Saturday, December 22, 2007

Merry Christmas!

(Adapted from my wife's annual Christmas letter)

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire; Jack Frost nipping at my nose, Yuletide carols ……….

Seems I’ve been hearing those carols being played since Labor Day but it didn’t feel like Christmas until the weather finally turned cold this week. Suddenly, Christmas is less than a week away! I went out for 3 hours today and got all my shopping done. Now, I’ve given myself a day to get out these cards before I start the baking for teachers/neighbors/friends.

It’s been another rather uneventful year and that is a real blessing. Locally, weather has dominated the news as our drought conditions have gone from mild to moderate to severe to extreme to exceptional. For the past few months, a drop of rain generates the kind of excitement usually reserved for snow! We have all learned to take much shorter showers, surrounded by 3 large buckets. I have managed to keep most of my perennials and bushes alive with that collected water. We also have been following the mantra “If it’s yellow, let in mellow….” . They are talking about mandating that even for public restrooms! Between the drought and all the high-temp records broken this year, there are only a few die-hard global climate change skeptics remaining in this area.

Phil has had a good year at work and he’s still employed. For a chemist these days, that’s certainly not a given. He continues to enjoy singing in the church choir. He’s also serving as an elder and chair of the music and worship committee - which means he spends many an evening on the phone trying to round up smiling faces to greet or usher. He recently joined AARP to get reduced hotel rates for a business trip and had the gall to sign me up too. We can’t possibly be that old, can we? We do, however, enjoy being able to excuse the occasional odd mishap as “a senior moment”.

I started the year by turning the house into a sewing factory as a friend and I made 125 costumes for our youth choir production of “The Wizard of Oz”. Later, I actually made some money sewing a few costumes for a small, professional salsa dance company. Then I started a project that seemed to go on forever. I decided to turn the ugly, pie shaped slope at the front of our property into a terraced perennial garden. I (with help from my wonderful hubby) began by digging out a foot deep of the heavy, hard, rooty, rocky clay soil. Then I terraced it by building stone walls, moving 4 ½ tons of stone. It turned out to be a great way to get to know the neighbors better, as they would often stop by to chat (and give me kind encouragement). I’ve now turned my attention to the inside of the house. We have lived here for 16 years now, and most rooms are in need of an update.

Blake is in his junior year at Earlham, double majoring in math and economics. He’s having a great year and really appreciates his single room this year after being in a triple last year. He works as a teaching assistant/tutor for the math department, and seems to enjoy that. He took a semester break from concert choir , but will start back in January. This past summer, we were happy to have him at home. He spent the summer baking bread at Great Harvest Bread Company. His 5 AM start time was a wonderful incentive to do well in college. He has been dating a very nice young woman, Hannah, for about 2 years now. She came home with him for spring break and we look forward to her coming again this year. He, in turn, will be spending the last week of his Christmas break with her family is Seattle. Could this be getting serious?

Whitney is now a sophomore in high school. Music keeps her busy and happy. She is in the treble ensemble and band this year, and also plays in the small wind section with the orchestra (we had 3 concerts in one week - full of wonderful Christmas music!) She also sings in the church youth choir and is on their leadership team. In addition, she continues to take tap dance lessons - and has absolutely no interest in any other sporty endeavor. She’s a typical, lovely 16 year old girl, spending hours chatting with her friends, not on the phone but on the web. She is in no hurry to learn to drive and has yet to take drivers ed. It feels rather strange as a parent to be pushing a child to start driving!

As a family, we’ve continued several wonderful traditions this year. We had our 20th annual summer week at Sunset Beach with Phil’s extended family and were joined this year by our good friends Jay, Sue and Haley from Pa. In Nov., it was back to the beach for our 15th annual Thanksgiving celebration. During Whitney’s spring break, we headed down to Charleston, SC. We took some wonderful tours (I highly recommend the Gullah tour if you are ever in the area) and ate some great food. We also managed a quick trip to Iowa after dropping Blake off at college in Indiana, and managed to catch up with family and friends.

