December 21st, 2000

Season’s Greetings,

It’s December, time to look back and take stock of the year. What a roller coaster for the economy. In the early part, we were busy getting a new car and finishing furnishing the apartment. We’re quite comfortable in it, conveniently located midway between downtown San Mateo and Burlingame, 7 miles south of San Francisco’s airport. Most of our shopping is close, and both San Francisco and Silicon Valley are within a ½ hour drive. Just about the time we were pretty much settled in, the economy started making its adjustments. Real estate kept getting more out of reach for many people while the Dot Com companies faced reality and many have closed their doors.

The winter months brought many rainy weekends, which led us to Napster. Because we are working out of the apartment, we have a DSL broadband connection to the Internet. We were able to recreate our old, still in storage, record collection, as a database of mp3 files. The impact the internet has had on the music industry was another interesting phenomina to watch this year. It’s still not clear what will happen, www.napster.com is still serving. Low cost mp3 players that plug into your home stereo system are appearing on the market. This tells me the days of spending money for music where you get one song you like and a bunch more so so songs are history.

We didn’t get out on the boat much this year, three of the races the Sierra Point Yacht club sponsored was about it. The yacht club was busy this year putting up a new building. The building we used to have got lost to the development company that owns the property. They did provide us with some land in a much better location, and the building fund was adequate for the volunteers to put up a prefab building. At this point, finishing touches are being done to the interior. It should be in full operation next year, so we are looking forward to having a place to hang out with friends on weekends.

Cindy is still with us, with the help of a drug called Rimadyl. She just got too old for yachting, and then when we thought she got too old for making it up and down the stairs to go for walks, we learned about this drug. It keeps her hips working much better, so she’s ok for now.

Harvey didn’t get much attention this year. We did fix a few things, and take a long weekend to explore the Lake Barryessa region of the wine country. What with all of the nasty notes on the windshield from our neighbors, griping about not liking such an eyesore parked where they could see it, we decided to find an RV storage spot. It’s kind of like a marina for boats, about 10 minutes away.

Working has kept us busy for the most part, the idle days of tanktops and flipflops are fond memories. We did get to go to a 49ers game with tickets Steve won at a pizza making party. All that time perfecting his pizza recipe while in Mexico turned out to be worth something. We also got to take a limo ride to the city to see the new play “Mamma Mia”, with the Left Handed Sagittarian Wives Club, but that’s a different story. We hope this letter finds you well, and we look forward to hearing from you. We wish you a happy holiday season, and much prosperity in the real new millennium.

Merry Christmas.

Cheers,

The crew of Spirit