Christmas
2002
Welcome
again to another Christmas missive from the Canterburys!
Those
of you who have been following along from year to year will undoubtedly note
that this is our 5th Christmas in Twinsburg. We have a running joke at our house, that since
we have moved every five years so far, we’re about due to move again. And, about once a year, something comes up
that makes us think about whether we should start packing the boxes and calling
the moving company. But as things stand
right now we’re settled in for a while, and may actually break the record for
length of stay in one location (5½ years in Virginia). We enjoy the peace and quiet of our
neighborhood, where the loudest noises we hear are the frustrated golfers on
the course behind our home, and we enjoy the amenities of the nearby Cuyahoga
Valley National Park. If we could
actually leave for the 2-3 months of winter every year, life would be darn near
perfect!
On
the career front, things are progressing well.
Nancy is about to complete her 5th year at Key Bank, where
she continues to serve as a Project Coordinator. She also advanced to serving as a Project
Manager in some cases, a big positive step for her. She is very organized and committed, and
everyone agrees she’ll be successful in this new role.
For
me, things have changed a bit but largely remained the same. Most of you have probably heard about the
Enron/Arthur Anderson accounting debacle by now, and the appearance of a
conflict of interest caused by auditing firms doing consulting work. Well, since 1998 I’ve worked for an auditing
firm (PricewaterhouseCoopers) doing consulting work. PwC had been looking to sell or spin off the
consulting business for a period of time when the Enron scandal hit, and that
just accelerated the process. IBM agreed
to purchase the consulting unit, so in October I became an employee of
IBM. Those of you have kept the
Christmas letters from the mid-1990s can refer back and see that I actually
worked for IBM (as a contractor, not an employee) back then, so I’m pretty
excited about the potential this change brings.
However it’s still early in the process, and the only thing that has
changed so far is the name at the top of my paycheck.
In
other news, Nancy decided that this year was the year she was going to make a
serious commitment to her bicycle. She
has legs of steel and can ride forever – assuming the bike seat is soft
enough. After working up to it all
summer, she rode in her first long distance ride, the Hancock Metric Hundred in
northwest Ohio. It’s called the Metric
Hundred because it is over 100 kilometers (65 miles). She did great and really enjoyed
herself. She is already talking about
the long rides she is going to do next summer, and the new bicycle she’s
getting for Christmas.
We’ve
had a very busy vacation schedule this year.
- We spent Christmas in Florida last
year and will do so again this year, staying at our timeshare in New
Smyrna Beach.
- We’re also heading to Arizona for
the Fiesta Bowl where Ohio State will face their opponent in the national
championship game (Go Bucks!).
- In March we spent a week in Puerto
Rico to celebrate our 15th anniversary. We found some interesting historical
spots in Old San Juan and stayed at a very interesting inn called Casa
Cubuy, located in a rainforest.
- For Memorial Day I gave Nancy a
“surprise weekend”, where she didn’t know where she is going until she got
to the airport. In this case we
flew to Marquette on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where we stayed in
an old lighthouse on Lake Superior that had been converted into a
bed-and-breakfast. The weather was
interesting there, as it was 76º the day we arrived, with snow flurries
and a high of 47º the next day.
- For the Fourth of July we flew to
Philadelphia, where we visited Nancy’s brother Warren and his family, and
my sister Barb and her family. We
also spent some time seeing the historic sites downtown, although due to
security concerns the lines for Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell
were impossibly long.
- By far the biggest trip of the year
was our two weeks in China. We
spent four days on a river cruise on the Yangtze and through the Three
Gorges, which will be flooded next year when China completes the world’s
largest dam there. We also visited
Beijing and the nearby Great Wall, Shanghai, and Xian, where we saw the
famous terracotta warriors. The
warriors, thousands of them, were molded from clay by decree of the
Chinese emperor, and buried with him to protect him in the afterlife about
3000 years ago. We have pictures
for this trip on the Internet at
http://community.webshots.com/user/jerrycanterbury.
Our
two cats Brutus and Snickers continue to be fat and sassy. We’ve also somewhat adopted an outdoor cat
that we’ve named Tux. Tux knows where to
find a free meal, so he stops by often.
Brutus and Snickers are curious about Tux, but not so curious that they
want him living inside the house, so we’ll stick with this arrangement.
And
finally, a postscript to last year: If
you refer to last year’s letter – go ahead, I’ll wait while you get it – you’ll
recall that I completed my first (and so far only) marathon in October of
2001. I remember the day well, with the
turning leaves showing a spectrum of colors on an otherwise gray day. At the time, I’d been experiencing pain in my
lower leg (“shin splints” for you runners) for a couple months leading up to
the marathon. However, since I had done
all that training and preparation, I wasn’t going to slow down or miss the
marathon. After the race, I stopped
running in order to recover, but the pain wouldn’t go away. After a couple visits to doctors and some
x-rays and other tests, the diagnosis was in.
I had a stress fracture in my lower leg.
Now the stress fracture wasn’t that big a deal, I didn’t need a cast or
any such thing. I just needed to rest my
leg long enough to let the fracture heal, which meant no running for a period
of time (it was May before I could run again).
However, the best part of the ordeal is that I can honestly tell people
that I ran a marathon with a broken leg.
Merry
Christmas!
Nancy
and Jerry Canterbury