December « 2008 « Adventures of the Tomato Family

Holiday Letter 2008

December 24, 2008

Yes, we have received a tremendous amount of snow here in Portland as the national news has reported!

We are getting around just fine in the truck, but Seth did spend 3 hours digging neighbors out on the 23rd.

Portland is ill-suited to a prolonged snow event (happens once every 5 years) due to a lack of investment in snow clearing equipment.

Celebrating after a 300 yd sled run

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We did manage to extricate the Pilot with a little more digging

The 2nd night of Chanukah

The view from Skyline Blvd - December 23, 2008

Happy sledding gals

Seth guides a crew down the long run

Dear Family and Friends,

The close of 2008 finds the Tomato Family settling in to our new home on the “mountain,” as our neighbors call it. We’re still in Portland, but we’ve moved to a much more rural area called Skyline Hamlet. The new spread is 1.3 acres, and we also have deeded access to a 2.5 acre forested preserve. There are only nine houses on our little dead-end street, and the kids can really run wild.

Seth and Amber joke about the his and hers halves of the lot. His is a lovely sod lawn upon which Seth is waging war against gophers and moles. Hers is quite a bit weedier, houses our little flock of hens (Parsley, Hope, Piplup, and Charlie Parker) in the Chicken Taj Mahal and is the future site of Amber’s organic farmette. Beryl’s angling for pygmy goats and a miniature horse. Seth’s agitating for a bird dog.

We loved our house and neighborhood on SW Vermont Street, but as the kids have grown, we’ve been talking about finding a place with more space for all of us, room to entertain our family and friends, real home office space for both Seth & Amber, storage for all our adventure gear and moving away from a relatively busy road. We mulled over moving to central Oregon but were hesitant to leave our beloved city. We were starting to get an image of what we wanted, but we weren’t quite ready to start looking.

However, Seth, who does indeed love to look at property, serendipitously found a house in NW Portland (while driving the napping kids around after a zoo visit) that seemed liked it might really meet our needs. After a lot of agonizing, Amber decided she was ready to give it a go. The stars indeed lined up, allowing us to execute on our contingent offer to some motivated sellers. Even in this tough market, we feel very fortunate that we were able to sell our place on Vermont in just one month. Not that it was all easy, of course. Most of the summer was sucked away in selling/moving activities including Amber’s amazing staging of our old house (Seth’s grateful comment J).

On August 27th, we made it into the house, barely before school started on September 3rd. Fisher is a first-grader at Skyline School, which is a fantastic, small, public, K-8 school that is working toward certification as an International Baccalaureate World School. His blended K/1 classroom has only 20 students, headed up by Mrs. Cole. Beryl continues at Little Garden Preschool, but we’ve moved her to three days a week this year since the drive takes us 30 minutes. Beryl loves being home with her Mama on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Both Seth and Amber are working from home, and believe it or not, this has been great. Seth likes having a coffee delivery girl, and Amber likes having him home for dinner! Speaking of work, Seth has a new job. As of late May he’s managing business development for EDS’ new SAP Practice for both the West and Midwest. EDS became an HP company as of August, and the corporate culture at HP is a good fit for Seth. He is thriving but also mindful of personal productivity and discipline to avoid working 60 hours/week (see 43Folders.com & David Allen’s book – Getting Things Done).

Amber continues her freelance writing. Her latest book is a graphic novel about cell biology commissioned by Capstone Press. Tentatively titled, Cells with Max Axiom, it’s due out in February and joins their popular Max Axiom book series. She also has a book on loon migration ready to go out to editors for review. There are several other books for kids in the works.

We did get in some fun this year but not as much as we usually do – just a little biking and zero camping close to home. Luckily, we got to make a trip to our cabin on Smoke Lake, which included a five-day canoe trip with Amber’s parents – great fishing and pretty good weather. The kids tromped over all the portages with nary a complaint and slept in their own tent every night. Fisher caught his first lake trout with Amber’s assistance. The kids also loved plunking worms for shiners and sunfish near cabin and camp.

We’ve mostly stuck close to home this year outside of Seth’s many business trips and our trip to Canada. Other highlights of our year included visits to Oregon by Seth’s parents in April and Seth’s sister, Bethany, which included a very fun weekend in Astoria at the coast in June. Pops and GramB got to watch Fisher play tee-ball, observe Passover with us, and help celebrate Beryl’s birthday.

Fisher mastered the bicycle this year along with his adventures in tee-ball in the spring. He likes the social aspects of team sports and has a lot of fun. Our winter exploits this year included many family trips up to Skibowl & Mt. Hood Meadows, cross-country skiing in central Oregon,and a powder ski weekend for Seth and Amber on Mt. Bachelor for their 10^th anniversary. Seth has also managed a fair number of trout and steelhead day trips on local rivers and even some duck and elk hunting this fall (he’s trying to fill up the new chest freezer in the garage).

We’re looking forward to visiting Seth’s folks in Florida in February including a search for Megalodon shark teeth on Englewood Beach. We’ve had our first rare snowstorm here and we are sure looking forward to seeing the family and enjoying the sun.

We’re hoping that this next year has a little less change and a little more peace and tranquility for our family. To that end, we’ve joined Temple Havurah Shalom and are attending quite a few of the family services on Saturday mornings. We hope that some of you might find your way to Portland. We think you will enjoy the sunsets over the Coast Range. Even the guest room has a great view of the valley and mountains! The hens promise fresh eggs, and the kids will let you race scooters down the driveway.

Much affection,

Seth, Amber, Fisher & Beryl

Amber’s website: www.amberkeyser.com

Amber blogs on books at: amberkeyser.livejournal.com

Seth blogs on family activity and posts photos here at: tomatofamilyjournal.wordpress.com

Seth’s personal blog: isenberguncertaintyprinciple.wordpress.com

Posted by sbisenberg

Filed in Uncategorized

November 2008 including Thanksgiving

December 7, 2008

The big news from November was that we hosted Thanksgiving this year. It was amazing to be surrounded by our family and friends in our now relatively new home. I apologize for the length of this album, but this has been a super month in terms of weather and we got out a fair bit. Happy Holidays to everyone and you can look for our next communication to be our holiday letter. We’ll post it here as well.