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| early November, celebrating Christie's 40th birthday at the Lake Elmo Inn with Christie's parents |
Merry Christmas!
Here's the update about what we've been up to this past year!
2014
ADVENTURES
Christie's parents came to Arizona again last winter to enjoy the nice weather and to spend time with us. We enjoy having them around. This last winter I (Christie) was still feeling pretty lousy, so we laid pretty low and simply enjoyed each other's company.
Greg's Mom has moved (mostly!) to Green Valley, Arizona (south of Tucson), and we've enjoyed seeing her and her husband, Dan, more often.
We especially had fun celebrating Thanksgiving this year!
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Turkey hats!
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Right before a big trip in May, I started feeling significantly better, thanks to some changes I'd been making in response to research I'd been doing. Right now I'm in a bit of a flare up for unknown reasons, and it's very frustrating, but I'm trying to be encouraged that most of the time I feel *lots* better than I did!
Click here to see what's been working the best . . .
In May, we took an Alaskan cruise! We (Greg and I) hadn't been on a cruise before, and it was better than we expected. The people were nice, there were lots of gluten-free and Crohn's-friendly food options, the staff was amazing and friendly, and the ship didn't seem stuffed with ugly Americans, after all. The scenery was gorgeous, and the gorges were scenic - it was easily one of the prettiest places we've ever seen.
And we got to hike on the Mendenhall Glacier!!!
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| on the Mendenhall Glacier in May |
In October, we flew up to Minnesota to see our families.
Christie's brother Mark and his wife Jillian had just added another sweet girlie to their family, and we got to meet her. We got to spend some time with Greg's Grandma and some extended family members in Bemidji as well wonderful time his Dad and Step-Mom and Christie's family. It was a good trip (outside of Greg ending up in the ER with a kidney stone . . . and no, it hasn't passed yet - grrr!)
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| getting ready to enjoy the chill in Minnesota (early October) |
GREG WORK
Greg spent most of the past year developing an advanced process control application which replaces two older ones. He is hoping that it will exit beta prior to the end of the year. Next year he will be working to add enhancements which will both reduce engineer effort as well as aid the continuing effort of shrinking feature sizes within microchips. Greg had his 20 year anniversary at Intel this year, and will be eligible for his third sabbatical in just a few months; we have not yet given much thought to when we'll take that eight week block of time off nor what we will do.
CHRISTIE WORK
In July I FINISHED THE CURRICULUM that I'd been working on for the last three plus years - hooray! I am still working on editing the illustrations and standardizing the format of the 35 lessons, but the main chunk of the creative process was finished and it was a relief!
The next step is getting the word out to churches and families that there is a curriculum that's written specifically to meet the needs of young children or people with special needs.
One way I'm doing this is through my (fairly) new YouTube channel.
I post videos on subjects related to special education such as communication development, behavior management, developing skills through play, and so on.
The channel's goal is to inform and equip families to better support their children with special needs AND to enable churches to be more welcoming for people with special needs.
It's pretty fun!
May your be BLESSED
as you celebrate Christ's birth,
and may 2015 bring you joy and contentment!
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| Lake Elmo Park Reserve in Lake Elmo, Minnesota in late October |
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