Excerpts from my holiday letter from 10 years ago:
...After two years as managing editor of Northwest Health magazine, I have begun a job-share arrangement with another senior editor so that I can spend two days a week writing book reviews for JanuaryMagazine.com and working on a mystery reader's travel guide to the Pacific Northwest. If all goes well, you’ll be able to buy the book on Amazon.com in 2001.(Within three months, this arrangement led not to a book but to a new job with Apple, writing website reviews for iReview.)
1999 was a good year for visitors from out of state: My cousin Carol and her son Michael were here this summer (Michael was doing an internship at Microsoft on his way to U.C. Berkeley for grad school).(Michael, after a stint in high tech, now has an MBA and is involved in politics and socially responsible businesses.)
...our friend Bob, a computer programmer and country dance caller from England, stayed with us for the Northwest Folklife Festival in May on his way to a new job in Australia. Two weeks later he was back from Australia, having left the new job to return to Seattle and pursue a romance with Laura, a wonderful woman he had met at Folklife!(Bob and Laura are now married; I later moved to Ballard, and they are neighbors.)
My parents spent much of this year’s visit to Seattle looking at condominiums. They plan to shift their summer residence from Cape Cod to Edmonds, Washington—a beautiful town on Puget Sound, about 20 minutes north of Seattle. Winters will still find them in Naples, Florida.(My father has since died, and now my mother has the Edmonds condo they purchased up for sale; she's planning on moving to a retirement community in Naples.)
The big-hearted lynxpoint Siamese, Solomon, died very suddenly of cancer in September. Solomon had made many friends up and down the block, and now it is not uncommon to find a neighbor standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, gazing at his resting place in the garden. They’ll explain “I’m talking to Solomon.” The four remaining cats (Bosco, Betaille, Sam, and Socks) are not among Sol’s mourners—nor are they out recruiting a replacement.(Sadly, none of those remaining cats are left. Sam was hit by a car (which precipitated the move to a very quiet street in Ballard); Bosco died of cancer; Socks died after the move to Ballard in a rare complication after dental surgery; and Betaille went out, of old age and cancer, three years ago. Sheba, who joined the household nine years ago, is the only cat left from the Wallingford era.)