We hope you and your family are well and find time to enjoy the blessings of this wonderful time of year.

……Glad tidings we bring to you and your kin; Glad tidings for Christmas and a happy New Year!

And now some pictures.

The Thanskgiving Bunch


Parts of the Beach Crowd


Blake and Hannah


Whitney and cousins, Joni and Paige


Donna's Project (before plants)

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Nightmare

About a week ago I woke up early, shaken by a horrible nightmare. First, some background: I have a 1999 Volvo S70. Now to the nightmare, it's short. I took my car to the dealer to have it worked on, maybe it was a tune-up, that wasn't really part of the dream. The bad dream was picking it up. I went up to the cashier and asked how much it would be. She casually said "Fourteen thousand dollars". "Fourteen thousand dollars?," I said. A horrible feeling of terror swept over me. How could it possibly be $14,000? My worse fear was how I would explain it to my wife that I let them charge me $14,000 for a simple checkup of a car that was worth, at best, $4,000. I remember standing there stunned with a whole bunch of emotions running through me and then I woke up, badly shaken by the whole affair. I got up and went to the bath room and was turning it over in my mind. I was relieved that it was a only a dream but I was still pretty upset about it. There was a mixture of anger at the dealership for not calling me before doing the work and that helpless sensation anyone feels when you don't have control. The emotions I felt at the dealership in my dream stayed with me for a few more hours, wearing off gradually over the morning.

I wonder what Freud would say about this.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Some Photos from Thanksgiving

This was the 15th Thanksgiving that we spent with family at the beach. We do the traditional turkey thing on Thanksgiving day and have a little cocktail party on Friday night where we steam a few oysters. We always take a couple of walks down to Bird Island and visit the Kindred Spirit mailbox. This is to get rid of the cobwebs in the brain from maybe a bit too much wine the night before and to take time out from constantly eating. As you can see from the pictures at the mailbox, it cooled off a lot from Thursday to Friday. A good time was had by all. Here are some pictures.

Thanksgiving 2007

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Video Test

OK, I haven't blogged in ages and it's time that I started back. There are a lot of reasons that I haven't blogged lately. The biggest ones are that I don't have time, I don't have much to say and I'm lazy. But, I've decided to get back on the circuit. I have an upcoming blog on the work my lovely wife has been doing out in front of the house. But not tonight. Tonight I am going to experiment with posting video. I have a nice little piece of video that I shot, oh, about 19 years ago. I've recently turned it digital and now I'm going to put it up on my blog. It's from the very early days of my son learning to talk. Here goes. (By the way, let's not mention this to him).

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Beach Photos, Summer of 2007

Hi guys. We go to Sunset Beach every summer during the week that crosses over from July into August. Sometimes I take pictures. Here's the ones I took this year. The link will take you to my public photos on Picassa.

Enjoy.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Simpsonize Yourself

Could anything be cooler than this. There is a new web site that allows you to upload a picture of yourself and turn into a Simpson's character. I took that photo over on the side of my blog and used it to make a Simpson of myself. Here it is:



I could have messed around with it a bit more but this is OK for now. If you want to make one of your own go to the Simpsonize site and give it a go.

Monday, July 16, 2007

In Fairness to Durham

In all fairness to the City of Durham, North Carolina, they finally finished the corner and a lot of other stuff. They even had a celebration. I didn't go but I did take a picture of the finished corner for you to see.

Enjoy!

How to Prepare a Gourmet Meal

Recently, my wife went somewhere and I had to feed my daughter and myself. This was an excellent opportunity for me to prepare a real gourmet meal. It's not hard. You can do it, too. Here's what I did along with some instructions and illustrations.

First choose a gourmet meal. I chose Marie Callender's Chicken Pot Pie, a delectable mix of chicken, vegetables, crunchy crust and some weird creamy yellow goo to hold it all together.



