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Greetings from Massachusetts! We hope you are all doing well. 2007 was a great year for the Mathesons. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing writer’s strike, good material for the annual letter is hard to come by this year. Of course, years as a teacher has taught me all the good tricks like using a decorative cardstock with wide margins. At least I didn’t have to resort to 18-point font. Lara is now 3 which is that magical age where she not only knows that Santa brings presents on Christmas but also that he keeps track of who has been naughty and nice. Reminding her of this on a regular basis has brought a great deal of serenity into the house during this holiday season. While Jolie has been critical of my use of jolly old St. Nick as blackmail, I have been quick to point out that it is no such thing. Technically, my actions merely constitute extortion, not blackmail, which certainly sounds quite a bit better. And really, what’s a little extortion between family members? Besides behaving well, Lara’s favorite activity is watching Scooby Doo. One day she aspires to be a meddling kid. At eighteen months, Aly is at the age where she is starting to help around the house. In fact, it took us three days to decorate the Christmas tree thanks to all of the help she provided. This year was one of major projects around the house. First, we remodeled our downstairs. The addition of flooring, heat, and running water makes it much easier to lock the children in the basement without raising the ire of the Department of Family and Social Services. I also engaged in the fine rite of passage for any father of building a swing set in the backyard. Fortunately, the set I purchased clearly described all 147 assembly steps in your choice of Korean, Danish, and Hindi. In the end, however, the swing was declared structurally sound by a crack team of bridge engineers from Minneapolis, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. Both Jolie and I went to our 20th high school reunions last summer. It is particularly discouraging going to a high school reunion in Boulder, CO, the fittest city in the fittest state in the country. I mean, most of the fun of this sort of event is seeing how fat everybody else has gotten, and instead all of my former classmates were comparing times on their latest ultra-marathon. Jolie had a great time at her reunion, although I am a bit offended that she substituted shots of a younger George Clooney for my picture when passing around photos of her family. At least she didn’t follow through with her original idea to hire a professional underwear model to pose as me. 9 Audubon Way There are also fun pictures of the cutest Matheson (as well as of Alexandra, Lara, and Jolie) and exciting economics papers at least occasionally updated at: http://www.holycross.edu/departments/economics/vmatheso/
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