i spent my day putting together shelves for our over flowing dvd collection. Now sue and I are going to go to some friends house and play Boulderdash and drink beer and play with their dog.
so happy new year. And stay safe.
See you in 2005.
Well its been sleeting, snowing, or raining for the last 30 hours or so. The ice on the trees is pretty bad, though luckily we don’t have any big trees, so they are just kind of bent over, instead of breaking. Oh well here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure.
Well we finally sent out our Christmas cards with a silly year in review letter. So here it is “webified”, enjoy…
Welcome to our second Christmas Mass Letter. In this letter we will bore you with the details of what we did in 2004. You get to laugh, cry, roll your eyes, and in general find out what we were up to this year.
So here we go, we will start at the beginning…In January we visited our friends J. Hall and our old roommate Ellen in the Windy City. Sue, her sister Cathy, our friend Brandon and I visited for a long weekend that saw very icy sidewalks and cloud cover so thick that we could only see about a third of the Sears Tower.Link
February saw Sue and me visiting NYC for her birthday. Cathy was in town on business and flew us out as a present. She was also kind enough to invite us to share her hotel on Times Square. Sue has very fond memories of New York from the summer she spent there as an intern and will forever blame me for us not moving there. The city definitely does not stink as much in the winter, but is still as expensive.Link
On March 10th we cried in disbelief when we received a call that our friend in South Carolina, Garrett Wonders, had been struck by a truck while riding his bicycle and was killed. Sue was a roommate with his wife, Terri, in college, and we lived with both of them for a few months before he joined the Navy Nuclear Power Training Command in SC. He was a brilliant, witty and driven man, among a million other adjectives. He will be missed by the many who knew him for his short 25 years on planet earth.Link Link1
At the end of March, Parsons decided they needed me to work in Indianapolis for a while. They told me I would only be there for a few weeks, but I ended up going there more often than not until July, when I quit. Sue was home all alone this time, but her sister, Christine, is still at OSU, so she was not too lonely.
April saw us on another road trip, this time to Virginia Beach and Washington D.C. We visited Sue’s friend Michelle and her husband Troy. We had fun spending time with them and seeing their new house and doggie, and we all took a nice stroll along the beach. In DC we marched with 1.1 million other pro-choice people in the March for Women’s Lives. Although Bush was on vacation (big surprise) we marched by the White House among a group of Unitarian Universalists and some Jewish kids with a drum section. Link
In May, our visit to see Terri in SC started in the capital city of Columbia. The Bicyclist Caucus was formed to promote safety for all South Carolina cyclists, and we had arrived in time to see it officially start. Garrett’s death had awakened the state to the dangers that cyclists face on the roads, and the Governor and state legislators were out to promote the cause. On June 1st the South Carolina General Assembly adopted a resolution that the new Cooper River Bridge bike and pedestrian lane was to be named “WONDERS WAY” in Garrett’s honor. After the caucus at the State House we got to visit with Terri for the rest of the week. I was finally able to fly my stunt kites, and we made the most of our time by going to the beach and a water park.
June was highlighted by Sue’s mom’s retirement. After 36 years of service with the Toledo Public Schools she said enough is enough and decided to hang up her apple and A+ sweaters. June also saw the near end of the Columbus office of Parsons. Basically, the higher ups decided that the Columbus office was no longer necessary, so most of us jumped ship before it completely sank. I had a job offer the week before the word came, which made my move to American Consulting in July very easy.
Since I started my new jobby-job in July, I was not able to go to upstate New York with Sue and her family on their yearly visit to the Ukrainian resort of Soyuzivka. From all the stories they had a blast, except for the Evil Hike in which a few people who will remain unnamed Sue were hungover, and a few other people were kind of pissy that the fast people would not just go on with out them. Oh and they took 1,177 pictures with our digital camera, which amounts to around a gigabyte of information.
Football season became go to weddings season as we went to three weddings on days that Ohio State was also playing. One of these was our old roommate, Ellen, and her man Vince. After a brief stay in Ellen’s studio apartment in Chicago, they decided to move to North Carolina at Thanksgiving. When we weren’t going to weddings, we moved Sue’s parents from their home of over 30 years. I always knew they had a lot of furniture, I just did not know much that furniture weighed.Link Link1 Link2
We did find some free time to go back to Chicago in October to see the pathetic Buckeyes loose to the Wildcats of Northwestern. Sue really wanted to just hang out before the game, but instead we probably walked 10 miles before the game, which started at 9:00 at night. Needless to say we were all very tired before the game, and then on top of freezing during the game, the Chicago trains were not prepared for the Buckeye masses. We managed to squeeze on to a train eventually and were home 4 hours after the game had ended. I still had a blast, even with everyone being tired and cold! 
- Sue Link
One Saturday morning, Sue received an early call from McGraw-Hill. After weeks of waiting for an answer after her initial interview, they were offering her an editorial position. Her time toiling away at gap.com has ended. She is now utilizing her English degree, updating workbooks for junior high reading programs. She will soon be working on a major revision of the Open Court Reading program.
Back in September, I started my blog (web log) http://bruin1.blogspot.com. I have been putting silly stuff and other pictures there for the world (or Karl and Zenon) to read. You can go there for a web version of this letter with links to pictures and other things at http://bruin1.blogspot.com/2004/12/2004-in-review.html.
“So, have a Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Kwazy Kwanzaa, a tip-top Tet, and a solemn, dignified Ramadan.”1
See you all in the new year-
While we were away in Florida, Darcy, our dog, got to visit my aunt and uncle’s house and play with their Border Collie, Smoky. So on Sunday we drove to pick her up. She was a little smelly from romping around with Smoky, but seemed happy to see us.
My uncle and cousins love trains. They have all sorts of model trains around the house and uncle Brad belongs to NWORRP, Northwest Ohio Railroad Preservation. The club has CHRISTMAS North Pole Express, a train ride through lighted Christmas displays during the holidays, so Sue and I tagged along with the Taylor family and froze our butts off on the Express.
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The reason for coming to Florida, was that I was sent to a Geopak conference for work, and Sue luckily got to tag along. While most of my days were spent in dim ball rooms looking at power point presentations, Sue got to go out and catch some sun rays.
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I am trying something new in that the Flikr Links open up a new window. Let me know, my loyal readers (Zenon and whom ever else) if you like this or would rather have it stay the same and just open in the same window. Sue does not like the fact that once you navigate the filckr site for awhile its hard to get back to the main site. Any ways too long for me battering on about link theory.
