2008/09 Newsletter
2008~2009 Holiday Newsletter |
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| The past couple of years have been so busy with always preparing to travel over the holidays that my annual newsletters have fallen through the cracks. But as these have become my only record of the year as a whole, I regret not having a documentation of them and sharing them with friends and family. So here we have it, a two-year recap. This past Christmas trip to Richmond was particularly rewarding. We got to see my brother’s entire family, kids, grandkids, and on the 26th there was the Owen family reunion—the first in many years (save a couple funerals), and on the 27th the Beasleys got together. Vickie & Mark were in town from Texas, Carol & Peggy from Blacksburg & Winston-Salem, and Uncle Rogers drove down from Maryland to get together with all the Richmond Beasleys. We were so blessed to have seen so many loved ones in one visit. | |
| Highlights for us this year: The BIG shout-out is Stuart landing a fantastic job as head of IT for the library system, in February. We’re so blessed he got a job using his Ph.D. in IT in a small town. Then just as we were starting to get our financial footing, we had a series three of unexpected expenses, so we continued to live mod-estly. Suki became very ill and could not keep food down. She lost a lot of weight. We have an amazing vet who saw her through with what is akin to IBS. She is now on acid reflux medicine, steroid drops, medicine for her intestines, and B-12 shots. Her weight is back now, and she is her frisky self again, running across the yard. Next we had to have the whole side yard dug up and another septic tank drain field put in. Then I had to have 2 ½ crowns on my teeth over a period of a month. Ouch! Thank God these setbacks didn’t happen any earlier or we would have been screwed. But God and his/her universe are merciful, and synchronicity prevailed. | |
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| Recession? We weren’t feeling it. After months of living on the edge, we’d already cut back as much as humanly possible and realized it’s not impossible. Sure, we enjoy the occasional fine dining meal out, or fresh local seafood, but we’ve enjoyed experimenting in the kitchen, and take our lunches most days. We can share a car and commute together, which saves a lot, as well. We hope to do a few house repairs and repaint the house in fresher colors and put it on the market this summer. We desperately need an office so our table can be used for dining again. And while living in the country is nice, it’d be even better to get on the other side of town. | |
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We attended my niece Kayla’s wed-ding in May, to Chris Smith, her beau of four years (pictured left and right). She was a gorgeous bride, and they a beautiful couple. In July we went to the NC highlands to the Grandfather Mtn Highland Games (GMHG) near Boone where I used to live with Jim & Kelley. We all stayed in a gorgeous B&B, the award-winning Taylor House, in Valle Crucis. I’ve wanted to stay there for many years. |
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| AND I’ve always wanted to go to have some kind of clan affiliation at the GMHG, which I’d been to on two other occasions. Yes, I’ve had Scots envy for quite some time... So two dreams came true sim-ultaneously. Stuart got to be the torch bearer at the opening ceremony for his clan, and ring in THE DOUGLASES ARE HERE with a resounding introduction. I held the Clan Douglas banner and Stuart raised the Douglas modern tartan flag in the closing ceremony, the parade of tartans (blue, green and white) while another clansman carried the ancient Douglas tartan of black & gray. Dubh= black, glas = gray, hence the clan name. We had an extra day to enjoy kicking around Boone and the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was fun going around to some familiar haunts. |
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Summer of ’08 we met mom & dad, Kayla & Cris and my brother, Ron, his wife Linda, & Chihuahua Twiggy (God rest his twiggy legs and soul) at Ron’s timeshare in Nags Head, NC—a 9 hour drive for us. We enjoyed lots of seafood, sightseeing, a sunset hike up the dunes at Kitty Hawk, and drove down to Hatteras one day & took the ferry over to Ocracoke Island. Here we are at the solid white lighthouse there. Stu and I decided to take the scenic coastal route home. I thought it would be fun to show Stuart some different scenery as he is new to the U.S. We left at sunrise, and 17 ½ hrs later arrived in Beaufort! We stopped for lunch at the Sanitary Fish Market & Restaurant in Morehead, NC and for a swim in the emerald waters of Topsail late in the afternoon. Somehow I dragged myself in to work the next day! This past Labor Day weekend mom and dad drove down to Emerald Beach, NC and met Stu and I at a condo. We enjoyed visiting our sister town of Beaufort, NC and touring Fort Macon (below left). |
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| In early October we attended the Scotland County, NC Highland Games in Laurinburg, on the grounds of the John Blue House, where we met up with friends we’d met from the Clan Douglas tent at the GMHG a few months earlier. It was a beautiful weekend, and the St. Andrews College Pipe Band was spectacular. The Saturday night ceilidh was held in a tent on the grounds of the Twin Oaks Winery. What a fantastic combination—a wine tasting and live Celtic music! | ||
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The Statue of Liberty Club met in NYC for Miss Liberty's 123rd birthday Oct. 22-25. It was great fun seeing our Liberty pals, and going to the statue together. Stuart got to climb up to the crown with many of the members. I'd done that before, and ceded my ticket to someone who hadn't been before. The Liberty mermaid I made in '07 that was part of Beaufort's Big Swim (aka Mermaids on Parade) was sold as a fundraiser after she and the others were auctioned off in the fall of '08. Three local couples purchased mine for $2400 and she now resides in Logan Park facing the Beaufort Bay. If you go to this link and click on Mer-Gallery, Mermaid de Liberté is #24. |