The first thing you do is turn on the oven to 400 F. While the oven is heating up, open up the boxes and place the pot pies on a tray. Then you tear off little strips of tin foil and wrap them around the edges of the pot pies. This keeps the outer edge of the crust from drying out while you're trying to bring the bulk of the food from rock hard frozen up to steaming hot. When the oven hit's the desired temperature, in they go.



Now comes the hard part. Set the timer for 60 minutes and go work on the Sunday Cross Word puzzle. You're supposed to cook then for 65 minutes, but you'll need 5 minutes to fix a couple of glasses of milk.

OK, times up. Open up the oven and give them a look. They should have a nice golden color. They should look like this.



Now comes the really hard part, the Flip. The real test of the gourmet preparation of a pot pie is a successful Flip. Basically, you have a fragile crust holding a flowing magma of goo and your job is to flip the whole thing over onto the plate and keep it all intact. Of course, the successful Flip must include a good release of the pie from the container. Nothing is worse than a good Flip, followed by tearing away the pie bottom and releasing the pie's contents before its time. If you do it right, it looks like this.



Bon Appetite!

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Downtown Durham Update

Over a year ago I wrote a blog about the work going on in downtown Durham, NC. I specifically wrote about the absurd placement of a new fire hydrant in the middle of the street. Well now I can see, sort of, why it was put where it was. It looks like the curbing was going to be extended out further so that the place where the new hydrant was to be placed would be on the sidewalk. That's all well and good except that a year has passed and these photos show how the project is going.





I'm glad I don't pay taxes in Durham, though I suspect that there's a bit of Federal money going into this downtown revitalization project.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Socks

The other day I was helping my wife do some laundry. Of course, in our house, anytime you do a load of laundry, you always find an old load left in the dryer that you have to deal with before you can get your load through the process. Well, in this case the load in the dryer was particularly interesting. It had a bunch of my kid's underwear and other such stuff. There were also a bunch of socks. Anytime you fold laundry with socks, you always have a single or two. Well in this load, there were 12 socks and only one pair in the bunch. Here's a picture.



Who knows where their partners are. Maybe they'll show up in the next load.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

New Computer

I recently got yet another computer. I didn't really need it but I didn't know it at the time. Tonights blog is about what I bought and why.

When I left Lilly a few years ago and started a new company, I needed a Windows computer because I was going to sell robotics which would require a Windows computer. I'm normally a Mac kind of guy, but for this application, well, I needed Windows. So I bought a Dell Inspiron 600m. Here's a picture of one:



Over the next year or so, the company didn't make enough money so I went back to work and left the company on a low hum. In the meantime, my lovely wife developed an affection for my Dell computer. She moved it downstairs to the living room and started playing online poker and sudoku and lots of other things while watching TV. She became very attached to it. I think I wrote about how I had to go buy another computer to use. That was the Mac mentioned in a previous blog. Of course, my daughter took over the Mac, but that's another story.

Anyhow, about a month ago, the Dell went on the blink. I came home from work and my wife told me the Dell wasn't working. So I went over and booted it up and it all worked fine. "See," I said, "I must have magic hands." About that time, just as I showed it to her, it locked up. I tried to reboot but it wouldn't happen. After a couple of hours, when it had cooled down, I tried again. It booted up fine, but after a few minutes, maybe when the fan kicked in, it locked up again. So it appeared that it would work just fine after it had cooled down, but when it warmed up, kapow!

It was this juncture that I did something stupid. We booted up and took off all the files that we needed. Then I started trying to figure out what was wrong. I decided to do some sort of disc scan to see if there were any errors. Well, a disk scan takes a long time and you can't get control of the computer back until it's done. It's not hard to figure that it could never get through the disc scan without locking up. It was during the many attempts to get through the disc scan that I was finally able to see for sure that the machine locked up just when the fan came on as I'd suspected. Hmmm! I think "So maybe if it stays cool, I can get through the disc scan." It was still sort of cool outside so I took the computer out and put it on the cold cement porch and let it sit there until it got plenty cold and booted up again. It ran a lot longer but not long enough to get through the disc scan until it locked up again.

