2011 Here She Comes
We spend New Years with Alain and Nita and their three fabulous boys Zebulon (one of the twelve tribes of Israel); Zakkai (In the New Testament, Jesus comes to town looking for an honest man and Zakkai the only one he finds); and Zephyr (The West Wind in the Greek mythology; warm and gentle). The family recently relocated from Tucson, AZ, to Oxford so Alain could teach at Oxford where he has a Professorship of Mathematical Modelling. Nita, meanwhile, earned her PhD in applied Mathematics at Arizona and before that, NYU for her masters in magneto hydro-dynamics - the study of charged fuels like plasmas found in the sun. Fluids can be shaped by magnetics (I learn). Nita, Sonnet and Catherine were "the Smith misfits" who found each other Sophomore year in "the quad" which is "the party center" of campus but did not make room for new comers. "This," Nita says, "why we bonded together."
