It’s a few minutes before midnight on December 31, 2002. This year has only a few minutes life left before entering the history books. My doesn’t that sound profound? Air Force Academy is playing Virginia Tech in a bowl game — they’re losing by 7 points but are more or less driving down the field. Tomorrow will have several football games and we’ll be staying home all day to get our fill of football.

Some new neighbors down the street had an open house this evening so that they could meet the neighborhood. We went over about 7 and stayed until about 8:15. They are very nice people and will fit well into the neighborhood. There’s about 30 seconds left in the ballgame and Air Force has a first and goal. Perhaps they can make this happen??

I enjoy Sunday evenings like this one. We’re home, it’s dark, no one is coming over, I’ve no place I need to be, there are no obligations or other things I need to be doing. It’s also the last day of the Christmas Holidays. Tomorrow is a working day and most everyone will be back at work.

We had Monday, December 23rd, Tuesday the 24th, and Wednesday the 25th off from work. We were also encouraged to take Thursday the 26th and Friday the 27th off as well. Most of my staff did take these days off. I decided not to burn the two vacation days since we’ll be spending some in January. The two days were great days to be at work. I got most all the administrivia taken care of and can now let it pile up for several more weeks.

Christmas was very nice. Nina and I went to see The Lord of the Rings part two, The Two Towers on Christmas eve morning. We went to the first show at 10:00 a.m. meaning we were able to get into the theater for $3.75 apiece. The theater was filled — with a smattering of single seats left here and there. We were near the front of the line and had choice seats. Only problem is, the movie is more than three hours long with previews and such. Well before the movie was finished, both of our bladders were demanding serious attention. That’s too long that early in the morning to be too far away from a bathroom. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the movie a second time. I’ll definitely go see it at least once more in the theater.

Christmas eve night we were invited to a Mark and Karvin’s home along with another couple, Bob and Rosemary. Mark and Karvin had put together an sumptuous feast, including Swedish mush! I like cereal and found this to be very good as well. The mush includes one almond which ends up in someone’s bowl. The finder of the almond is supposedly blessed with good fortune in the coming year — in such ways as being the next one married, or having the next child. None of us were interested in any such “luck.” However, the Bishop drew the bowl with the almond. We’ll have to monitor his coming year to see what “luck” comes his way!

We were planning to sleep in on Christmas morning! At 4:45 a.m. the phone rang and it was our friends from Townsville, Australia: Ray and Mary. We had a lovely long chat. It’s mid-summer in Australia, so their day included a BBQ, swimming, and a water-balloon war. Meanwhile, we were enjoying 30 degree weather. Fortunately, Ray and Mary called us second. Duane and Bobby got the 4:00 a.m. call! After the chat with Ray and Mary, sleep was out of the question. We both lazed around until around 8 when we opened presents and then made a huge Christmas breakfast. Most if the breakfast waffles made it outside for the birds. All the bacon, however, was consumed! Later that afternoon we went over to Bobby and Duane’s to join them for their traditional family Christmas dinner. In preparation for the dinner, Duane decided to get a couple of tables and some chairs from the church building. He called me to make sure the room where the tables are located would be unlocked. I offered help, but he assured me all would be well. A little while later, I got a call from his cell phone. He was at the church and had locked his keys inside the building! So I drove down and rescued him. He had brought out two tables, with one holding the door open. He loaded the other one into the pickup truck along with sixteen chairs. He then loaded the other table- and the door closed, locking his jacket inside the building on the couch along with all his keys. Luckily, the cell phone was on the seat of the truck. He took a lot of ribbing about that incident!

While at Duane’s house, I took a couple hundred digital pictures of the family (there must have been about thirty people there). I then loaded the best of them, about a hundred pictures, onto a CD and put together a slide show of the pictures. That was a lot of fun and I learned a lot putting the CD together for him. One of their children lives in Maryland, so I made up two CD’s so that they could send one out east for that family to see pictures of the cousins and siblings.

Friday morning we finally finished revising our will. Both Nina and I now have a will, powers of attorney, medical powers of attorney, living wills, and all the associated paperwork for trusts and specific bequeathments. It’s good to have that done. The work is expensive…. Definitely not as expensive as not having all this paperwork completed! We can now demise and not have to worry about what will happen.

