All posts by tracy

Holidays 2025

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December 2025

Greetings from the Rotton / Finifter household! As we close out another busy year filled with work, travel, and college applications (!), a quick update on everything we’ve been up to.

January: We started the year with another beautiful performance by Sasha at her vocal recital.

February: Mark, Tracy, Lois, and Brian sailed on another Star Trek cruise, joining old friends and making new ones.

March: Sasha performed again, this time with the Maryland All-State Senior Treble Chorus, and starred as Toby in her high school production of Sweeney Todd. Things got interesting when, on her “off” night, she had to go on at the last minute when her double-cast was unable to perform.

April: Tracy joined in the Hands Off! rally in D.C., and she and Sasha began a series of college visits, starting with Salisbury University in Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

May: Tracy and Lois embarked on hiking Scotland’s West Highland Way, completing 96 miles from Glasgow to Fort William over the course of nine days.

June: Lois was off again, this time with Brian cruising the Danube from Hungary to Germany.

July: Sasha spent most of her summer working again at the local JCC summer camp, bringing home entertaining stories of herding four-year-olds, while Sam continued his classes in Digital Animation at Montgomery College.

August: We were excited to welcome our dear friends Hennie and Tommy, visiting the U.S. from Denmark. We spent a week showing them around the Washington area, then spent a few more days with them in New York before parting ways.

September: More traveling ensued, as Lois and Brian sailed from Los Angeles to Tokyo on a Trans-Pacific repositioning cruise.

October: More college visits, as this time Sasha and Tracy flew up to Boston to look at a school there, while Sam went to the Baltimore Comicon to draw inspiration from animators he admires.w

November: Mark and Tracy also went on a repositioning cruise, this time from Boston to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sasha was again on the stage, starring as Scorpius in her school’s production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, as one of the first schools in Maryland to perform it. College acceptances started coming in, with University of Delaware, Towson University, Salisbury University, and Penn State University all accepting Sasha.

December: We enjoyed Sasha’s last performance of the year in her show choir concert.

We hope everyone is doing well, and that everyone has a great holiday season and a happy and healthy 2026.

Holidays 2024

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December 2024

Greetings from the Rotton / Finifter household!

Sasha’s big year included playing Madame Thénardier in her high school’s spring musical production of Les Misérables and starring as the narrator of The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon this past fall. Over the summer, she started her first year as a summer camp counselor working with 4-year-olds, and is especially excited to have gotten her driving learner’s permit. She also joined Psi Alpha, the high school psychology honor society, and recently was accepted into the Maryland Senior All-State Treble Chorus (more on that next year).

Sam continues to work towards his digital animation degree at Montgomery College. In February, he and Tracy both competed in Snowshoe Mountain’s Cupp Run Challenge giant slalom race. We were able to celebrate his birthday in Cleveland while viewing the total solar eclipse.

In the fall, we made some long-overdue visits to relatives around the country. In September, Lois and Tracy drove out to Wisconsin to visit with their cousin Connie and her children and grandchildren. Then in October, Mark and Tracy flew out to Colorado to visit with Mark’s mother and sister to celebrate his mother’s 80th birthday.

Tracy is still running her own website development business, working with other agencies as well as clients across the U.S., and Mark continues his work with a federal contractor at the National Institutes of Health providing computer server and cloud support. Lois continues to knit all the wool in sight, while also joining a local hiking club with Tracy to prepare for a big trip we’ll share with you next year.

We’ve prepared a slideshow that highlights our year:

Holidays 2023

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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:

A Christmas Carol

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In lieu of a “traditional” fall play this year, Sasha’s drama club put on a radio play of Charles Dicken’s classic A Christmas Carol. It can be listened to at ShowTix4U, now through December 27. Sasha plays the parts of the radio announcer and Mrs. Cratchit.

An individual rental is $9.37 and a family rental is $19.35, and rentals are good for 48 hours.

Holiday Letter 2020

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Dear family and friends,

2020 has been quite a year, with lots of great adventures for the whole family:

  • We finally got to see Hamilton live on stage at the Kennedy Center;
  • The whole family went on a wonderful cruise through Scandinavia, Scotland, and Iceland;
  • We saw Cirque du Soleil when it came to the D.C. area;
  • Sasha competed in a number of Irish dance competitions around the region; and
  • Tracy resumed her WordCamp speaking presence with talks in Washington, D.C. and Lancaster, PA.

At least, we assume that’s what our counterparts did this year in the alternate universe where COVID-19 wasn’t a thing.

Instead, like you, we spent much of our year hunkered down and doing our best to stay healthy. Fortunately, none of us caught the virus, at least as far as we can tell.

And so while our Hamilton tickets went unused and we contented ourselves to watch the Broadway recording on Disney+, we were grateful that Mark’s job at the National Institutes of Health is going well (albeit from home, of course) and Tracy’s WordPress development business had a strong year. Lois couldn’t attend her knitting camps in Vermont, of course, but busied herself knitting and cooking at home.

The kids (Sam in 10th grade, Sasha in 7th) have been “going” to school via Zoom all year, and will probably continue to do so in the second semester. Sasha’s drama club still did its fall play: a radio drama version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol; details on how to hear it will be posted on the family here when available. Sam found ways to connect with his friends through online gaming, and Sasha did virtual “movie nights” with her friends, and kept up her voice lessons and dancing remotely.

We hope you’re all doing well also in this crazy, topsy-turvy year. Here’s hoping that 2021 brings a more normal year and an end to this pandemic. Keep safe, stay healthy, and have a happy holiday season.

All the best,
The Rotton + Finifter Family

Summer Vacation 2017

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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

National Zoo Reopening

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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