I talked to the computer guy at work and he said that it might be a memory problem. So I came home and took out one of the memory chips. And, what do you know, it ran through the disc scan and seemed to be working OK. But with only one 256 MB, it ran really slow: 1/2 hr to boot, 15 minutes to launch the mail program, forever to surf the web. This is because, windows XP consumes all the ram and everything else has to get it's memory from disc swapping. So I got a new memory chip from work and put it in the computer and it booted up and ran fast again. Cool it's fixed. Then the fan came on and it locked up. Crap.

By this time my wife had gone into severe withdraw and showing signs of depression. So I figured it was time to replace the machine. I asked my wife if she would like a new computer for Mother's Day. She looked so happy, so I ordered one. I ordered a similar machine, though, because it's been three years since I got the last one, a similar cost a bit less. Also, I didn't buy Microsoft Office again. The bad news is that this one has the new Vista operating system. It sucks. Anyhow, here's a picture of the new machine.



In the meantime, I tried to figure out how to fix the old machine. I looked on the Dell web site and sent in a problem ticket. They said it was a bad mother board which they could fix for about twice what the computer was worth. So I got to thinking, maybe the only thing wrong with the mother board is that it can't read one of the ram slots and the electrical drain that accompanies the fan coming on exacerbates the problem and causes the lockup. This doesn't have to make sense. It only suggests a possible solution. Don't use the bad slot and jack up the memory in the good slot. It so happened that Staples had a 512 DDR notebook ram dohicky on sale for $40. So I bought one and slipped it in the good slot on the Dell and, viola, back to it's old self.

So now my wife is happy again and I got a new computer that I didn't really need but at least now I can blog at the same time my wife plays Nanosweeper and my daughter plays with her iTunes playlists.

OK, enough of this. So long for now.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

An Afternoon on Jordan Lake




So I haven't blogged for a while. And a I got a nasty comment from one of my two readers telling me that I need to start back and that I can't blame it on God. That's not exactly how he said it, but it's close. I haven't had so much to do that I haven't had time. It's more that I've always got a little something to do which I'm always putting off and so I can't blog when there's something else that needs to be done but can be put off a bit longer. I call it "procrastination as art."

I finally got most of those little somethings done and so now I can blog freely for a few days.

Today I'm going to talk about what we did yesterday. But it starts on Friday, or maybe sooner. I work for a small biotech company in Durham. Like most such organizations, we don't make any money. We do something much more interesting. We create value. Recently, we created some more value and so, to celebrate, each employee got a little gift. This past Friday afternoon, we had a small happy hour and everyone got the same gift, some flexible remuneration and a lovely group photo. They said that we shouldn't use it (the money) to pay bills but to do something nice for ourselves.

I came home and told my wife about it and, of course, she had an idea. "Why don't we go to Jordan Lake and rent a motor boat and ride around the lake?" She had already done her homework. There was this place, a marina, that rents motor boats and we could go tomorrow and it would be a lot of fun.

So I called the next morning and reserved a boat for us from 1:30 to 6:30 PM. We loaded up some drinks and snacks and took off for the lake. It was a beautiful day. It was in the mid to high 70's and there were a few fluffy white clouds in the sky. When we got there I went in and read all the rules. The rule book that you had to read had lots of pictures and at the bottom of each page it said "NO EXCEPTIONS!" "NO EXCUSES!" We paid up and off we went. Here's a picture of a boat like the one we rented.



Of course, I had to drive. We took off slowly but pretty soon we got the hang of it and sped up a bit. The first thing we did was head south under Highway 64 and started looking for something interesting to do. "Let's go up the Haw river." But instead of going up the Haw we took off a bit further to the east and went into a little nook as you can see on the map charting our progress.



