Christmas 2000

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all for this, the last holiday season of the Millennium! (Yes, the true millennium ends in 2000, not in 1999, as everyone would have you think.) We hope you all survived the Y2K bug unscathed, as we did.

All continues to be well in the Canterbury household. Nancy served as an assistant project manager at Key Bank this year for a project to upgrade some software to meet SEC standards. I’m still at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and still working on a project in Bloomington, Illinois, where I’ve been since March 1999. And yes, I still leave home each Monday morning and return Thursday evening. It actually sounds worse than it is, and Nancy and I make sure to make the most of our time together on weekends.

Our travel year has been quite busy once again. We paid a visit to Fort Lauderdale for Nancy’s birthday in January. For Labor Day we visited Key West with Jerry’s parents and brother. A third trip to Florida occurred in early December, when we went to see a space shuttle launch. Other weekend trips include Cincinnati and Washington, DC to visit with some work friends, and a weekend at a resort in St. Charles, Illinois.

Our big trip this year was to Alaska in late July. We flew through Seattle, and spent a few hours there. We flew into Anchorage, then drove down to Seward, where we took a day cruise of the Kenai Fjords and viewed glaciers calving into the bay. We drove back up through Anchorage Talkeetna and to Denali National Park, where we spent a few days. During our tour of Denali, we saw a grizzly bear and cubs right beside the road. We also saw moose, a fox, caribou, a marmot, bald eagles, and numerous other wild animals. Because Mt. McKinley is often shrouded in clouds and not visible from the ground, we took a flight-seeing tour, which was the highlight of the trip for Nancy.

After Denali, we drove on to Fairbanks, then down to Kennicott in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Kennicott is a ghost town that was a copper mining community back in the 1920s and ‘30s. It’s a 2-3 hour drive off the main road over a very rough road that used to be a railroad bed. In fact, you can still see railroad ties and spikes on the road. While in Kennicott, we stayed in a lodge that overlooked a glacier. We toured some of the old mine buildings, walked on a glacier, and saw a black bear. Afterwards, it was back to Anchorage for the flight home.

We’re already making our vacation plans for 2001. We hope to visit Las Vegas in February, and see the Great Wall and Yangtze River in China in the spring.

Our two feline friends, Brutus and Snickers, continue to be healthy. Despite our best efforts, Brutus remains fat, weighing in at 19 pounds. Snickers decided she needed to bite Nancy – hard – on the hand this past September. Nancy’s arm became infected and a red line began creeping up her arm. She had to spend three days in the hospital to receive antibiotics to fight the infection. Nancy recovered completely, and Snickers is back in our good graces.

If you have the opportunity, we hope you’ll come visit us in 2001! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Nancy and Jerry Canterbury