Christmas, 1999

Friends and Relatives,

Since I’m quite certain you won’t receive this until after Christmas (what with the postal service being so busy this time of year), we hope you had a pleasant and meaningful holiday. The fact that we aren’t sending it until Epiphany has nothing to do with it.

Our year in brief:

Travel: We celebrated our 25^th anniversary with our first-ever cruise, aboard the Royal Caribbean Vision of the Seas on a trip through Alaska’s Inside Passage. We flew to Vancouver on Sunday July 4, the ship departed that afternoon, and returned the following Sunday morning. In the meantime we saw some of the glaciers of Glacier Bay; rode the train over the White Pass from Skagway, one of the routes the gold-seekers of the 1890’s took to the Yukon; flew in a float plane from Juneau over some other glaciers to the Taku Lodge where we ate barbecued salmon; met some nice folks; saw some shows; ate too much; and just generally had a great, relaxing time. I didn’t know what to expect from a cruise, but it was a lot of fun, and I could see doing it again sometime.

We also took a couple of 2 or 3 day driving trips in my new toy: a ’99 Miata. We had fun driving down the coast to San Luis Obispo via Highway 1, then a couple of months later up the coast as far as Point Reyes.

Emily’s travels took her to England and Scotland in April with the Lynbrook High School band. She also went on tour with our church’s high school singing group Common Ground, and to Seattle in July for the Western States Youth Conference.

Chris went to Calgary with the Mountain View Laser Quest team in June for the Western Regional competition, where they did well enough to compete in the finals in Fort Worth, Texas in September. He also went on the Common Ground trip to help with the "tech" (the sound and lighting systems- our youth director doesn’t do anything half-way).

And the four of us just got back from a few days at Disneyland.

Music: Barb is still the principal flute player in the San Jose Wind Symphony and is still on the board. Emily also plays the flute and is working on catching up to her mother. While she still has a ways to go, the music director at church recently apologized to Barb when she couldn’t tell who was playing which part. I still think of myself as a banjo player, but at the moment am not playing it very much. Too many other interesting (and some non-interesting) things to do.

Work: I’m still at Intuit, a member of the team working on Quicken for Windows, most recently Quicken 2000. Barb works part time as the Resource Specialist at the elementary school our church runs, and teaches flute 2 or 3 afternoons a week. Chris works as a manager at Blockbuster Video, giving him the opportunity to see a lot of movies, and also giving him a chance to learn about dealing with the public and with other employees. Emily has an occasional baby-sitting job.

Students: Chris is a first year student at Foothill College, one of the local community colleges, with a major of "Communication Arts and New Media", something he’s been interested in for a while, by subject if not by title. Emily is a sophomore at Lynbrook High School, enjoys the marching band, which did pretty well this year with a difficult show and lot of freshman. She’s also doing well with her other subjects. Barb always has something or other she’s researching, and usually several things. I’m a student of life.

Technology: We’re nothing if not advanced around here. Barb joined the wired world with a new computer and access to the Internet. We sometimes have to send a search party for her when she tries to read the entire World Wide Web. Since Chris is now in college, we got him his own computer, with a good video capture card so he can work on his various video projects. I’m having fun doing video editing also (although nowhere near as good at it as Chris is) so we upgraded my capture card too. All the computers are networked together and we have a DSL connection to the Internet. I never thought I’d end up being a system administrator in my own house, but that’s what’s happened.

Health: All of us are in good health, for which we are thankful. Chris still has a problem with arthritis, but he is taking Mannatech food supplements, which help the immune system do its job correctly, and the arthritis is kept under control when he remembers to take them. We actually all take them, since what they do is provide the raw materials the immune system needs, which are not all in our food supply these days. I’ve noticed that we seem to get sick less often, and I am much less affected by allergies than I was. Barb’s "Mannapage" address is http://www.mannapages.com/barbell if you’re interested in finding out more about this.

Conclusion: We’ve had a wonderful year and consider ourselves blessed to have had so many opportunities.