Letter 2004 -- Pat'n'Steph

	We celebrated New Year's this year the same as last year, with our old friend Noam. Since travelling around Amsterdam is difficult and a little dangerous on New Year's Eve (because they stop running the public transportation and wild teenagers are busy with lots of firecrackers), Noam comes over at dinner time, and we have a nice meal and do a lot of talking (and a little internetting), and then go out to see what people are doing around midnight. This year, we went out to watch a lot of semi-professional fireworks that someone had set up on a bridge over one of the canals. Very nice, and good cheer among those gathered there.
Murphy	This year we spent most of the year cat sitting for Murphy. It almost seems hard to believe right now that he was here, even though he's only been gone (back to his owners) for a few months. The other thing we did most of this year was take Spanish lessons. Both of us took Spanish in high school, but we decided to start over at the beginning. This worked pretty well, and we got good and warmed up for our summer vacation.
	We have some friends who live near Nice, and we planned our vacation this year around their wedding. There was record heat this summer, and this was in the midst of it. We left Amsterdam and took a leisurely two days to drive down to Spain. First we spent a couple of days in Girona, and then the rest of the week on Las Ramblas in Barcelona. While the Dutch can be quite eager to switch back to English when trying to speak Dutch with them, the Spanish were very patient listening and replying to us in Spanish. After Spain, it was off to St. Paul de Vence for a long weekend and wedding festivities. We got a very nice tour of the market in Nice, and it was good to see people I hadn't worked with in a while.	Barcelona
Grapevines in Tuscany	Then it was off to Italy, Tuscany to be specific. The unexpected thing Steph enjoyed was looking at the wine producing grapevines up close. We have a grapevine covering the front of our house. It used to go up the middle, but this year we rerouted it to run under the windows. We started a garden in earnest at the end of 2002 by planting lots of bulbs in the fall, and then myriad vegetables in the spring. The bulbs have already started coming up with their leaves for this year. There's no exact count of the number of tubs of dirt we had things growing out of, but we harvested tomatoes, zucchini, green beans, peas, snow peas, bell peppers, anaheim peppers and jalapeños. We'd been craving some decent Mexican food, and it seems the only way to get it was to grow it ourselves. Steph's colleague Juan took our harvest of jalpeños home to his mom in Antwerp, and she made the most killer pickled jalapeños we've ever had. At the end of August, Murphy the cat went home. The house sure seemed empty after that. For days we kept wondering momentarily where he was.	fritillaria imperialis rubra
	For Steph, summer vacation was the last bit of free time she had for the rest of the year. A new major release of software at work for The Netherlands, followed by the deployment for Austria kept her average work week between 50 and 60 hours. Though we didn't get to see much of it, we both spent most of November in Vienna. Steph's grandmother died while we were on summer vacation. The memorial service was in September. While there were of course the somber aspects of the event, it was also an opportunity for everyone to get together. It was the first time in years that Steph got to see all her cousins in the same place at the same time. And all their partners, and all their kids.   December is hibernation month in a lot of ways. Work for Steph slowed down and she got to be a homebody Christmas week and do not much for the end of the year. We also took a couple of long weekends just to see other parts of the country. One weekend we went up to Texel, which is an island in the North Sea at the top of Holland. Another weekend we went to Epe, which is in the woods in the east of the counry. One of the reasons for this kind of little trip is to scope out some land to buy for some gardening or a summer home.	Jessica, Alena and Byron
Tomatoes, with peppers in the background	So here we are at the end of January, at the beginning of our 14th year in Amsterdam. Pat's planning for the garden this year is well under way. A new friend has a yard just right for some experimenting, and the seeds Pat's ordered to plant this year have started arriving. Steph's passed the 40th birthday hurdle, and it was only a big deal for a little while. All Steph's overtime from last year is getting paid out in days, and so we're off for a trip to Chile, with mornings to be spent in Spanish class in Santiago. We'll have about a week to do a little travelling about as well after the course finishes up. I hope that catches everyone up a bit on what we're up to. Pat and Steph