Holiday Letter 2022

Hello again and happy holidays! Another year and our bubbles are starting to dissipate.

I finally finished grad school this December. Even though I had a few credits to complete, they let me walk at Husky Stadium this past June. There were 7,000+ graduates walking! Both my brothers and my cousin came to celebrate. The pic below is from my cousin Tanya. I also walked for my Bachelor’s degree at the Puyallup Fairgrounds a couple of days after my Master’s. Due to the pandemic, the in-person commencement ceremony was postponed until this year.

Panoramic view of Husky Stadium. Credit: Tanya Haeussler

About the mortgages on my life, aka the kids. Vanessa is still without a job, but we were able to increase her virtual meetings with her job coach to three times a week. We are hopeful the organization we are working with will find something, but the leads keep petering out. Logan, on the other hand, still enjoys school. There have been a few times where he is the typical teenager and does not want to get out of bed, or go anywhere, or do anything. After writing this, I experience those morning too.

Work is returning to regular in-person business hours. At the beginning of the year for winter quarter, offices needed to be opened twice a week and available remotely three days per week. Then spring quarter we moved to in‑person three days a week, summer four days, and this quarter, fall, five days a week. What this means is that the office needs to be staffed, but not all employees need to be there. We are able to rotate working in the office and working remotely. For me, I was in school twice a week, so I was in the office two to three times a week.

Chris’ office has more events to work, so his work schedule is back to weird hours. He really enjoys his job. Even more so after he made POTUS sound good. President Biden made a stop to Green River College for Earth Day (and my birthday!)

We met quite a few neighbors in April through the NextDoor app. Y’all know I adopted Cora last year. Well, in April this year, Cora ran away after a not-quite-closed-door blew open by wind. A neighbor trapped a black cat, but it was not Cora. Devastated, I adopted Sheba on May 1, then other neighbors helped find Cora a day or two later. Cora had been missing for three weeks. We had to slowly introduce both cats to each other and they seem to be getting along, but they are not friends.

If you can tell from the picture, there is quite a bit of a size difference. Sheba is on top, Cora below. Cora was a healthy nine to ten pounds when we got her. She shrunk to about six to seven pounds coming home. She still hasn’t gained the weight back. Probably because there is another cat in the house that eats a lot and gatekeeps. Sheba was estimated to be 2 ½ years old. I would put her weight at twenty pounds at this point. She is a big cat and has gotten fat. I want to train her to be on a harness and leash so I can walk her. She really is the size of a small dog.

So, that’s it from us this year.