There were a lot of tree stumps off to one side of the nook and so we went fairly gingerly and stayed in the middle away from the stumps. This path eventually stopped and obviously didn't lead where we had wanted to go. So we got out the big water-proof map that they give you so you don't lose their boat and realized that we went the wrong way. We turned around and took off to where we needed to go. My wife had a bit of trouble figuring out the map and kept looking for a bridge that we should go under to get to the river mouth. Eventually, we figured out that the road that she was looking for was now under water and it all made sense.

Given that I was driving most of the time, we didn't get a lot of pictures. Here's Whitney, sitting up front, enjoying the ride. She's always liked to ride in boats from the first time we put her on a boat at age 2.



And here's our intrepid river boat pilot manning the stern.



So we eventually figured out the map and went a few miles up the Haw river and then came back through the lake and up to the more northern parts where there a few more stumps and trees off to the sides. After about three hours of this, the clouds got a little thicker and it was actually cold when the sun went behind the clouds. So we headed back taking one more little side trip under a bridge before heading back to the marina. Before we left, we went back in to pay for the gas we used. I happened to look on a map on the wall and saw that our trip into the first nook was in a strictly forbidden zone,"NO EXCEPTIONS!" "NO EXCUSES!" Luckily, we didn't hit anything in there and damage the boat. That would have chewed up the rest of my little gift and a lot more.

So that's what we did yesterday. We ain't gonna do nothing much today.

Bye!

Monday, February 05, 2007


Shopping at COSTCO

My wife likes to shop at Costco. Costco is one of those big membership warehouse stores, like Sam's, except that they have liberal policies like paying their employees well and giving them good benefits and they don't try to destroy the environment and other eco-friendly things. It's "Sam's for Liberals". They're from Oregon. Figures!

Anyhow, the problem with a place like this is that they sell things in really big quantities. "What a bargain!!", my wife says as she hauls in a 25 lb. bag of rice.



And so I get around to the subject of tonight's blog. This week, I finally emptied out the last of the 25 lb. bag of rice into the little rice jar that sits on the counter for regular use. All the rice is not yet gone, but I was able to throw away the bag and free up some room in the storage closet. I went back to see when I took the picture shown above which I took soon after the rice came home. I took the picture on February 1, 2006. So it takes this rice eating family a good year to do in 25 lbs. of rice. So if anyone ever asks you how much rice our family eats in a year, you'll know that it's probably less than 25 lbs. but not by much.

Well, that all for tonight.

Khudaa haafiz (good-bye in Urdu)

Friday, January 26, 2007

Marginally Cleaned Up Desk


Since I recently wrote about my computer desk and the wiry mess below it, I thought it might be worth mentioning that I have done a little work to make it a little less of a mess. My wife gave me a new power strip for Christmas. It's one that has some space between the plugs and has the plugs aligned outward. This way all those little black power converter boxes can fit on it without covering up all the other plugs. So I replaced the old two power strips with one new one. I added two little micro-shelves that you can't see to on which to hang some of the wires. I another shelf below the server shelf so I could put in the VCR that feeds the TV box. I stacked the TV box on top of the computer using some little spacer feet. I added a shelf behind the monitor to hold the speakers (Oh, I think they're new also) and the wireless router so the desk is a bit less cluttered behind the monitor. I also added a little headphone-speaker switch (the little black box next to the computer) so that I can listen to the speakers and my daughter can listen to headphones without having to go behind the computer every time we switch computer users. The best thing is that one (usually my wife) can get to the little dust bunnies that used to grow under the wires with the vacuum.


OK, so it's a pretty pathetic life if this is all one can think of to talk about but I poured out my passion last night on the lottery.

