BJ & TJ at Large: Update

Thanks for the update, Kris. Glad your employment opportunities are looking up. Amazing that you & Ann are together. Say hi for me.

We--BJ, my son Nick and I--visited Catherine Napier this summer. She's doing great, tho I think the big house on Long Island may be getting to be difficult for her. She was having problems with basement flooding when we were there. She has a wonderful painting of great-grandfather Napier crossing the finish line in a sailboat race somewhere long ago.

Catherine in front of lavender fields near her home.

BJ, Ted, Catherine, and Nick

I didn't realize how long it had been since we touched base. When we were moved to a newly-created group, my manager at QWEST said to just move to Seattle & by the time the dust settles I'll just be the guy in Seattle. So i did. I drove there over the weekend & showed up at the guard's desk on Monday & asked him if I could look through the directory. I started at "A" & called a friend, David Aho, and asked if he had any empty desks around him. He offered me his--said he always worked from home. So i worked there for 2 years & lived aboard a sailboat on Lake Union.

At the start of the 2nd winter, I realized I couldn't handle another dark, damp winter & transferred myself to Ft Collins where BJ lived. Then my folks needed help, so i transferred myself to a QWEST service garage in Brainerd, MN & we lived with them up at the lake for the summer, sent them home in the fall & stayed into the winter. One day, when it was 30 below, I got a phone call from my manager offering me a package. I took it. I wasn't pension-eigible anyway, so a year's salary & benefits looked mighty good. That took me to age 64, so i took social insecurity & here I am. We fired up the old '76 motorhome--literally--by lighting 2 charcoal fires under it & drove to Florida. We've been living in it ever since, spending summers at the lake in MN with my folks & winters in Florida.

I haven't worked--just a little volunteering. My QWEST web development was highly specialized--accessing & linking legacy systems with web tools--so the corporate setting is the only place it could be applied & I'm not going back. So we're living off soc security & savings & trying to live cheap. There was a point at which I might have been able to go back & update one of my apps at QWEST, but they never really offered & i didn't pursue it. At some point I may have to put BJ to work. She's a massage therapist & yoga instructor. We got married on the beach in FL last winter.

We sailed to Haiti this spring with a boat full of relief supplies and a solar system we installed on a school. That was a once-in-a-lifetime trip.