Merry Christmas from the Kelly McCreary Family!

Laura's year has been jam-packed with... well, everything. She wrote and directed a one act play, entitled Oh My Gods, and acted in the world premier of Hallelujah Hotdish! A Minnesota Musical. Spring break was spent discovering how much she enjoyed Mexico, and the summer was spent discovering how much she loved England and Shakespeare. Upon beginning her senior year, Laura discovered that she was the President of the Drama Club and the director of Sibley's full length fall play, The Brother's Grimm Spectaculathon. Laura then turned 18, fought with her AP Literature class, and got accepted into Carleton College. She still wants to be a baby dinosaur when she grows up.

Mary has spent the last year thinking in Japanese and it confuses her Spanish teachers quite a bit. When she's not speaking in Spanglishese, she tends to make her friends and her family shake their heads in worry by ranting about the pretty Japanese Idols that she has come to fangirl. Over the past year she has been in six shows, and is starting to wonder if there if a giant sign on her head that tells people to cast her in the male roles (the last two roles she has had plus four others in previous years have all been male). In November, she managed to churn out another 50,000-word novel that was mostly written in between the scenes of her theater group's show. Now she is relaxing because there are a full three weeks until she will be back on the stage!

Ann is still with Northland Insurance and was recently promoted to the Manager of Planning and Governance; if you have the slightest idea as to what that entails please let her know immediately she could use all of the guidance she can get her hands on. This year she and Dan spent time in Mexico and went biking in Wisconsin and Maine. They tended their lawn, perennial garden and 20+ heirloom tomato plants. She now belongs to two book clubs and volunteers with the Minneapolis Public Schools ELL Distance learning program. She is routinely seen playing Word Twist and Twirl word games on her Macbook Air and still finds time to bake cupcakes for her family and friends.

Like many people today, Dan used to work at a bank, but is now working as an independent consultant. He still is interested in metadata and semantic web technologies and empowering non-programmers to build their own web applications. He is working on a book on a new web application architecture with several colleges and has been active on several on-line wikibooks. When not on the web he can usually be found doing spectral analysis of the blue LEDs in our Christmas lights.