Kíhtwám ka-wápamitináwáw   (goodbye to more than one in Cree)

Thursday, January 25, 2007

The North Carolina Lottery

About a year ago, North Carolina finally got a state lottery. This is supposedly for education. I hate state run lotteries. If there's something that will get me up on a soapbox fast, it's the lottery. The lottery is one of the lamest, unethical things a state can do. It's a tax on people who can't do math, people who ain't got nothing but dreams. Stupid People. It was always obvious to me and to any moron who manged to look, that a disproportionate amount of the lottery tickets were purchased by people who should have been spending the money on something else, like food and clothing for their children. So basically, the state sets up a mechanism to extract money from the very people that it will have to turn around and support in some other way based on their lower expendable income due to money spent on the stupid lottery. It's not only unethical, it's also inefficient. For all the money we get from them, we only get to keep about 30%. Half goes to the few people that win, and a bunch more goes to the corrupt organizations that run these lotteries. If we really want to screw these people, which is what we're doing, then why don't we just shoot them. It's only marginally less ethical and certainly more monetarily efficient.

For a long time, I was proud of being a North Carolinian. We didn't have no stinkin' lottery. We weren't mean and nasty like those arrogant jerks up North who like to look down on us. Lotteries are tacky and North Carolina was classy. OK, NC has it's problems, but in this instance, we were a model of class. Then all of a sudden all the stupid states in the south started feeling like they were missing out on something that all the other states were enjoying, "Screwing the Stupid People for Fun and Profit." About the only argument for a lottery in North Carolina that I can abide, is that now we get to screw over our own stupid people rather than let Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina do it for us.

The reason that I bring all this up is that the PowerBall lottery got up to $240 million and I got stupid and bought a lottery ticket. Here it is:



Last night they had a drawing and here are the numbers. Some stupid person in Missouri won.



I didn't match a single number. Now I really hate the damn lottery even more.

Görüsædæk (that's good-bye in Azerbaijani)

Saturday, January 20, 2007

DOG POO !

No matter how long you live or how well adjusted you are, you never get quite used to stepping in dog poo. It just takes the shine off your day.

Today I was walking around in the woods behind the house, looking at the dead trees aimed at the house. When I walked back to the house I noticed something on the side of my shoe. It had the consistency of muddy clay but unfortunately, it wasn't the right color and it had a subtle but pungent aroma. Damn! Dog Poo! I walked back out into the woods and found what was left of the offending excretion lying in the trail. I used a stick to slick it off to the side. Then I used many of the dead rotting stumps to scape the offending stuff off my shoes. I got most of it off but my wife suggested that I leave the soiled shoes outside.

Maybe I'll go walking in the mall tomorrow to loose up the remains and return my shoes to a state of OK.

May you always have clean shoes.

Good night.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

A Bit of Snow Today!


I got up this morning to go for my morning walk and, "Holy Cow!", there was snow on the ground and it was coming down like gangbusters. That was all the excuse I needed not to go for my walk.

Actually, there wasn't that much snow, only about an inch. But we haven't seen much snow around here since Global Warming really took off a few years ago. And it wasn't really coming down all that fast, but it was exciting just the same. It's been pretty warm around here lately and so the snow melted almost immediately on hitting the pavement. So I went to work as usual. School was canceled. There was a planned delayed opening and so I guess they decided to just "call it a day."

Anyhow, by about 8:30 AM the snow turned to sleet and then rain and by the afternoon, the snow was little more than a memory and we were left with only a cold rainy day. Yuk!

Well, enough for now.

Auf Wiedersehen!

Tuesday, January 16, 2007





American Idol

I just finished watching this years first episode of American Idol. It was a two hour special. I really like the season's early shows the best. That's when they (Randy, Paula and Simon) go around to various cities in the US and audition some of the worse "talent" that one can imagine. Where do they find those people? Unfortunately, its the most untalented and pathetic people that make for the best entertainment.

This week they were in Minneapolis. There are a lot of people out there in the heartland that can sing good enough to get through a shower without breaking any glass. But not a lot better. They are often surrounded by people who can't sing at all and are completely tone deaf. So these shower singers get the feeling that maybe they can sing good enough to go in front of millions of people and sing. Unfortunately, the tone deaf people only encourage them if only to make them feel good and because they don't know any better. It's all done with the best of intentions and with the most disastrous of results. It's like some illiterate reading my blog and then convincing me that I can write. But I know better.

