This is Lanchi and Tuan's annual family letter. 2007 was a busy year marked by changes in family, residence, and occupation. For some time, Tuan's mother, now 82 year old, had been showing signs of an Alzheimer-related condition called "Body of Lewy". As it was becoming clear that she could no longer live by herself in her Paris apartment, Tuan traveled to France on this year's eve to arrange her paperwork and to initiate the sale of the property. In mid-April, he returned to Paris to finalize the transaction. For a month, with the exception of a day trip with mom to Fontainebleau, Tuan did almost nothing but wading through bureaucracies and packing belongings (30+ cartons)to be sent to California. In the three-bedroom apartment and a small basement, his parents had managed to store away possibly every single object and piece of paperwork that they had acquired for the last half-century. While he discovered many sentimentally valuable artifacts, as well as some of the most prized vintage wine, he had to comb through piles of ancient papers to cull out such things as his mother's birth certificate, wedding photos, his father's university notebooks... Tuan returned to the US accompanied by his mom on a visitor Visa while waiting for her permanent status. Just before Tuan left for France, we made a very quick decision - quicker than it takes to shop for Lanchi's compact camera - to buy a new house in a more hilly and pastoral neighborhood of San Jose. We anticipated needing more space for Tuan's mom, our growing children, while continuing to live with Lanchi's parents. When Lanchi's sister next-door neighbor put their house up for sale, we seized the rare opportunity. We then opened a door between our yards, maximizing the benefits of extended family for which we had chosen to stay in crowded and overpriced Silicon Valley. In mid-June, we moved to our new house, but it was not until early Fall that we began to recover from this second consecutive move and settled in a bit. Please be sure to note our new street address at the end of this letter. Although it took only a couple of weeks for Tuan to be able to resume operations, Lanchi had to build a new greenhouse from a kit before being able to transfer her orchids to their new home. As the new greenhouse is smaller, she engaged into a number of increasingly larger Internet orchid auctions to trim down her collection. Since many of her orchids are very difficult to find, she has developed quite a following on Ebay from the fanatic orchid collectors, in spite of realizing a substantial profit margin by reselling plant divisions for multiple times her initial cost. In December, Tuan traveled for the third time to Paris, this time only for two weeks, accompanied by mom, in order to obtain her immigrant visa at the US Embassy. This was much faster than adjusting her status in the US, and gave her the opportunity to visit her relatives in France. As taking care of mom and moving twice left too little time for both computer vision and photography, Tuan eventually resigned from SRI and left research for good. It had been a fun 20-year career (including the PhD) rewarded with enough discovery and recognition, but he felt that his most creative years as a scientist were over. Despite being now a full-time photographer, Tuan didn't photograph much this year. The longest trip was to India in January, from mid-way Paris. While the main goal of the trip was to hand-deliver more than a thousand of 5x7 transparencies to be drum-scanned in a Mumbai lab (a good exercise in outsourcing with a 90% savings over the fee charged by US labs), he managed to travel all over the country for 12 days, visiting 11 UNESCO World Heritage sites as well as looking for colorful scenes in Varanasi and Jodhpur (which turned out to be his favorite). He also squeezed in a week of travel in the South of France during his December trip, during which he froze himself while capturing 9 of the World Heritage Sites in-between visits to friends and stays with family. Nature photography was reduced to a half-week mule-assisted trip that provided comfortable access to the backcountry of Kings Canyon National Park, at the invitation of Ken Duncan of Florentine Films (working on their own National Parks project PBS series), and another half-week in Yosemite National Park. Now that he has to be more serious about the business, Tuan spent more time than ever on the computer, in order to reverse the decline in relative web traffic that his site had lately experienced. The address of the website is www.terragalleria.com, and are always grateful for any effort to spread words, or even better, web links. As before, you can download hi-res wallpaper from our site with "friends2008" as both user name and password. Vi-Van and Minh-Dan are now respectively 3 years 11 months and 2 years 5 months. They have made quite a bit of progress in speech. Vi-Van is having fun with a few hours of weekly special education classes, where she is rapidly picking up English (despite the Vietnamese-only policy at home), while Minh-Dan readily delivers better syntax and pronunciation than his sister. They begin to play together, and love to join forces to commit mischief. Since they are the least disciplined children that we have seen so far, having them run around the house and demand attention all day has been exhausting for Lanchi, who in addition to this round-the-clock job is having lots to do. Besides running the photo business during Tuan's multiple trips, she took up the task to scan all the 35mm slides and correcting the color of the large format scans from India. Thanks to the declining in US housing market, we have just managed to sell the old property a few weeks ago (hopefully, we never know until close of escrow...). Maintaining and dressing up the vacant property have been time consuming for Lanchi, who also has to negotiate with a difficult real estate agent. The Paris real estate transaction went relatively smoothly, despite delays that caused us to transfer the funds at a local minimum of the Euro/Dollar rate. With all that happenings, we did not have a true family vacation this year but a few weekend outings... Our family photos, as well as an archive of our family letters, can always be seen at http://www.terragalleria.com/family