year. We started in Aspen, went to Belarus, the Congo, Denmark, Ethiopia, the Falklands, Greenland, Holland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Venezuela, and Zaire. Our adventure sailing our new yacht around the world was a great experience for the kids. We learned to communicate with dolphins and discovered a new region of deep water volcanoes.
Other than that and except for learning yesterday that we won the $150 million Powerball Lottery and that I’ve been given a wildcard to participate in the Ladbrokes.com World Darts Championship, it was a very quiet year.
Well, I could go on, but don’t want you to feel inadequate at this very special time of the year.
May your holiday be happy and your New Year prosperous, and do feel free to bask in the glow in the Dartoid family glory…
From the Field,
Dartoid