The Christmas season and the year 2002 draws to an end. It has been a good year for us. We’re still gainfully employed. We’ve been able to take two cruises. All of our children are doing well and everyone seems to be in good health and vigor. Mom and dad are getting much more frail, but they are still enjoying life and able to take good care of themselves. Dad has recovered very well from the fall resulting in a hip replacement. Mother has a congestive heart condition but it hasn’t gotten much worse over the past year. We’re active in the Church and thoroughly enjoy our work at the Denver Temple each week. Life is good!

We had our traditional Christmas services this morning in Church. The choir sang four numbers along with two speakers. I enjoy singing in the choir and we performed reasonably well for a volunteer pick-up type of a choir. We sang an arrangement of Silent Night followed by a speaker reading the Christmas story from Luke. We then sang Angels We Have Heard on High from the hymnbook followed by a congregational hymn Far, Far Away on Judea’s Plain. We then sang Were You There followed by the main speaker. The choir then sang an arrangement of Hosannah. The congregation sang O Come, All Ye Faithful and that ended the service. Our normal organist was out of town, so I was substituting on the organ. All went well except for the introduction into O Come, All Ye Faithful! My feet wanted to play the hymn in it’s normal three flats, hands were playing it in one sharp as it is now written in the hymnbook. We survived, however. Our organ has a nice 32′ diapason stop which got cranked in on the last verse…!

This Christmas looks to be very quiet around the house. We’ve been invited over to our Bobby and Duane’s house for Christmas dinner. We’ll have a quiet dinner here with Nina and me on Christmas Eve. This is the first time that I can remember where we’ve not yet found anyone to come over for Christmas Eve!

Bradica has been scarfing up on candy, however. She’s torn open a couple of packages that had candy in them. The one last night had fudge in it and she’s been a pretty sick dog. She just started to perk up a little while ago. Only problem is, she never learns a lesson from that.

Looking ahead at the new year is a bit difficult. Business conditions are improving, but very slowly. Bonuses and merits increases will continue to be on hold for at least the first six months of the year. Hiring is frozen; even if someone quits they likely won’t be replaced. Spending will be tightly constrained. I think that’s even the optomistic outlook. We’re looking right down the barrel at war with Iraq and if that happens, the economy will likely go south in a real hurry. That war will likely be very messy with a lot of casualties and the American people won’t tolerate that very well. We’ve got plenty of political problems as well. Reason and moderation have completely departed Washington and have been replaced by radical fanaticism. Only the far right and far left remain as they’ve literally made everyone that even smells moderate inconsequential. Makes one a bit depressed, me thinks.

The Two Towers was a marvelous movie. I was ready to turn around and go right back into the theater! Nina and I will definitely go next week, perhaps on Monday afternoon after we’ve finished with the will. That’s a task that’s been put off too long, so Monday morning we’ll review the wills thoroughly with our lawyer and get them finalized.

We left the office about 10 a.m. to go to the 11:30 a.m. movie. When we got to the theater, the line of people with advance purchase tickets was fairly long. We waited in line until almost 11:20 before the doors into the theater complex opened. They were showing the film on two screens, both of which were filled to capacity. It was a thoroughly engrossing movie and the almost three hours were over quite quickly.

I did find it very strange that the building was closed up for so long with only a few minutes to get into the right theater and seated before the movie started. As it was, I found a seat, left my jacket there, took a couple of food orders, and went back out to the popcorn counter to get some popcorn and drinks. Those lines were pretty long as well and I didn’t get back into the theater until about 11:50. I got to my seat as the last preview finished and the main feature started. Thank goodness for previews!

We’ve had a little snow this afternoon — perhaps an inch or so. Probably don’t have much more snow coming, even this small amount wasn’t forecast. We’d sure like to get a lot of snow and make some more progress towards breaking the drought in this area.

The second installment in the three-movie Lord of the Rings series debuts today. The first movie, The Fellowship of the Ring was an outstanding movie, so attending the movie today is quite important. To that end, I’ve declared the middle part of the day a “mental health” day and given everyone on my staff permission to take the time to attend the movie. Some thirty people here in Colorado Springs will be going together. This is quite exciting, actually!

We’re headed to the Church in a few minutes for our annual Tithing Settlement meeting with the Bishop. After that, it’s off to Walmart to finish up some shopping. We may even find some treasures there! Nina seems to be right ready for Christmas to be here. She’s been wrapping and packaging non-stop it seems for a couple of days. Tomorrow should see most everything in the mail.

