Christmas Card

Dear Family and Friends,

I (Brian) have been at Adaptive Computing for 3 years and am still loving it.  In between my software architecture and engineering responsibilities, I try to find time to play with the kids and even see Devri once in awhile.  My company even sometimes sends me to hot vacation spots such as Belarus.  This year, I've spent countless nights and weekends trying to finish the framing and electrical in the basement.  In September, Devri and I finished a room for Ethan (see below).  It didn't turn out great, but it's a room that we made with our own hands (with help of course!). We've been excited to get back to work on it again eventually.

Devri has been finding all sorts of projects and hobbies to keep her busier than ever before.  This year she's had a baby (which is a big project mind you), rotated teaching preschool for Michael and friends, joined a photography club, edited exactly 1 bazillion pictures in Photoshop, and chased both Michael and Rachel around the house all day.  She loves seeing our kids laugh and play with each other.

Michael is now 4 and is more fun than ever.  He has no fear unless we want him to show off to our friends and then he suddenly gets shy.  He has tons of friends in the neighborhood and has started to play with them all day almost every day.  I personally feel like he is very popular, but then again I don't remember having any friends at the age of 4 so I may be a bit biased.  He still loves to make people laugh, loves his little sister (see below), and loves playing Kirby on the Wii with the family.  He also started a more structured preschool this year as well as music lessons.  He often sits at the piano on his own and names the keys in Solfege, and he is always right!

We consider it a great honor and blessing to announce that this year we finally bought a roll (just one) of Press N Seal, and it felt good to live the high life for a bit.  Also, we had a baby girl who we named Rachel.  She is a redhead, much to the delight of every person that has ever seen her, but especially to the delight of her red-headed grandparents.  She is almost 11 months now and is crawling everywhere, standing up on her own, clicking her tongue a lot, and trying to grow teeth.  She loves playing with her big brother and gets lonely in the back seat of the car whenever he is not there.  We are so happy to have her in our life and count our blessings during the day when she's smiling and wonder what we were thinking at night when she's crying (just kidding, sort of).

This year Devri's brother, Ethan, moved in with us in order to maintain residency in Utah while he gets ready to go back to school at Utah State.  He is a single, white male who enjoys romantic evenings of killing zombies and long walks on the beaches of Normandy (both on the Xbox).  He is hard working, smart, and great with kids (seriously, Rachel and Michael adore him).

We are still loving Saratoga Springs and the beautiful view of the Wasatch front.  We miss and love all of our friends and family we live apart from and hope you are having a wonderful Christmas time and year.

Love, the Savilles

I made our Christmas card back in November, and they were all printed before Thanksgiving. I was ahead of the game, and feeling pretty proud of myself. And then, well who knows happened? Next thing I knew, it was a week before Christmas, and I still hadn't addressed a single envelope! I decided to do a mail merge in Office and print the envelopes on our computer. I thought it would be faster than doing it by hand. It would have been too if the printer hadn't kept "jamming" (I put that in quotes because the printer wasn't actually ever jammed. It just kept flipping out about trying to print on envelopes). Anyway, on Saturday, December 21, I enlisted Brian's help to finish printing the rest of the envelopes so we could get them in the mail. I headed off to other things, and before long, he found me and said, "Funny story. Our address is wrong on all of the ones we printed. I just caught it." So, Ethan brought us home some address labels, and we tried that route. It should have been a straightforward print job. We used the right template, but they printed wrong. An hour later, we finally got them to print correctly, and then started putting them on our envelopes. We finally got them all stuffed and ready, and we were off to the post office. A half hour of standing in line later, I madly put the stamps on them and dropped them in the mailbox. And amazingly, I think most people got them before Christmas. Whew! At least we got them out before Flag Day!

And, we got our neighbor presents all ready to go before Christmas, but we'll be delivering them today. Oh well. At least we did something this year for our amazing neighbors.