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| The SOL Club newsletter demands much of my time, and all the corres-pondence that goes with it. But I do enjoy editing the SOL Club newslet-ter, the creative outlet it gives, and the wonderful people I’ve met writi-ng articles about the members and Liberties worldwide. I’m in my last year of editorship now... but I have to give up the laptop if I give up the editor-ship. It’s been a nice perk, and most evenings find Stuart and me on our laptops and watching any number of TV programs and films we have in our arsenal of DVR recordings. |  |
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We love the cooking shows (esp. the competitions): Top Chef, Chopped, Chef Academy, Good Eats, Jacques & Julia, and Iron Chef America. And yes, all 3 Gordon Ramsay shows, Hell’s Kitchen, F Word, and Kitchen Nightmares. Ramsay is from Glasgow, not far from the town of Lesmahagow, where Stuart is from. While we were in New York we had a memorable dinner at Ramsay’s restaurant @ The London. It could be our best meal ever. |  |
| Our fav dramas and comedies include NCIS, House, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Medium, Numbers, The Closer, Saving Grace, Glee, Modern Family, Brothers & Sisters, Desperate Housewives (okay, that one and The Bachelor are my guilty pleasures, but I justify it as a study in pop culture), The Good Wife, and the car show, Top Gear. Kinda like the British version of our Car Talk, but with racing and celebrities. Our fav, dose of reality is Bill Maher. So irreverent, so funny, and also fair. The lib-rary system where we work orders lots of indy films & award winners, so we never have to rent DVDs | ||
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Cousin Carol came for a visit in Spring, and long-time friend I knew in South Dakota, Bruce Pencek, visited in the fall. Coincidentally both live in Blacksburg and work at Virginia Tech. Mom and dad also came down twice this year on the train. |  |
| We had a very stressful year at work. Basically it amounts to twice the work we normally have with the learning curve of our new operating system, Evergreen, an open source online catalog. 10 library systems in the state have come on board the Integrated Library System (ILS) so far, which gives all in the consortium the expanded sharing of library materials. Stuart and I both represent the BCL system in Cataloging and Systems committee meetings in Columbia, where we set policies for our new catalog, called SCLends. There were some major SNAFUs with the host servers in Athens, Georgia, and whenever libraries join the system, many records get duplicated that have to be merged so that patrons don't have to sort thru so many of them. |
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Each year we meet our friends Jim & Kelley from Raleigh at a Myrtle Beach condo and enjoy miniature golf and the variety of restaurants. Kelley and I are friends from Jr. High, J&K our Best Couple in the wedding. Jim and Stu enjoy keeping each other up on latest technology. Kelley & I enjoy Scrabble, sharing photos on our laptops, and power walking. In '08 we went down to Litchfield by the Sea to visit with Kelley's mom & sister at their time-share. Last spring we went to Murrell's Inlet to Brookgreen Gardens. Like the Biltmore Estate, it takes all day to see everything. There was a 48 ft. pontoon boat that toured the creeks and rivers throughout the estate where we saw some huge alligators, egrets, osprey, and lots of turtles sunning. We saw remnants of the rice plantation that was once in cultivation there. Captivated by the Carolina Lowcountry with its undulating rivers and shadowy swamp-lands, sandy pine forests, sweeping marsh vistas and stately moss-draped oaks, Archer & Anna Hyatt Huntington purchased the 9,127 acre property in 1931. Today, Brookgreen Gardens is a National Historic Landmark with the most significant collection of figurative sculpture, in an outdoor setting, by American artists in the world. The figure at left, Diana of the Chase, was sculpted by Ms. Huntington. The estate stretches all the way to what is now Huntington Beach State Park. |
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| We participate in our library's annual Book Club meeting, and once a year we have a turn at facilitat-ing the group discussion. Our group has many good cooks and we enjoy trying new recipes out on each other. Some of the books we've read over the past couple of years: | |
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| A personal discovery that I was able to work in between book club readings was Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series, set in Scotland. Dalhousie is editor of the Journal of Applied Ethics, and as a phil-osopher, she questions everything that isn't obvious. Not your run-of-the-mill mystery series. From that I was inspired to watch his novel-come-HBO series, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency set in McCall Smith's native Botswana, a beautiful country with genuinely caring citizens. I've been revisiting Dakota author Kathleen Norris and some of her other writings I'd not read, and more of Pat Conroy's eloquent prose. I'm also getting to know other Lowcountry authors like Anne Rivers Siddon, Patty Callahan Henry, Mary Alice Monroe, Carl T. Smith, and Katherine Wall. | |
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| We enjoy going out to the nearby Hunting Island or Fripp Island beaches in warmer weather, or hang-ing out with our buddy Michael and enjoy watching dolphins from his dock or a boat ride. Try as he might, poor Stuart still has not broken his losing streak at fishing. I guess that's why it's called "fishing" and not "catching." Maybe he'll get the big one next year… | |
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Wishing you all a big, bountiful, and happy new year! Lotsa Love,Brendagael, Stuart & Suki-Lu |
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