Christmas Letter

Happy Holidays :

If 2007 was the year of cancer, 2008 was the year of fun. Or as much fun as we could have and still deal with all the residuals from the cancer. I slept a lot this year, but not as much as last year! We played a lot of darts during the first of the year. I brought my first trophy home from Vegas this year, 2nd place in Cricket Doubles. We would have taken first but we played our next to last game at 12:30 pm and didn’t play again until 3AM. So sleep became more important than darts.

During the summer, we quit darts and going out a lot. We bought a new car and talked about going fishing. (We didn’t.) Next year we are heading to Idaho for our summer vacation. I’d like to take a short road trip around the area, like Kentucky. I’ve never seen Kentucky or Alabama.

On our last full day in Vegas we took the plunge and got married. It was a beautiful ceremony in a chapel that had been built around a series of stained glass they had salvaged from a church being torn down in Missouri. So we had some of our Idaho friends as witnesses and a touch of our new home in the chapel to help start our new life. We talked about stopping at the Grand Canyon on our way home and counting the drive as our honeymoon but we ran out of daylight and vacation time.

One of our Idaho friends stopped by on Halloween during one of his trucking runs so we went out to play darts and then to hear a band at a local bar. Going out on Halloween is always interesting but the next morning I sure felt my age.

Work was good for both of us this year. Jim switched companies when they merged and is now a happy member of the SM & P locator team. He really likes his new supervisor and co-workers. And he wasn’t sent out of town all summer like he was last year. I was promoted to senior license coordinator and came really close to being hired by the corporate training department. Although it was a disappointment at the time, later this year when they laid off seven people in that department, I realized it was a blessing. I am editor in chief for Fleet Op’s newsletter and working on that has enriched my workday.

I have had several successes in my writing career (hobby?). I was published in True Experience in October with an essay about losing my hair during chemo. (It’s funny, really!) I also finally got my copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Divorce and Recovery where I wrote The Tool Box under a pen name.