December 2, 1995

I’m sitting here at our PC listening to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite on the CD drive and typing all this into Word for Windows.  In the last week Nora and I did the graphics for a company logo, visited a photography exhibit in Sweden on the Internet, sent e-mail to a friend in Arizona, balanced the home budget electronically, pulled together our Christmas card address list from a database and used our color printer to automatically address our envelopes.  It’s amazing how much technology has changed our world in the last five years.  Santa’s job is getting easier, his big red sack is half-filled with CDs ... games for the kids and software for the adults.  I’ll bet the rosy cheeked, white bearded, jolly old dude has a top of the line Pentium-Pro system ... Intel and Microsoft probably sponsor his yearly activities.

Another year of ski instructing at Steven’s Pass has come and gone.  I had two 8-week classes this year with some great kids, motivated and trusting.  "We’re going to take this run next, it’s a bit steep and has quite a few moguls on it, but nothing you can’t handle (heh, heh)."   That’ll teach them to trust me!  After instructor responsibilities were over, Nora and I met a group of friends at Whistler, B.C. in April and had an incredible weekend of Spring skiing.

In late July, I attended a 5-day PSIA Ski Race Camp at Mount Hood, Oregon with about 10 other instructors and friends.  Race camp teaches you to ski gates (slalom courses) efficiently, which requires that you have all your basic skills of balance, pressure and edge control finely-tuned.  Violating Rule 1 of gate skiing ("Make sure you have both skis on the SAME side of the gate.") is a bit painful, if you know what I mean.  Gate skiing really brings out the flaws in your regular skiing and helps you improve quickly.  Nora came down on the weekend and we all stayed in a big house about 30 minutes away from the mountain, spending our civilian time golfing, eating and partying together.

We did a bit more hiking this year, with day hikes to some beautiful waterfalls and Cascade mountain lakes.  We spent a relaxing weekend in the Leavenworth area with some friends in a beautiful log home built along the banks of Icicle Creek among the pines at the base of a majestic ridge of mountains.  The men confirmed their manhood with a morning swim in Icicle Creek, verifying personally what inspired it’s name.  Brrrrrr!

The Big Island (Hawaii) and Maui were the destinations of this year’s vacation.  Our friends, Heather and Scott, joined us for 11 days of hiking, sightseeing, snorkling and partying.  Watching the lava flowing into the ocean at night, hiking the Haleakala crater (right) at 10000 ft. elevation and swimming among sea turtles in the wild were some of the more memorable activities.

Cultural activities this year began in April by attending the musical "Miss Saigon" with Thuy and Marty and ended in November witnessing the Seattle Symphony performing the "Cyberian Rhapsody".  "Cyberian Rhapsody" was the world’s first live on-line Internet concert.  The Seattle Symphony played compositions by a number of different contemporary grunge and alternative rock groups (Screaming Trees, Alice in Chains, Queensriche, etc.) with member of those bands playing cameo appearances.  Never thought we’d see Slash (Guns and Roses lead guitarist) on stage with a symphony orchestra ... a unique experience to say the least.   We also saw "Hootie and the Blowfish" on one of Seattle’s waterfront piers on a warm summer evening.

Nora and I broke down and reroofed the house this summer.  Almost the entire month of July was spent stripping off four layers of roof (including the original 1926 wood shingles), putting down new plywood over the entire roof surface, tar-papering and adding edge metal and vents.  Nora did the vast majority of the clean-up, filling a 20x8x6’ dumpster in our driveway with 6 tons of old roofing material and cleaning up the unbelievable mess in the attic.  July’s weather alternated between hot and sunny, and windy and raining, making the project a bit more tricky.  I was clamped to the roof (it’s quite steep) with a bungy and roofer’s belt through all of this, doing my best to avoid the dreaded "slide and drop".  We had a "real" roofer lay down the new shingles and ended up saving about $3000 for all of our efforts.

My parental units visited in August staying for a little over a week.   Their agenda included the usual array of home improvement projects to keep them busy, some golfing and a few tourist attractions.  We especially enjoyed spending their 46th wedding anniversary with them and hearing some of the more colorful stories about when they were first married.

Fall means just one thing around here, University of Washington Husky football games!  Another mediocre season for the Dawgs, but we still have fun attending the home games with our friends.  The entire city followed the Seattle Mariners to the AL championship this year, and we were no exception, glued to the television set throughout all of the exciting playoff games.  Never thought I’d say the Mariners were great, but this year they played on pure emotion and it was fun to witness all of the bottom-of-the-ninth game-winning home runs.

We did the "bowling-for-fruit" thing with Suzy and John again this year, sweeping up 5th place in a "Market Basket" league.  You see, whenever you get a colored headpin and a strike, you win a banana, apple, potato, ear-of-corn, etc.  Sounds kind of bizarre, but it’s fun to see how much produce you can leave the alley with each week.  Nora’s been working out with her friend Thuy and doing aerobics when they find the time.  I’m still playing volleyball once or twice a month.

Life at Rockwell-Collins as the IS manager has been quite hectic keeping up with the changes in the company and technology over the past year.   Universal Avionics (the company Nora works for) has expanded from about 80 to 115 over the last five years and they continue to grow.  This equates to quite a bit of added responsibility for Nora as the manager of their Information Systems department and well as having a few more people working for her.  These days, we both lead fairly fast-paced lives.

I finished a nine-month certificate program in Microcomputer Management at the University of Washington in June.  While in class, I met quite a few professionals specializing in different areas of the computer field.  A few of us decided to get together and look into starting up our own business.  After about five months of meetings, a lot of work and losing one of the members, "Digital Vision" was born. My partner, Doug, and I decided to begin providing consulting services after-hours for small businesses and individuals, until we’ve built up enough capital to set-up a retail computer-related venture.  We have several friends interested in providing independent consulting through us, specializing in various different disciplines.  We’re officially an S-Corporation in the eyes of the state and federal government and have a corporate bank account, budget and our accounting software in place.  Our initial advertising is set to kick in the first of the year.   We have a business line and are in the process of linking our computers in a "virtual office" set-up.We designed a pretty cool logo and enlisted the help of a graphics firm to put together our business cards, letterhead and envelope design, adding their creative touch to the finished product.   We still need to pull together our service rate structure, get our voice-mail/fax/modem set-up on the business line and design and implement a Web Page for our Internet on-line presence "digital-vision.com".  This has all been a lot of work and an incredible learning experience without a lot of capital investment.  It’ll be interesting to see how the next few years shape it’s success.

I’ve decided to take a year off from ski instructing this year, in leiu of all our other activities.  This allows Nora and I to ski at a number of different ski areas this year (Whistler, Tahoe, Big Sky and Switzer have been discussed) and frees me up from about a 3-month commitment to my ski school.  We’re heading to Florida at Christmas for a mini-family reunion, meeting my brother and his family from Dayton, Ohio down there.  My oldest brother, his family and my parents (half-time) live there.  It’ll be fun to all be together again.  Looking forward to lots of golf, snorkling, sun and relaxation ... we both need it desperately.

We wish you all the best in the upcoming year and a Merry Christmas, 1995!  Keep in touch ... we look forward to hearing about your lives as well.   As always, if you’re in the Seattle area next year, you have a place to stay and part-time tour guides at your disposal... it’s beautiful here in the summer and there’s a wide variety of things to see and do.