Monday, December 2, 2013
Column 455
Happy Holidays from the Family ‘Toid
Dear Friends of Dartoid’s World:
It is that time of year again to share with you our adventures in this journey we call life. 2013 has been another year of magic and wonder for the Family ‘Toid…
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 John Kerry during his recent visit to Afghanistan. She plans to spend this holiday transcribing War and Peace into Arabic and Cantonese.
Chris, who you may remember we adopted from China in 2009, 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 start ups 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 CEO of the American Cancer Society and senior partner of Goldman Sachs, she published two novels and introduced a line of handmade active-wear. She remains active as a key political advisor to Hillary Clinton (yes, she’s running). 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.
Marky, our golden retriever, learned to speak French and last month she won the Florida State Orange-fetching Championship. Romy, our werewolf rescue from Romania, won the World Biting Championship.
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 boat 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, it was a very quiet twelve months.
Well, we 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 of our glory…
Oh, and be sure to watch Dartoid as he competes in the Ladbrokes.com World Darts Championship later this month. It should be a real cracker, whatever that is.
Mr. and Mrs. Dartoid and Family
