Hi 12/19/1991
Time for another Christmas letter. The highlights of my year are my fine relationship and three Western hiking trips with Marsha, good visits with family, friends and relatives, the genealogy computer program which is finally "on the market" ( 3 copies sold) and a new job starting January 2.
Putting the best first, Marsha and I have been enjoying each other's company a great deal. We seem to think similarly, she also enjoys lots of physical outdoors activity, she likes all my humor and silliness, we both dislike conflict and argument.
I'm delighted at the prospect of improving my financial fortunes by working at a regular job again. It only took one interview to land a job. I will be the only computer person for a small company that manufactures labels. I'll be programming in the C language running the UNIX operating system on an Altos computer. These are all my favorites from the past. Lord knows if I will make a gracious adjustment to arising early every morning.
In January I broke my nose playing basketball. It cost $2,000 to fix the damage. It also rained three inches of ice one day. I actually enjoyed doing my income taxes this year because my income was so low that I paid no taxes. I got all my money back.
In mid-March, Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Rex Strait celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Nine of my ten first cousins on Dad's side of the family came. As an added bonus, four of the cousins on Mom's side were in town also.
In late April, Marsha and I flew out to Phoenix, rented a car and drove the scenic route through Prescott, Jerome, Sedona and Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon. We hiked down to the Colorado River at the bottom and camped out for two nights. That is such an impressive place. Every ten minutes of hiking changes the landscape unimaginably. My favorite is the black rock at the very bottom near the river. That rock is veined with pink or white and contorted and twisted. We saw mountain sheep and a wild turkey.
My brother Dale and his wife Carolyn made the trip from Minneapolis down to Belleville to visit Mom and me this spring. My sister Carol invited us all out to Mt. Olive for a weekend barbecue.
I intended to be on the Appalachian trail before the 80 degree, humid days hit. However, Marsha had agreed to market the computer program, so I was working diligently on the computer when that weather arrived in mid-Spring. In May, a friend asked me to house sit while she and her husband went to visit her mom and vacation in Puerto Rico.
The three weeks of housesitting was great and terrible. I spent lots of time working on the computer program. I ran nearly every evening. I played Frisbee with the dog every day. The weather was insufferable. The daytime highs were usually around 95 degrees. The humidity was 70 to 90 percent. Even the night time lows were in the seventies . . in May!
While house sitting, I received a wedding invitation from Stewart in Santa Fe. The wedding was set for June 29. After house sitting, I hitchhiked to Kansas City and spent three weeks with Marsha. I worked on the computer program during the day while she was at work. I walked her dog, Dewey, a Westhighland Terrier, every day. By the time I left to hitchhike to Santa Fe for the wedding, the computer program was in good shape. I was surprised to find that I had grown quite fond of and attached to Marsha.
Hitchhiking out to the wedding was amazingly easy. Marsha dropped me off on the western edge of Kansas city around 7 AM. It was a pretty amazing trip, Kansas City to Santa Fe in one day of hitchhiking and only three rides. One driver is an Independent Baptist minister who feels called to become a missionary to Maui, Hawaii. I had good company all the way.
The wedding was a beautiful ceremony at the Pecos National Monument in the ruins of the Pueblo church. Stewart and Judy asked my to house sit for them while they honeymooned in Vancouver, Canada for a couple of weeks.
On July 4, I joined my friends John and Linda to hike into the Pecos "Wilderness". The trip was an unmitigated delight. We hiked from the trailhead at Borrego Mesa into the Sangre De Christo mountains to Jose Vigil Lake. The wildflowers were quite showy with lots of daisies, Indian paintbrush, Queen Ann's Lace and several smaller yellow, white, pink or blue flowers. Linda found some Oyster mushrooms and a couple of edible Meadow mushrooms. The lake is situated at the bottom of a cirque and we had it entirely to ourselves. We could see big trout in the clear waters of the lake. Ken caught a 12 inch cutthroat trout. We enjoyed the crystal clear skies and bright stars. Within two feet of the spot where I filtered water, seven different wildflowers were blooming.
John, Brian and I walked up South Truchas Peak (the second highest mountain in New Mexico, 13,102 feet.) The tiny alpine flowers are particularly pretty. There were parts of the the route when I could stand up straight and almost touch the face of the mountain in front of me. We reached the top quickly. The view from mountain peaks beggars description. The lake had two deep black areas separated by lighter blue shallows. Our tents were mere specks of blue and red. We could see the hazy figure of Sandia Crest 90 miles to the south. Nearby ridges and peaks were very vividly rough. To the west were the reds and sand and dust of the desert surrounding the green swath of the Rios river valley.
By the time Stewart and Judy returned, I had decided to return to Kansas City to be with Marsha. The Appalachian Trail will wait. Marsha might not.
Marsha and I took a couple of fine short trips this summer. We went to the Rocky Mountain National Park over the Labor Day weekend. We left Kansas City in the evening after Marsha got home from work, drove all night and stopped in Georgetown Colorado to breakfast with my friend Pat at 4:45 AM. That first day was rough hiking since we hadn't slept, weren't accustomed to the altitude and got a late start for the seven mile hike. Next day, we hiked eleven miles up over the Continental Divide. That was even more exhausting! We staggered in to the beautiful Timberline campsite in the circe below the divide. Returning to Kansas was the pits.
We made a second trip to the Grand Canyon in the fall. The hike down was hard because of another late start. Marsha swore for two days that she would not walk back up the same trail. We lounged by the Colorado for an entire day, saw several raft expeditions "float" down. Hermit Rapids bounces rafts like bumper cars. We relaxed in a beautiful streamside pool near our campsite where a tiny stream had carved an amazing canyon of sheer cliffs, huge boulders and pleasant pools.
Marsha has planned two trips for 1992. Since I'm finally returning to the "real" world of working daily, my travels will be severely curtailed. I wonder if I can adjust. Wish me luck. Better yet, write me.
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