Dear Family and Friends,
Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year! As you can see, we decided to go green this year to save both trees and dollars. We hope you enjoy this Holiday e-letter; we had fun putting it together.
This past year was filled with changes, trips, school, work, and fun. Having moved to Chatham, NJ in May of last year, we are happy to report that we are comfortably settled in this wonderful town. It truly feels like home to us, and we are blessed by friends, family, and neighbors who have supported, welcomed, and helped us as we’ve adapted to our new home.
Here’s a video of Alexa and one of her friends, Hannah, who lives one street away:
In April of this year our entire family went on a trip to Disney World in Orlando, Florida. One of the highlights of the trip was getting to meet the Disney Princesses at the Princess Breakfast. 
Emma and Alexa also enjoyed makeovers at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique. Alexa selected a traditional princess look while Emma went with more of a Miley Cyrus meets Pop Star Diva ‘do. We stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge where Emma and Alexa had their first opportunity to try out bunk beds. They were an instant success and they have been sleeping in bunk beds and sharing a bedroom since June.
John visited his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, in May for his 15th year college reunion. He enjoyed spending time with friends, eating an authentic cheese steak, and taking in all of the changes that have happened since he was last on campus.
We welcomed our au pair, Kathi Opitz into our family in Mid-July. She’s from Berlin, Germany and after her year with us will return there to apply to be a pilot for Lufthansa. It’s been such a blessing to have Kathi in our lives and we are so grateful that she chose us as her host family. She’s already taught the girls how to count and do simple math in German!:
We love how Alexa can't help herself and jumps in. ;)
Upstate New York wine country was the destination for the Rivera Girls’ Weekend Away in September. This year Jen, Caitlin, Mom Rivera, Su Li, and Mei Li joined in the fun. They stayed at the Aurora Inn and had a memorable trip following the Cayuga Wine Trail and enjoying some delicious wine.
October means Halloween and this year’s costumes were lots of fun. Emma decided to be Cleopatra, Alexa selected a 50’s Poodle Skirt Girl outfit, and Kathi dressed as a witch. The weather was colder than last year, but we still managed to get over 100 trick-or-treaters!
John and Elia went with their friends Linda and Jean to Aruba in early December. We lost count of how many Slippery Monkeys we consumed and rotations of the Lazy River we completed during the week. It was an important get-away that helped us re-energize for the year ahead.
We have done a lot of traveling besides Aruba and Philly. Business has taken us to San Fran, Minneapolis, Orange County and Chicago. Our favorite times have been when we've been able to visit friends and family in Cape Cod, Niskayuna, Ft. Lauderdale, Poughkeepsie, Saratoga, Delaware, Hartford, Boston and many other places.
On the job front, John was recently promoted to Sr. Partner (a somewhat honorary, but nice distinction) at Ogilvy mid-year and more recently added Executive Director of Marketing Technology to his roles at the company.
At the end of March, Elia left her job as VP of Program Management at Pershing to join UnitedHealthcare in Basking Ridge, NJ as an IT Program Manager. Not only is the commute amazingly better (20 minutes driving through beautiful horse country versus 50 minutes of polluted air on a highway) but the job is a much better fit for her professionally. She’s currently managing a multi-million dollar program that will hopefully improve UnitedHealthcare’s performance in the next couple of years.
Emma, now seven, is a second grader at Milton Avenue School. She loves her class, teacher, and friends. She also enjoys tennis, swimming, soccer and Brownies. Emma’s message to everyone is: "Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah! I can't wait to show you all my new grown-up teeth. Also - want to buy some Girl Scout cookies?" (She is taking Daddy's marketing job to heart)
Alexa, now 4½, is in her second year of preschool at Stanley Preschool. In addition to enjoying school, she also enjoys ballet, tap, swimming, and craft projects. Alexa’s message to everyone is: "Happy Holidays! Ducky and I are hoping to welcome a new teddy bear to the family this Christmas".
