Christmas 2009

Well, let's get the big news out of the way first, we have joined the grandparents' club!
Rob and Amanda have a happy healthy son born in late May. Nathan Robert is (of
course) an extremely gifted child as well as remarkably handsome. We are so pleased that
he is a healthy and generally good-natured child…..a joy to have around, a joy which Sue
experiences every Friday when he visits for the day.

The cats, contrary to Grandma's joy on Nathan Fridays, find the child to be VERY
SCARY. There are two theories: 1) They are convinced he will immediately learn to run
and be chasing them at any second, or 2) They have extrasensorarily perceived that the
child has the ability to morph himself into a full sized rotweiller and will do so at any
second. The cats go to ground when the baby arrives in the same manner they do when
Rob brings his actual dog over.

Last year we announced our plans to rip out the old kitchen and rebuild it from the inside
out. New oak floors and baseboards, new red birch cabinets, fresh new paint, and
beautiful granite counters. We put up with the old one for a long time before we could see
clear to do this project. We are most pleased with the end results.

Jim & Sue took a week and travelled to Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia this fall and we
had a ball. Williamsburg has a very large living history museum….took us three full days
to come anywhere close to having it covered. We took another day to see Jamestown,
where English settlement of North America began and yet another to see Yorktown,
where the Revolution ended. We sandwiched in a half-day canoe trip on the York River
estuary, which was beautiful, and got to experience effects of tides while paddling. There
was still more we did; suffice it to say we had a full week.

At the first of the year Laura, who still camps out at our place, was hired into the full-
time position of Assistant Production Manager with the Noble Fool Theatricals (for
which she had worked several show-to-show gigs the prior year.) She seems to have
settled in well. Often she works more or less regular-people hours, but then there are
times we won't see her for days on end….just depends on the particulars of the shows
that pass through her theaters. If you want more details, you'll have to ask her and she
can tell you herself.

Rob and Amanda are of course busy with being new parents. Both are working, so
Nathan goes to day care 4 days a week and to Grandma's on Fridays as mentioned
before. I haven't seen much of any new woodworking projects from Rob as he's lately
been tied up with a major project that a friend commissioned and which Rob had kept
putting off while preparing a furnished nursery.

Sue loves the Grandma business. It's a lot of fun to watch her with Nathan. I'm sure glad
garage sale season is over for this year as she has to stop and minutely examine anything
that looks like a good find for a baby boy. She still works her same library job full time,
but has a schedule that allows for Nathan Fridays.

While Rob continues to hang in at Sara Lee, Sara Lee and I had a parting of ways in
February. They have struggled greatly over the last couple of years, in fact I just read
today that they're closing yet another major plant at the end of the year. I was given a
very fair severance package and then was lucky enough to land new work even before the
severance benefits had run out…just 9 weeks from finish to start. I now work for Bay
Valley Foods (not a household name company, I know), a company that is profitable and
growing instead of losing money and shrinking. I like the job (mostly) and the people
(mostly). I have enough work to do without feeling like there's no end in sight, I'm good
at what I do and I'm appreciated for it. Bay Valley makes a lot of store-brand foods:
every thing from coffee creamers to canned soups to pickles to salad dressings. When
Keebler was acquired by Kellogg's a few years back, the former Keebler exec's got
together and made a new company. A nice place to work. I can run into the President of
the company in the hall, and he'll greet me by name. Pretty neat for a publicly traded
company with $1.5 billion in sales.

This Christmas we pray for peace. We pray for those who remain unemployed or
underemployed. We pray for those suffering illness. We pray for all our family and
friends.

God bless