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Happy holidays from the Browns! We hope that this letter finds you and yours happy and healthy in the early days of 2009. We have had a very busy end of 2008, so this letter is more of a Happy New Year / Happy Martin Luther King Jr Birthday greeting.
(almost all the pictures below will take you to our web albums, so please feel free to click on everything you see)
2008 was a busy year for Susan Jane. In her second year working in Washington, DC for Congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon, Susan Jane
became more familiar with policy and the political process inside the Beltway. She helped to draft wilderness and forest management legislation, prepared her boss for hearings and floor speeches, and worked extensively with constituents on a variety of natural resources and environmental issues. Perhaps one of SJ’s biggest accomplishments was helping to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, a law that brings federal dollars to counties with high percentages of public lands within their boundaries. Extending this law was a top priority for Congressman DeFazio, and after much effort and political maneuvering, the law was reauthorized in October.
Even though DC has been very exciting, Susan Jane concluded that two years in Washington was enough policy-making for now, and decided to come back to Oregon to pursue environmental litigation once again. In December, Paul flew to DC to help SJ drive back to Oregon to pick up where she left off (more on the drive later). Susan Jane will be studying for the February Oregon State Bar exam (again), with the intention of joining an environmental law firm in the Spring. (Although she is barred in Washington State, she still has to pass the Oregon bar. And, while she was teaching at Lewis and Clark Law School two years ago, special admission rules allowed her to be barred in Oregon – but that privilege expired when she left the law school. So... more studying it is!!) Please think positive test-taking thoughts for her over the next few months!
Paul had a relatively stable year at Intel - he has not changed jobs, managers, or sites for over 18 months. It's been an exciting time however, as he's built his team from 14 people last year to 55 this year, including starting a team of 10 in Guadalajara, Mexico, and built a 6000 square foot lab. Paul was even able to return to Purdue for a recruiting trip in September for the first time in his 12.5 year career, including seeing old friends, attending a Purdue football game and a performance by comedian Lewis Black! Paul's team will be working in full force on the Larrabee project for all of 2009, and the industry buzz around the program is very encouraging.We continued our traveling adventures this year, despite living on 2 coasts. Paul traveled to Folsom, California several times this year and was in Mexico in May and October. Susan Jane also was able to take a long-desired camping trip with her father to the California Redwoods over recess in August.
In May, we celebrated our 9 year anniversary with an 11 day trip to Alaska. We met in Fairbanks, where we took a riverboat cruise on the Chena River. After Fairbanks, we set out to Mount McKinley and the beautiful Denali National Park. We took a full day trip into the park and saw several animals, including the grizzly bear in this video!
After Denali, we took a train to Anchorage, where we met our cruise ship. The ship then sailed through College Fjord and Glacier Bay. The first stop was in Skagway, an incredibly small town that was created during the Gold Rush. Next stop was Juneau (including a Sled Dog Summer Camp!) and then Ketchikan, where we did zip lining and then took a flight in a sea plane for a few hours into the Misty Fjords National Monument. Finally, we sailed to Vancouver, BC where we said our goodbyes and returned to reality. It was an amazing trip and we had great weather the whole time. Feel free to browse our photos - we definitely would recommend people head up there, especially while there are still glaciers to be seen!
(click any of the pictures below to open the albums from each day)
For the 4th of July this year, we again were together in DC. Susan Jane was lucky enough to score an invite to enjoy the fireworks on top of the Department of the Interior building, and it was incredible. We had a great view of all the fireworks, they had hot dogs and ice cream and soft drinks - it was quite a party! After the fireworks, we decided to do another roadtrip, this time focused mostly in Virginia. We went up to Antietam, MD first though, and had a guided tour of the battlegrounds by a civil war reenactor. We had hoped for a short tour of some highlights, but we ended up getting a tour by someone who has written 3 books on the area and was a key consultant for the movie Gods and Generals, so it was a pretty intense lesson in history. 23,000 people died in a single day, and our tour guide took us through the whole battle, hour by hour. That was enough killing and death for us, but we did stop in Harper's Ferry - a town that traded hands 8 times during the civil war!
Then we drove down to Charlottesville, VA - home of the University of Virginia and Monticello. As luck would have it, SJ's Aunt Kathy and Uncle Jack were also in Charlottesville and we were able to meet up with them and catchup. We briefly toured the campus, but wanted to spend as much time as possible at Monticello, which was incredible. Then we drove out to Jamestown, VA, home of the first permanent English settlement in America. They have done a pretty good job of preserving it and we really enjoyed it. Our last stop before heading back to DC was Historic Williamsburg - which was the capital of Virginia after it was relocated from Jamestown and is now the world's largest living history museum. It was a great way to end our roadtrip, and we spent a day there among colonial presentations, speeches, and performers. It's only about 10 hours of driving total, but we did it all in about 4 days, so we didn't waste a lot of time along the way.
