2009 Year In Review

If you read this blog all year long, you'll find nothing new here, but just in case you haven't caught all of them this year, here's the very condensed 2009 King Year In Review!

Happy Holidays to our Family & Friends!

2009 was another busy year for us!  Our year started and ended in North Dakota where Nathan continues winter work with Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  In between, we visited a combined eighteen states plus the District of Columbia.

Amber continues working for IBM, where she leads teams in the U.S. and China.  She completed her Project Management Professional (PMP) training in May and filed her first patent the same month.  Amber is taking her office on the road and is working remotely full-time as of November.

Nathan worked at Pipestone National Monument over the summer.  The work was both challenging and enlightening.  The site is used today as it was in generations past, for the collection of a sacred stone used for making smoking pipes.  You can learn more about Pipestone and its significance on the web at www.nps.gov/pipe.

Amber spent a long 4th of July weekend in Colorado with her friend Sara, where they visited Rocky Mountain NP, Garden of the Gods, and saw the famous Greeley Stampede rodeo.  Yee haw!

The most fun we had this year was going to the Eastern U.S. to attend Amber’s sister Samantha’s wedding in North Carolina in October.  Along the way, we visited Chicago for a live taping of Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me and got to meet the cast, then headed to Gettysburg NMP, Washington D.C., Shenandoah NP, Blue Ridge Parkway, Appomattox Court House NHS, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania NMP, Moores Creek NB, Great Smoky Mountains NP, and Mammoth Cave NP.  We hiked to the top of the two tallest mountains in Shenandoah, down into the longest cave in the world, and walked the hallowed grounds of Civil War battlefields.  Our favorite hike was to Ramsey Cascades in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

In July, Nathan’s mom passed away from complications of multiple myeloma.  She was 53.  Nathan misses her every day and thinks of her often.  We are grateful for the continuing love and support of our friends and families.

Next year, we will be moving to Kansas for at least half of the year.  Nathan was hired for a permanent status job at Fort Larned National Historic Site, a well-preserved fort along the Santa Fe Trail.  We plan to sell our house in Minnesota in 2010.

We wish everyone a happy holiday season and a great 2010.

Amber and Nathan at Ramsey Cascades

New Year

This is my first post of the New Year and it's already January 18th. That should tell you how busy the year's been already!

I have mixed feelings about 2009. The promise of new beginnings is still there, just like any year, but this one is already tainted with media rumors of the worst recession since the Great Depression and massive jobs loss. At IBM, they're only predicting a 4% reduction of staff, but at a company of 386,000 employees, that's a whopping 16,000 people. The ax should drop sometime in the next two weeks. Lucky for us, that's no where near what some other tech companies are reporting. For instance, Microsoft may cut 17% and no one seems very excited about the new Windows 7.0.

On the good news front, since the year rolled over, my 401K losses don't seem as depressing. I've only lost 5% since the beginning of the year, instead of 37.94%. My bi-weekly commute to North Dakota now costs me $30-40 one way instead of the $60 it did last year. Best of all, people are not buying useless things like the one-click butter cutter or faux sky lights that seem to exist only to clutter our houses and hurt the environment.

As for me, I plan to tackle my pocketbook by living a little more sustainably. Nathan and I are ordering a vegetarian cook-book to reduce our meat consumption and I'm pondering buying this, which will turn my bike into exercise equipment and a small power generator. I think it's going to be a good year.