In closing, we wish you and yours a fun-filled holiday season and a safe, happy, and healthy 2009!
We leave you with a clip from Emma’s holiday concert this year (she is in the upper right hand corner):
Love,
John, Elia, Emma, Alexa and Kathi
This article on CNN, based on a government report is so exceedingly short-sited and under-thought that it pains me to have to point out the obvious.
First, the breathless first sentences of the article:
The cost of attending college has risen nearly three times the rate of the cost of living, and could eventually put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to a National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education report released WednesdayThere are lots of reasons for rising college costs. The biggest are:
When in Aruba, my wife L and I, along with our friends drink the famous drink of the Aruba Marriott properties - the Slippery Monkey. It is quite strong, filling and oh so yummy.
Courtesy of the Visit Aruba site, here is the recipe:
Slippery Monkey Ingredients:
Tags:
Aruba,
drink,
Slippery Monkey,
vacation
Stores need to understand their policies on this new consumer-friendly technology quickly.
From ReadWriteWeb:With the rise of app-laden smartphones like the iPhone and Google's Android OS, now on T-Mobile's G1, many penny-pinching shoppers have downloaded barcode scanning applications onto their mobile devices. These apps allow consumers to compare the prices of merchandise on a store's shelf to competing stores in the area just by taking pictures with their smartphone's camera. The prices are instantly retrieved and displayed on the mobile phone so consumers can know before they buy if they're getting a good deal.
Although consumers may be catching on to this barcode-scanning trend, some stores are still in the dark. For example, a Target store in Michigan recently requested a shopper to stop scanning merchandise, saying it went against store policy. The customer reported the event to the application's makers, Big in Japan, whose app Shop Savvy is a popular download for Android handsets.
I am not talking about stopping people from using the tech. Instead, embracing these folks - at least for now - for the pioneers they are and knowing how their store's reaction will dictate the brand experience. These are the same folks that will Twitter, blog and tell all their friends and network about whatever decision the floor employee makes.
What do you think of this technology and trend? Is it the future?
I am sad to see this happening to a beautiful city. Please don't tell me they didn't see this coming.
VENICE, Italy (AP) - Strong southern winds pushed the Adriatic Sea into Venice again Tuesday, submerging parts of the lagoon city a day after an unusually high tide caused the worst flooding in 20 years.
Tuesday's tidal surge peaked at 3 feet, 4 inches (102 centimeters), well below Monday's 5 foot, 1-inch level (156 centimeters), which marked the fourth highest tide in the city's recorded history and the worst since 1986.
Still, the water Tuesday was high enough to flood the city's landmark St. Mark's Square and other low-lying areas.
This was sent to me today. A pretty good explanation of the tax system that we have. I always get a little irritated when people get huffy about "tax breaks for the rich".
Click through and read the whole article where he extends the example to include what happens when we make tax breaks.Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
Tags:
Taxes
I am not familiar with the specifics of the Florida legal process, but I hope this sticks. Adoption should never be blocked from potentially loving parents so long they are sane and capable of supporting and loving the child. Here is a quote from the article:
In a 53-page order that sets the stage for what could become a constitutional showdown, Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman permitted 47-year-old Frank Gill to adopt the 4- and 8-year-old boys he and his partner have raised since just before Christmas four years ago. A child abuse investigator had asked Gill to care for the boys temporarily; they were never able to return to their birth parents.
''This is the forum where we try to heal children, find permanent families for them so they can get another chance at what every child should know and feel from birth, and go on to lead productive lives,'' Lederman said in court before releasing the order. ``We pray for them to thrive, but that is a word we rarely hear in dependency court.'
I hope L and I can teach our kids to see failure in the right way. This is a great article on how to start training them to do it.
The Effort Effect, Carol Dweck's book, "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" (Thanks, Dad!)Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the students to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist in the face of failure—and to succeed. The control group showed no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to recover slowly. These findings, says Dweck, “really supported the idea that the attributions were a key ingredient driving the helpless and mastery-oriented patterns.” Her 1975 article on the topic has become one of the most widely cited in contemporary psychology.
