2002 Holiday Letter

2002 has been a busy and exciting year for both of us!

In February, Chris traveled to Boston to attend the IBM/Lotus Technical Forum, and Paul happily accompanied him. Together, we enjoyed the great city of Boston in between seminars and meetings, and even got to spend some time with friends while we were there.

However, it's Paul who has done the majority of the business traveling this year. Montpellier, France, was the destination in May, to teach a class on how to cluster together IBM's new servers. In July, he flew to Munich, Germany, to teach the same class with a hands-on lab! It was an incredible opportunity for him, and his only disappointment was that Chris couldn't make the trips with him. More recently, in early November, he spent a week in Chiba, Japan (about an hour outside of Tokyo) as one of the presenters at a four-day conference on server clustering.

In July, we played host to some friends at our home in Wappingers Falls, and visited the sixth annual Bounty of the Hudson at a local winery here in the mid-Hudson Valley. The Bounty is a wine festival at which several local vineyards gather in one place to showcase their harvests. Since the valley produces a number of nice quality wines, we were happy to support the local economy and visit with friends at the same time.

August brought both of our birthdays. Chris turned 24 this year, and Paul celebrated his 25th birthday. Of course, Paul was very excited to be a quarter of a century old, but he was even more excited because his car insurance rates went down dramatically! To celebrate, we went to a minor league baseball game right here in Fishkill — the Hudson Valley Renegades lost the game, but the fireworks afterward were the real entertainment anyway!

In August, we also visited Chris's sister Erin in State College, Pennsylvania, where she's pursuing her master's degree in English. We toured Penn State's main campus and got a small glimpse at what life is like at a big college.

Shortly after, we began our wedding double header. For Labor Day weekend, we flew to Atlanta, Georgia, to attend the Massey-Colón wedding. Amanda, the bride, is a high school friend of Paul's, and Paul was honored to participate by reading a passage during the wedding mass. The following weekend, we attended the Harkins-Price wedding in Rockaway Point (Queens), New York. Kelly, the bride, is a friend of Chris's from Lehigh. At Kelly's wedding, Chris was also honored to participate by reading during the ceremony. We both had a great time with Kelly and her husband Mike, and we're looking forward to another Lehigh wedding (this time the bride is Chris's friend Lauren Weiss) in May 2003.

In late September, we finally took a much-needed vacation. The destination this year was Disney World! We spent an entire week with Mickey and friends, and made it to all the parks at least once. We both enjoyed the short lines and relatively good weather of Orlando's "off season," and have agreed to avoid the peak attendance times in the future! Highlights of the trip included seeing Cirque du Soleil's La Nouba as well as having breakfast in the Magic Kingdom with Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore and Piglet. For next year, we're considering Mexico as our vacation spot; we hope to divide our time between the ancient ruins and the beach!

We have continued our education in American Sign Language (ASL) this year at our local community college. Paul completed ASL 5 during the spring, and Chris is nearly finished with ASL 3. Our hope for the coming year is to continue our study in smaller, private classes with our favorite teacher, Lisa. We are also progressing on our master's degrees from Rensselaer. Chris has completed his third class (only seven more to go!) toward a master's of science in management, with plans to finish in Spring 2005. Paul has only three classes to go before he earns his master's of science in computer science; he finishes in December 2003.

We hope that this holiday letter finds you and your family healthy and happy. We look forward to 2003, and hope to see many of you throughout the year. Best wishes!