Christmas Time!

I'm going to cheat a bit, and first post the letter Jason wrote to include in our Christmas cards this year:

Greetings!

This has been a very full year for the newly established Baxter family. The largest event of the year was our wedding. We were able to introduce many members of Steph’s family to the joys of Utah. Rumors have been passed along that many of them will consider visiting again. We had perfect weather not only for the wedding and reception in UT, but for the WI reception as well. It was a great time, with both of our families finally getting to meet each other.

Steph and I then took a week-long honeymoon trip through California. We visited several well recognized places including Yosemite National Park, Sequoia National Park, Lake Tahoe, and the Golden Gate Bridge, just to name a few. We started calling it our “tour of trees”, after seeing Redwoods, Sequoias, Pinyon Pines, and even Joshua trees. For those who aren’t familiar, Joshua trees grow in the desert and look like something from a Dr. Seuss book. We took in a Vegas show on the way home, and ended the trip by arriving back in Utah with enough time to attend the annual Baxter family reunion. After a few thousand miles of driving, our back-ends were tired of sitting, and we were ready to be out of the car for a while. Luckily, we took a plane to Wisconsin for the second wedding reception and time with Steph’s family. My family, however, elected to drive to Wisconsin for the second half of the wedding month extravaganza. They did their best to stop at all the scenic points of interest, and had several planned detours on their route. They managed to put over 5,000 miles on the minivan in a few short weeks. They are looking forward to slower-paced future visits to the Midwest.

Despite my best efforts at delaying the inevitable, we added a cat to our household this year. We are now the proud owners of a 1 ½ year-old orange polydactyl (extra toes) tabby cat, who came to us with the name Kiki. She will play fetch with twist ties, which is her most interesting trick. She also occasionally races around the house, drifting around linoleum corners, and making frightening velcro noises on the carpet with her 24 claws. She has been entertaining to have around, and will probably get to stay.

Steph went on her first caving trip that required the use of ropes this year. On the upside, she enjoyed herself. On the downside, she may enjoy the climbing and rope work more than the actual cave exploration. I will have to see if I can further enlighten her. In other caving news, this year I was awarded a paid contract to work for the National Forest Service locating caves and other geologic features of interest in the Ashley National Forest. This should help cover the weekend costs of my chosen sport in the upcoming year. I was also called out to help with my first cave rescue effort this fall. I’ve found that 2am phone calls are rarely a good thing, and this event did not end well. It was a very sobering reminder of how fragile life can be, and how grateful I am to have our families to spend time with this holiday season.

The final topic of note from this year is Steph’s epic house projects. She repainted most of the basement, created a guest room, and turned the majority of the basement into actual usable space. She also decided that the sad-looking lawn around the house needed to be fixed and ended up tilling and reseeding the entire lawn over the course of the year. There were also several smaller projects like replacing bark/mulch in the flower beds, and establishing an area for next year’s garden. Now we just need to wait out the snow, and progress can be made again in the spring. I would like to be able to claim more than a supporting role in these projects, but most of them were accomplished almost entirely by Steph. My biggest contributions were purchasing the house a few years ago, driving the truck to deliver a tiller to our yard, and occasionally running a shovel/wheelbarrow.

The coming year should bring new adventures for both of us. We will start the year with our first visit to WI since the wedding (January 6th-12th) which will be my first trip to WI during the winter months. Additionally we are both approaching the end of our Master’s degrees in school, and excited to see what married life is like without dysfunctional school and work schedules.

We hope this letter finds all of you happy and healthy. Best wishes for a safe holiday season and a wonderful beginning to 2010!

Jason and Stephanie Baxter