Happy Holidays!

December 2010

Dear Friends and Relatives,

Happy holidays to you and your family! In 2010, we were busy with work and traveling to visit family and friends.

In May, we visited Phil’s grandmother and aunt in Ft. Lauderdale. Phil’s siblings, Amy and David, also joined us for the visit. Afterwards, we drove to Key West and spent a few days vacationing. In June, we traveled to Ohio to visit Phil’s other grandparents and attended his cousin’s high school graduation party at a local lake.

It was also a year for momentous birthdays. We celebrated Julie’s dad’s milestone birthday in Florida while visiting his mother, who shares a birthday with him in August. We also got to visit with Julie’s aunts, uncle, and cousins while there. In October, we celebrated Julie’s half-milestone birthday with a home party that included about 30 local relatives and friends.

Phil’s friends from Stanford, Adam and Nidhi, married over Labor Day weekend, and Phil was a groomsman in the wedding in the Stanford Memorial Church. We traveled to the Stanford area the week before and had time to visit with Julie’s cousins Sandi and David Steich and their family as well as Susan Walton. We also visited with Phil’s brother and numerous college friends who live in the area and went to a jazz show in San Francisco. Julie got to try In-N-Out Burger for the first time.

We returned to Stanford in late October for Phil’s 10^th college reunion. There were numerous events, including a reunion for his freshman dorm, a computer science majors reunion, tailgating, football game (Stanford is having a great season!), and an evening party for everyone from the class of 2000.

Several of our relatives and friends had children this year. Julie was busy making gifts for a number of the babies.

This was our second year hosting Thanksgiving. We had the same six guests as last year: Phil’s sister and her fiancé, Julie’s parents, and her aunt and uncle. We went with a larger turkey breast and three drumsticks, so there were more leftovers than last year. Everyone brought side dishes, and we had an enjoyable dinner.

Phil continues to work for EMC in a research and development office in Princeton. His projects included improving compression for long term data storage and collecting data sets for future experiments, and he recently had a paper accepted on clustered storage.

Julie continues to work for Light Management Consulting and a division devoted to health care websites. She manages a few dozen intern writers and attended medical conferences in Chicago and Orlando to cover recent clinical trial results. Phil went along to the Chicago conference and got to see the Art Institute and aquarium while Julie was busy working. We had time to try multiple deep-dish pizza restaurants for dinner. Before the start of the conference in Orlando, Julie got to visit with her grandmother and aunt and uncle again this year.

We hope you had a healthy and happy 2010, and we look forward to talking with you soon.

Love,

Julie and Phil