Attribution theory, concerned with people’s judgments about the causes of events and behavior, already was an active area of psychological research. But the focus at the time was on how we make attributions, explains Stanford psychology professor Lee Ross, who coined the term “fundamental attribution error” for our tendency to explain other people’s actions by their character traits, overlooking the power of circumstances. Dweck, he says, helped “shift the emphasis from attributional errors and biases to the consequences of attributions—why it matters what attributions people make.” Dweck had put attribution theory to practical use...
...[S]ome of the children who put forth lots of effort didn’t make attributions at all. These children didn’t think they were failing. Diener puts it this way: “Failure is information—we label it failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’” During one unforgettable moment, one boy—something of a poster child for the mastery-oriented type—faced his first stumper by pulling up his chair, rubbing his hands together, smacking his lips and announcing, “I love a challenge.”
Such zest for challenge helped explain why other capable students thought they lacked ability just because they’d hit a setback. Common sense suggests that ability inspires self-confidence. And it does for a while—so long as the going is easy. But setbacks change everything. Dweck realized—and, with colleague Elaine Elliott soon demonstrated—that the difference lay in the kids’ goals. “The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something,” Dweck says, and “learning goals” inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than “performance goals.”
They need to give her PR people to the dude in the back.
I generally agree with Seth Godin on what would be best for Detroit and the US related to the auto manufacturers. We need a massive wave of innovation and companies, laws and regulations that will enable it for us. Unfortunately, status quo maintainers will work hard to stop this at every turn. From Seth's article:
Not only should Congress encourage/facilitate the organizedbankruptcy of the Big Three, but it should also make it easy for themto be replaced by 500 new car companies.
Or perhaps a thousand.
That's how many car companies there were 90 years ago.
I'd spend a billion dollars to make the creation of a car companyturnkey. Make it easy to get all the safety and regulatory approvals...as easy to start a car company as it is to start a web company. Use the bankruptcy to wipe out the hated, legacy marketing portion of the industry: the dealers.
We'd end up with a rational number of "car stores" in every city that sold lots of brands. We'd have super cheap cars and superefficient cars and super weird cars. There'd be an orgy of innovation,and from that, a whole new energy and approach would evolve.
Talk about tone deaf. I recognize there were more than one person on those flights, which the article unfairly doesn't mention, but come on, these guys should use their heads.
ABCNews says that the big three auto CEOs "flew to the nation's capital yesterday in private luxurious jets to make their case to Washington that the auto industry is running out of cash and needs $25 billion in taxpayer money to avoid bankruptcy."
Just because your company is on the verge of bankruptcy— well, that's no reason not to arrive in style. Right?
From ABC:
All three CEOs - Rick Wagoner of GM, Alan Mulally of Ford, and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler - exercised their perks Tuesday by flying in corporate jets to DC. Wagoner flew in GM's $36 million luxury aircraft to tell members of Congress that the company is burning through cash, asking for $10-12 billion for GM alone.
"We want to continue the vital role we've played for Americans for the past 100 years, but we can't do it alone," Wagoner told the Senate Banking Committee.
While Wagoner testified, his G4 private jet was parked at Dulles airport. It is one of eight luxury jets in the GM fleet that continues to ferry executives around the world despite the company's dire financial straits.
ABC estimated that the trip cost GM $20,000, as opposed to a first class ticket on Northwest Airlines flight 2364 from Detroit to Washington — which would have cost about $800.
Amazingly, private jets are a luxury that even free-spending AIG is reconsidering.
AIG, despite the $150 billion bailout, still operates a fleet of corporate jets. The company says it has put two out of its seven jets up for sale and is reviewing the use of others. Though there are no such plans by GM or Ford.
Big Three CEOs Flew Private Jets to Plead for Public Funds [ABC]
(Photo: Bonita Sarita )