We’ll have no family here for Christmas and have been invited over to Duane and Bobby Slocum’s for Christmas dinner. I think Nina’s got a few folks coming over on Christmas eve as well. Meanwhile, tomorrow is a very big day!

It’s inconceivable to me that we could lose a server! But, for some reason on Friday morning a crucial business-continuity server had disappeared. Further, it had been offline for some thirty hours and that fact was also just being discovered. Then followed a most frustrating day that I was very glad to have come to an end. The server was eventually found. It hadn’t been shipped to Gresham, Oregon, as reported by some people but was, in fact, exactly where it was supposed to be. The network connection had failed and needed to be restarted. The workday ended with a “come-to-Jesus” meeting with my boss. That’s not the kind of meeting one likes to have at the time of year when he’s writing my annual review.

So, I got home in a fairly foul mood in time to head to the Church for the annual Christmas Creche festivities. Again, a bunch of little things that should have happened didn’t and I ended up spending the entire evening there serving punch and cookies. The event was a brilliant success which helped to diminish my mood. By the end of the evening, the only issue was my very sore feet from being on them too long during the evening.

It’s now a Monday morning and I’m back in the office. The day was supposed to start with a dentist appointment that didn’t happen. I showed up at the supposedly appointed time of 7:30 a.m. to find that they thought the appointment was tomorrow at 7:30 a.m. I’ve got my own “come-to-Jesus” meeting that’ll happen in about 45 minutes. I’ll be meeting with the staff here in a one-way-communication meeting to see if we can’t break this cycle of haphazard work accompanied by a “so what?” attitude. I’d like to think that things can only get better, but there’s plenty of room for things to get worse.

Yesterday I started the last business trip of the year. I flew out of Colorado Springs through Denver into San Jose, California. I got out of the houst about 15 minutes later than I wanted to leave for a 7:40 a.m. flight and then missed the exit off the freeway to the airport. Due to construction in that area, the exit configuration had changed rather dramatically and I went flying by the exit. That added about five minutes to the trip to the airport. However, none of that mattered since the flight was delayed and perhaps cancelled.

This flight was operated by Air Wisconsin and equipment problems grounded the planned airplane. A replacement airplane was being ferried to Colorado Springs but probably wouldn’t be available in sufficient time for me to catch the flight from Denver to San Jose. So, I rebooked to take an 8:40 a.m. United flight to Denver and an 11:20 flight out of Denver to San Jose.

While I was sitting in the airport in Colorado Springs waiting for the rescheduled airplane, United filed for bankruptcy. That shouldn’t make much difference for me in the short term, but probably means a huge difference for United in the long term. No airline has ever emerged from bankruptcy and survived.

Sunday’s newspaper had an announcement that security at the airports will change “just in time for the holidays.” Not a day too soon, in my opinion. One of the changes implemented after 9/11/2001 attack was to implement supposedly random inspection of passengers at the boarding gate. Amongst the frequent traveling public, this has become known as the “old lady search.” Because it is imperative that the random inspection of passengers at the boarding gate not delay flight departure, the inspectors pull the first person in line for inspection. When they are finished inspecting that person, if there are sufficient people still in line to board, they will inspect someone else. So, all the seasoned travelers hang back from boarding until someone is being inspected. That usually turns out to be an elderly person, usually a lady, who approaches the boarding gate hoping to get early boarding so she can get situated. She’s usually walking with the aid of a cane and carrying a lot of stuff. She becomes the sacrificial lamb and as soon as she’s snagged, the boarding gate is mobbed. It’s definitely time for this absurd practice to end.

Of course, when I arrived in San Jose, I was more than two hours late for my rental car reservation. That necessitated a stop at the rental car counter to get the reservation reset and get a car rented. The net was rather than arriving at my San Jose office about 11:00 a.m., I didn’t get there until about 2:30 p.m.

The purpose of the trip is to attend two all-day meetings. In times past, these would have been so-called “offsite” meetings. However, in the current economic situation, we’re meeting on-site in one of our conference rooms — an on-site offsite meeting! The first of them is an e-commerce working council meeting followed by an all-day IT management meeting on Wednesday. I’ll fly back on Thursday afternoon. Perhaps travel will be less of a travail on Thursday?