1998

Well, mystery solved. It seems I didn't send out letters in 1996 or 1997, but that 1995 gem is still out there someplace. You'll notice this is the first use of the <<name>> fake mailmerge joke that I'll repeat in several letters and later in the program at our wedding. Spoiler alert, it's been about 12 years and it's probably going to pop up again soon.

December 1998, Christmas

Friends and Family,

Greetings to everyone on this, the first year I’ve gotten Christmas cards out in the last three. I have no real excuse, so I’ll beg no pardon. But I thought it would be a good idea to include one of these Christmas letters in with everyone’s card to let you know what I’ve been up to this year. Despite the generic look and feel, I can assure you **«name»**, I wrote this especially for you.

As the year closes, I am still working with Andersen Consulting. I will be celebrating my 10th anniversary with them on January 9 of 1999. I am not sure how this could be, as I’ve only been out of college a year or two, but nonetheless, that’s what they’re telling me at work. I remain happy with the work, having spent this year focusing exclusively on satellite companies. I ended my three years of work for Iridium this February. Despite my best efforts, they have now launched (successfully) their service of satellite mobile phones worldwide. It was very exciting helping to put in their billing and business control systems around the world. While I didn’t get to do any international travel, our deployment team racked up over 3 million miles all told. I was told I was “too valuable” to send out into the field, but management got very shifty and nervous when pressed for more specific reasons for my not being allowed to travel.

I began working in March in Arizona for a Motorola project called Celestri, which is not the popular green vegetable, but rather another global satellite venture. In May or June (the months do run together at the end of the year) Motorola began working with Teledesic, a competing company which overnight became our strategic business partner. They are based in Seattle. So from March until now, I have been spending at least 3 weeks a month on or near the west coast, flying back on weekends for the most part. I enjoy the travel associated with the job, and it gives me a chance to see more places and people –  Mom and Chad in Phoenix, Craig and Christie in Denver, Milan and Janet in Colorado Springs – and to accumulate a number of frequent flyer miles (I’ve flown over 100,000 miles this year on United alone). Which has led to some fun as well.

**<Some boring stuff redacted>**

In mid-July, my group at work, those of us who specialize in telecommunications network systems had our annual worldwide conference. Being a global group (and presumably having a bigger budget than last year when this “event” was held at Dulles airport), our boss decided to hold it in Bermuda. Despite all our protestations that Dulles airport had been good enough for us, the meeting went off in Bermuda, where everyone is friendly, everything is expensive and the stores close at 3 or 4 in the afternoon no matter what. We had a great time riding around with friends on mopeds, snorkeling in the coral (where we saw really cool fish and my first octopus in the wild) and generally acting sophisticated among the Bermuda gentry. Chad came to Washington on the 16th, his birthday, while on tour with Sam the Butcher. They played at a little coffee-house in rural Maryland so we all got together to watch.

**<boring / possibly incriminating stuff again>**

In September, I was able to do a lot of recruiting at JMU, something that is fairly enjoyable. I also have done a lot of training classes and presentations about communications topics throughout the year. This is probably my favorite part of the job right now. I wouldn’t mind doing training more in the future, since it’s no use gathering up all this information if I can’t go out and tell people about it.

 In October, Sarah and I went up to Maine to meet up with Mom and Ron, Barbie and Glenn, Steve and Karen and Pop Pop and Kathleen. We stayed in Bar Harbor after driving up the whole east coast. It’s very long, the east coast. But we got a lot of shopping done, and had a great time visiting with everyone. If you ever get a chance to go to Bar Harbor on Columbus Day week, it’s a great time to go because things are cheaper, the leaves are beautiful, and all the stores have sales.

Just this week, I have been in London. A good way to cap off a year which – I hadn’t realize until now – was filled with fun trips all over the place. I had a satellite conference which was somewhat interesting, and then spent four days driving around London, Bath and Salisbury. They have this great steak there, called the Bath Steak. I learned to drive on the left, which was fun. But I kept reaching for the seat belt over the wrong shoulder and revving the gas instead of the brake whenever I went to shift. With no major mishaps, though, we made it safely back to Heathrow and we’re now on the way back to the states.

One other note for everyone, I’ll be selling my house in Bowie at the end of February, and getting a new address. I don’t know where I’m moving to yet, minor detail, but I’ll let you all know. The house was just too much to take care of while I’m travelling all the time, and after 10 years with it, the market was good enough to sell. I’ve been thinking about getting a cabin up in northern MD, someplace to stockpile food for the Year 2000 (joking!), but who knows. So for those of you in whose address books my name stands next to 400 crossed-out old phone numbers, you can look forward to a change of address as well. In the meantime, I’ll give you all my new cell phone number, which works just about everywhere – it’s 703-627-3494, and my pager is 800-701-1220 **<That's right, I had a pager. Who da man?>**, which is also always with me.

I wanted to thank all of you who’ve put up with me dropping by over the year, especially everyone who had less than 24 hours notice. One of the best things about all the travel is the opportunity to see more of you all around the country that I would normally get to do. One of the drawbacks is seeing less of the folks back in DC than I’d like. So here’s hoping 1999 will see us all with a chance to get together more. I still don’t know where I’ll be for Christmas, but wherever you are, I hope you have a great Christmas and New Year, and I just might drop by, who knows.

Love, **<Still writing my name in a nod to personalization>**

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