December 2023

Greetings from the Rotton / Finifter household!

Sam, who turned 18 this year, had a year filled with accomplishments: he made Eagle Scout, graduated high school, and recently got his drivers license. This fall, he started at our local community college, Montgomery College, where he is working towards an associate’s degree in digital animation.

Sasha, now 15, also had an eventful year. At the end of her freshman year at Walter Johnson High School, she won a departmental award for child development, one of the few underclassmen so honored. Still active in theater, she appeared as an ancestor in last spring’s school production of The Addams Family, and this fall she starred as Goneril in King Lear. She is also president of her school’s Educators Rising club, as well as publicity manager for the school’s drama program. She also spent much of the summer volunteering as a Counselor in Training at Lessans Camp JCC, working mostly with four-year-olds, and hopes to be a paid junior counselor this coming summer.

Over the summer, we were finally able to take our long-planned cruise to the U.K. and Ireland, sailing out of Copenhagen. We were so excited to see our family friends Hennie and Tommy in Denmark, and visit with many of Mark’s U.K. relatives in Liverpool and Anglesey, Wales.

As for the adults, all has been pretty much the same. Tracy is still running her own website development business, working with other agencies as well as clients across the U.S. Mark’s employer was acquired by a new company late in 2022, but with a federal contract firmly in place, not much has changed in the day-to-day. Lois continues to knit, and knit, and knit some more.

We’ve prepared a slideshow that highlights our year:

Another summer vacation is in the books. This year, we took a road trip through the southeastern United States. The highlight of the trip, of course, was the Great American Eclipse, which we saw at totality in Hopkinsville, Kentucky with our friends Tara, Doug, and Liam.

Our activities:

• Furniture shopping in High Point, North Carolina
• A day at Nashville’s Adventure Science Center
• Seeing Rifftrax live in Nashville
• Visiting the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky
• A day at the amusement/water park
• Exploring Mammoth Cave National Park
• Solar eclipse viewing in Hopkinsville, Kentucky
• A visit to the Makers Mark distillery in Loretta, Kentucky
• Horseback riding in Snowshoe, West Virginia
• Buying way too many books at the Green Valley Bookfair in Virginia
• Wine tasting at Shenandoah Vineyards

As of 6PM, we’d had nine continuous hours of snow, and still falling. Here’s the hour-by-hour visual record.

With school out for the day, and the government shutdown over, Mark and my mom decided to take the kids to the National Zoo. Little did they realize that they’d be interviewed by channels 5 and 7 news, Taiwan TV and Corcoran College. Here’s Sasha and Sam, who made the 5 o’clock channel 5 news.

DC News FOX 5 DC WTTG

I’m not nearly as good a photographer as this photo might have one believe.  I just had an amazingly beautiful subject to work with.