Anyhow, I enjoyed it. It's on again tomorrow night. They'll be in Seattle. But I won't be able to watch. I'll be at choir practice. Maybe I'll record it using my little device that I mentioned in my last blog.

Time for bed. Au Revoir.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

What's on TV?

Some time ago I bought this little box that shoots TV onto my computer screen. It's called TVMax and it looks a lot like my little computer. You can record TV shows and do all the little things that one does with a DVR like TIVO. It can do a lot of other things, too. Actually, I bought it so that I could turn all of our old VCR tapes into electronic versions so that those precious moments wouldn't be loss when the tapes go to crap and I can no longer find a VCR to play them on.

Anyhow, I was sitting down to play on the computer tonight and was watching the tube over in the corner and I discovered that there was nothing on. Oh there were lots of things but few were really worth watching. Here's a sampler:

There was a Tom Hanks movie on channel 6.


Channel 16 was trying to sell something:


There was a football game on Channel 13:


CNN on Channel 29 was all over those lost boys in Missouri:


And there was a commercial for cheese on HGTV, Channel 76:



I liked this one the best. The black and white cows look real nice against the green grass and blue sky.

So that's what I was doing on a Saturday night, although it was Monday night before I got around to finishing this post.

Adios, Amigos!!

Monday, January 01, 2007


Christmas Letter

My wife recently wrote our Christmas letter. You know, that thing you insert into your Christmas card telling how much more exciting your life is than that of your friends. Well, I thought I'd post it, only it doesn't sound so exciting. I've decided that, as I get a little older, "exciting" ain't all it's cracked up to be. With minor edits to give anonymity to my family, here it is:

Greetings from North Carolina!

I've been procrastinating about writing this annual letter because we've had a very uneventful year - which is a blessing. This morning I asked Phil what were some of the big highlights of the year and the only thing he could come up with was: We got a new bird feeder!

Phil did change jobs this year from company A to company B (not much of a change, eh?). They are both small companies, but he's happier at his current place where his favorite former boss is now his boss again. He's still singing in the church choir and is about to start a term as elder.

I continue to volunteer at church and school. This year I kept my sewing machine humming making costumes for the school play (Hounds of Baskerville - I made a great Sherlock Holmes coat and hat!) and the youth choir musical (Seuessical - bird girls, fish, monkeys - you name it!) and am about to start all over again on the Wizard of Oz. I'm beginning to get bored and may have to find a new venture this year.

Son (or "alternative son" as he now calls himself) is now a happy sophomore at Earlham and pleasantly surprising his parents by doing better than they expected. He recently decided to do a double major - adding math to his economics degree. Unfortunately for us, that means he had to drop his plans to do a semester abroad in Vienna where we were already making plans to visit him. He sings in the Earlham chorale and has a steady girlfriend (from Seattle). He spent the entire Thanksgiving break in bed, and a week later ended up in the ER where he was diagnosed with mono. He managed to make it through exams and is now recovering at home (by sleeping days and staying up all night).

Daughter started high school this year and is loving it. She's in band (French horn) and especially likes her Japanese class. She continues to take tap dance, sing whenever she can, and always has a pencil in her hand for drawing. She cut off all her hair this year, so no more tangles!

We did not take any big trips this year. Daughter was sick most of spring break - our usual travel time, but we did manage to get in a short trip to the mountains. We had our annual July trip to the beach where we enjoyed the company of Phil's best friend from high school and his wife. We spent Thanksgiving at the beach for the 14th year in a row - always a great time for Scrabble, long walks and watching the dolphins play right off shore. We also had a beach weekend in October when we celebrated Uncle Frank's 80th birthday!

That's about all the news from our corner. We hope you and your family have a Christmas blessed with joy and peace.

And that's it.

Of course, I'll have to toss in a few pictures just to make it all worthwhile.