It's been quite a year for the two of us (or should I say the five of us!)

Our new puppy, Moyo, arrived in February at 8 weeks and 25 pounds, now a scant 10 months later she's 130 plus. Despite what Yukie says, even I don't gain weight that fast! Sai has just turned 4 and Maro is now 8. Not telling how old Yukie and I are, but I can now get senior citizen discounts at the local parks.

After a "short break" of only 25 years, I started playing the Baritone horn (actually it's really a Euphonium - the true baritone is mainly an English thing)  And more recently I really "bottomed out" so to speak by going back to playing the Tuba as well. I've been playing in a community band for the last few months and I also took part in the Christmas Tuba Festival in San Jose along with 207 other intrepid souls. This bash was organized by my teacher, Tony Clements, tubist for the San Jose Symphony. Great fun! Yukie grins and bears it all, even if my sense of rythm is awful. But she thought maybe I'd gone over the edge when I started teaching the dogs and cat to play. No joke, they actually had their little chops on the mouthpieces. At least I had the common sense to wrap the mouthpieces in plastic film first!

Yukie and I have been studying Italian for almost 2 years now, and in August our teacher, Simona, went back to Italy to visit her relatives. Seemed like a great chance, so Yukie and I went to Italy and visited with her family in Rome and Umbria. It would have been nicer if our luggage had also made it to Rome, but... It did catch up with us 4 days later, so all ended well. Umbria was a lot of fun, beautiful area, good food, nice people, good food, good weather, good food, etc. One of the real highlights of the trip was going truffle hunting with Simona's cousin Barbara and her truffle hunting dog, Roscoe. (Pigs in France, Dogs in Italy!)

Saying Ciao! to Italy we headed to England for a great week. We (Yukie) didn't like the hotel in London, so we (Yukie) decided to pull up stakes and visit Cambridge, which we (Yukie) liked a lot better. OK, OK, I liked it too! We picked up a car there, and drove to the Winchester area where we stayed in a wonderful B&B and went to pubs and generally misbehaved. From there we stayed over a couple of nights in a small village on the Thames river where we stayed in a nice old Inn that was built in about 1136 and visited a well-known wooden boatbuilder who was good enough to take us out for a spin in one of his creations.

After gaining XXX pounds in Italy and YYY pounds in England we finally lost about 200 pounds by virtue of counting our cash hoard while having dinner in Oxford and leaving the money on the table. Great tip. But I was philosophical about it all - after all the odds of making it through the Heathrow duty free area with the money was pretty small.

Fast forward to November. Yukie had a successful student recital, and at the end after the kids had done their thing she and the trumpeter from the San Jose Symphony played the first movement of the Haydn trumpet concerto. I was already in Japan on a business trip so I missed the concert. Yukie flew over the next day and visited her friends while I worked, and on the weekend she came north and we visited a few nice little towns in the Tohoku area. We stayed in a little country inn in the mountains just in time to catch the first snowfall. very nice, sitting in the outdoor hot spring watching the snow. By the way, if you look at the pictures you might mistakenly(???) think you see a couple of sake bottles.. Of course, it's only a local health drink (ha ha ha). It must work because after drinking a couple, believe me, you feel no pain!!!! Great trip except that Yukie forgot her green card when she left the US, left her purse on the counter in a railroad station in the boonies, and lost my Japanese cell phone on the airplane coming home. All except the cell phone showed up.

So that's about it. Another year older but no wiser, so I think I'll finish up and once more give you our warmest regards and best wishes for the coming year. Ciao!!!!