Perhaps the most important trip of the year was moving SJ back from DC. Paul flew out there on December 13th, and we drove back starting on Dec 16th - hitting snow in 12 out of 13 states! We started in DC, drove NW through Maryland and Pennsylvania, then pretty much straight west through Ohio and Indiana. We had some car trouble in Indiana, so we stopped at the Subaru dealer after staying the night with Paul's parents. After about 5 hours of work, including replacing the original plugs and wires that were covered in oil, we hit the road and made it through Iowa to Omaha by around 10pm - the next day it snowed 12 inches in Chicago. Omaha was a pretty big city, and easily the coldest stop on our trip (single digit temperatures without counting the windchill). Our house sitter called us to tell us that a pipe had burst at our house and flooded our basement, so we started calling the insurance company and repair companies. Then we drove west through Nebraska. And drove west some more through Nebraska. And then west a bit more...Finally we got to Colorado and stopped in Colorado Springs to see SJ's parents. We got back on the road and crossed the Rocky Mountains on I-80 in southern Wyoming. The wind and snow were picking up there and they were closing parts of the highway behind
us, but we got to Salt Lake City without too much trouble, other than a "check engine soon" light. We called ahead to Boise to make an appointment at the Subaru dealership there and left out of Salt Lake early, just missing their worst storm in a decade. Idaho was mostly ok, but when we got to the final stretch of interstate on our way home, the weather really took a turn for the worst. After 5 days of driving and 3000+ miles (about 50 hours in the car), it took us 3 hours to complete the last 47 miles from Hood River, OR to Troutdale, OR. It was the worst snow conditions either of us had ever seen - repeatedly causing us to come to a complete stop due to poor visibility. It worked out well because they closed that highway right behind us and it remained closed for 3 days. They say it was the worst snow storm in 40 years, with snow staying on the ground for almost 2 weeks. Luckily, SJ's parents were able to fly in for the holidays and we flew back to Chicago to see Paul's family for the week after New Years without incident. That's enough travel for us for a while! After the 5 month project of replacing our retaining wall last year, we set our sights on finishing the yard this year with some landscaping. As you can see from the pictures below, we've added an extensive footpath around the west side of the yard as well as considerable vegetation on the parking strip and the yard. It's not shown in the pictures, but we finished the project off with some lights, spotlighting some of the bigger trees, as well as lighting the footpath. After all the work of last year, it doesn't seem quite as exciting, but it really ties the project together and puts an end to our external upgrades for a while (although we do hope to paint the house in the next year or two). The next big project will probably be to add a bathroom in the basement (after we clean up from the burst pipe).
The dogs had a mostly uneventful year of sleeping, digging in the yard, barking, and sleeping some more. It's a tough life. Sadly, the older, bigger, slightly less smelly dog (Luca) woke up lame in mid-September and we feared the worst. He's been fighting a losing battle against dysplasia and arthritis all his life, and we thought the end might be near. However, through the miracle of modern medicine, he pulled through. He hadn't been able to go down the basement stairs for 2 months, but finally went down again over Thanksgiving weekend, and earlier this week he went up and down 4 times in one day (we're not sure why - maybe he has a secret stash of dog treats down there
. So we've been quite lucky. Luca turns 10 next year and Lorax is now 8. They still both act like puppies most of the time.
Amazingly, this year marks the 11th holiday letter we have sent out. Time really flies. If you're interested, we've attached each of the letters below, including the year that we only sent out a card (1999) and the year we only sent out a picture (2004). A lot has happened since we first did a joint letter 6 months before our wedding (we typically used paper with fancy designs on it, but we didn't save any of them so I only have the plain white versions). Which brings us to another landmark - we celebrate our 10 year anniversary this coming Memorial Day weekend. Hard to believe it's already been that long, but since we've been apart for the past 3+ years, it only feels like 6 or 7. Now Paul is feeling the pressure to come up with an exciting vacation that tops the trips we've taken so far (or some amazing piece of jewelry). If you have any suggestions, please send them his way.
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2007
Starting with our holiday letter next year, we are offering to only send you an email with the link to our letter instead of old-fashioned snail mail. The plus side to this is the faster notification time, reduced paper waste, and of course reduced postage. The downside is that sometimes people change their email addresses more frequently than their home residence, so we may lose touch with you if both become out of date. Please fill out the form below to let us know if you'd like to keep getting a standard mail notification or if you want to have all communication on the computers. (you can also leave some personal thoughts and even opt out of future mailings altogether). We promise we will not sell your personal information to anyone
. We are sending out an email to everyone whose address we have, and this year we are also sending a post-card notification to everyone whose snail-mail address we have as well.
Happy New Year,
Susan Jane and Paul
(Paul is on Facebook too - send a note if you want to link up with him)
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