Dearest Recipients:
A heavily-adorned balsam fir shades the kitchen table. Glass shards of broken ornaments cling to the webbing between Tom’s frog-like toes. Sub-zero temperatures and deep snow drifts turn the backyard squirrels to peanut-eating frost wraiths. Thanksgiving leftovers change colors to signal the approach of holiday letter-writing season.
In January, we traversed a Nebraska blizzard to visit JoAnn’s ailing Grandma Merle, who passed away a few days later at age 91. Some of her last words came in the form of a song—The North Wind Doth Blow—that she and JoAnn sang together. Grandma Merle spent a lifetime of hard work caring for others, and we always found comfort in her ability to sing through it all.
In partial tribute to her grandmother, JoAnn has settled into a rewarding career as an RN on the Medical Unit at Poudre Valley Hospital, recipient of the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award for business achievement and performance excellence. JoAnn’s efforts to incorporate the Baldridge criteria into her personal life suffered a small setback in early December, when she arrived home from work one night to find Tom under the tree, celebrating the season in his holiday uniform, a tiara of cupcake tins and a loincloth of short-circuiting holiday lights.
Despite his behavior, Tom finds inspiration in JoAnn’s compassion for her patients and co-workers, her love of her schedule and employer. He tries hard to follow her example, but founders at times in the sea of medical exams, proficiency checks, training videos, mechanical malfunctions, bird ingestion standards, drug screenings, customs inspections, and electrical disturbances that comprise a typical day at the office. Substandard hotel plumbing in June required an unpleasant grooming with cold toilet tank water, and he was placed on respiratory probation in September for coughing up a collar stay on a high-profile customer. Throughout this trying period, Tom focused on and celebrated his first ever senior discount at the Nashville Airport McDonalds.
Fonder memories from the past year stem from our late January visit to the tip of the world’s longest peninsula—Baja California—where we basked in the Sea of Cortez with playful gray whales, frolicked on the beach with a brigade of souvenir vendors, and survived a careening Mexican bus trip into the peaceful village of San Juan Del Cabo. Other activities included visits to a glass-blowing factory and a beer-serving jewelry store in Cabo San Lucas, as well as viewings of Finisterra (Land’s End), Lover’s Beach, and the adjoining and much less romantic, but larger, Divorce Beach. Our busy schedule of spa visits and sea shell collecting ended all too soon, so we plan to return at the earliest possible opportunity.
The tranquility of our vacation gave way in April to a two-week bathroom renovation that stretched far into June, demonstrating a systemic tendency toward unrealistic optimism regarding budget and project completion time. However, the time and effort paid off; for our master bathroom now resembles the Baño Del Cabo we shared in Mexico and serves as a constant reminder of our idyllic Baja getaway.
So far our 2010 calendar is empty, so we welcome your visits, e-mails, calls, and letters, and we solicit your support for Tom’s New Year’s motto: “Ridiculous actions call for a ridiculous face.”
