Greetings from Candace and Mike in sunny Tucson. We have survived our first full year here and it's now Christmas Eve already! Today is bright and sunny, but it had been raining for the past two days. We even had a light sprinkling of snow and a little thunder in the Santa Catalina Mountains that rise rapidly from the desert floor just a mile or two north of where we live.

Snow on the Santa Catalina Mountains, Christmas Eve 2002
Casa de la Dueda is the 'new' construction on the left.

1. I've been travelling between two to three weeks a month, sometimes more, upgrading our customers from our old product to the new Windows version. When not on the road installing it and training people how to use it, I'm home fixing all the bugs in it (and making new ones by adding new 'features' to the software). This has been good for the bank account, but bad for my sanity. Next year promises to be more of the same.
   
   
2. Construction on our new house has proceeded, at a (not unexpected) slow pace. Many of you have received updates from time to time regarding this project. We won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say, you can see progress of some sort by comparing the photographs below, all taken from roughly the same vantage point.
   
   



December 2001 to May 2002"



July 2002 to December 2002




At this point, we are expecting another 9 - 10 months. We've done lots of major remodeling but never built from the ground up before. The neighbors who have been through this recently say that after the initial excitement of seeing the framing go up very quickly we should prepare for things to slow down again as the finishing work moves forward. We are hoping against hope we will be in for Thanksgiving 2003. As we all know, the years just go faster and faster, so this wait should be a breeze!



Candace, by the (unfinished) Stairway to Heaven

3. Candace has played a lot of golf with the ladies 9-holer group. She lets me play with her if I'm home on a weekend (usually Sundays) and it doesn't otherwise interfere with her games. If you look back to our 1999 letter, you will see that was the year we started playing this self-inflicted torture-game, and I can truthfully say (as can anyone who ever plays with us) that after four years of it, we are not even a little bit better than the day we started, and maybe worse in some areas.
   
   The main difference, as any golfer will tell you, is that after four years we no longer get lost finding our way from one tee to the next, but that's about it!
   
   Speaking of golf, this is the time of year when you see lots of pictures of the 3 wise-men, holding their 'rods' and 'staffs': I think they are holding some sort of ancient golf clubs (the 'rod' was a 3-wood, and the 'staff' was a 7-iron, according to my Google searches). What was really going down in these pictures is that they were just asking Joseph where the 19th hole was, and if he would mind if Mary tagged along with them while Joseph stayed back in the manger keeping an eye on you-know-who.
   
   Oh yeah, and the other difference manifests itself in our bank account: We've blown thousands of dollars on golf related stuff (equipment, clothing, a golf-cart, country club memberships, travel to exotic golf locales, etc.), all for no positive result.
   
   

Other News:

Since we have no children, we can't report on their accomplishments. But, as usual, this was year of cats in our little house. Our two oldest, Betty and Wilma, both died within a few days of each other. Betty, who had developed a nasty cancer (resulting from a Feline Lukemia shot), went first. Then Wilma, her twin sister, died four days later, (we are convinced) from missing Betty. This was a very sad week for us. Since I was due to be out on the road again we decided to wait a while before seeking replacements. Candace decided a suitable mourning period was over after three days. Henry, the remaining 'king of the roost' was also lonely. We found two wonderful kittens at a local shelter.

Lucy and Mrs. Peale

Mrs. Peale likes to chase the mouse

We also play host to a bobcat (we call him Bob) who likes to sit on our patio and grab birds from our feeder. He's not exactly tame, but certainly doesn't run away when he sees us.

Bob (taken Nov 15th, 2002)

We had a modest number of visitors throughout the year. Candace's brother (Jeff) and his wife (Alice) came out for a few days in April. We visited the world-famous Kartchner Caverns on a day-trip with them and Jeff and I also visited the Davis Monthan museum and did the boneyard tour while Candace and Alice gallery-hopped.

Other visitors included old friends from the Seattle area. Now when I say 'old-friends' I really mean old. On a few occaisions I had business in the Seattle area and was able to return the favor. As we get older we seem to have fewer and fewer young friends. A few days ago we (along with a bunch of other old farts) nearly beat down the door of a local restaruant at 4pm to get dinner (and we were very disappointed they didn't actually start serving until 4:30!) They call it the early-bird around here, but we know it is really just a very late lunch.

We saw Don Henley and Cheryl Crow in two separate concerts, (and of course, being old, we thought they were too loud.) One of the strange things about living here is we get the 'off-day' concerts for those folks who play the big crowds in Phoenix. As a result most of the big names show up here on a Wednesday or Thursday night. It's hard to squeeze an early-bird dinner and a concert in on the same night.

We made a trip to the east to visit Candace's sister Susie and her husband Howard. We lived a different life there, driving around in stretch limo's, wining and dining, and all that! The highlight of the trip for me was a very brief visit to the World Trade Center site. There was not much left of it but a big hole by the time we got there (almost exactly one year to the day after 9-11) but it was still a very moving and very troubling site to behold.

As noted earlier, Candace as been paticipating in the 9-holers group and is making new friends (but they are still old). We have a reasonably active social life (as much as we can take) and enjoy the weather and environs here quite a bit, and especially the traffic which is light-years removed from the constant traffic hassels of the Seattle area.

A few years ago I got heavily into Napster and subsequently its numerous successors. My big vice this year is eBay! Be warned .. it's worse than heroin! I found myself getting up at 2 am (I just told the boss I was 'going to the bathroom') to make a 'last second' bid to try and ace out all the other idiots doing the same. Finally, I found a program (purchased on eBay, naturally) that let's me tell the computer to go and do my dirty work at 3 am while I'm soundly sleeping, counting my booty like sheep jumping over the hedge-row! Candace is ready to kill me for all the money I'm saving, since she'd rather put those dollars to a better use, like playing the PowerBall lottery (which is now the focal point of our retirement savings plan).

That about sums it up for us this year. The continuing saga of our "Casa de la Deuda" home construction site is always at our web site. I'll be adding a link for the upcoming 2003 epoch as soon as (or if) we make it that far.

If your plans bring you to the "Old Pueblo" please give us a call (520-299-5268) or drop an email to Candace (candace@quadrant-systems.com) or Mike ( mike@quadrant-systems.com) and we'll get together. Once our new house is completed, we expect all sorts of riff-raff from our past to start coming out of the woodwork, so we plan to stop answering the phone after October or so. This is your last chance. We're going to get lots of brochures from the AAA for all the local hotels.

We hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a great new year!

Remember we are all lucky to live in this beatiful country so we are counting our blessings and you should too, (even if our part of it is more beautiful than yours!)

Candace and Mike