Christmas Greetings 2011!

Dear friends and family,

     We had a very good 2011, and hope that you did as well!

     Dan is still working at Intel; he has now spent over 11 years at the company.  That time has certainly flown by!   This year, he had a significant change of job responsibilities within Intel.  Previously, Dan was the Product Line Marketing Manager for platform components across the Intel Xeon product line.  He is now the engineering Program Manager responsible for development of all Intel Xeon E3 platforms, which are used in entry servers and workstations.  This move has reconnected Dan with his engineering roots, and it has been a good change so far.

     Nancy is still working part time as a microbiologist at the Capital Medical Center in Olympia.  She continues to stay quite busy with her volunteer activities at World Vision and at the county’s Community Youth Services, for which she helps to cook a monthly dinner for foster kids attending the organization’s life skills lectures.  While those activities are going quite well, she is continuing to lose the battle against weeds and other afflictions in our landscape….

     In April, both of us participated in a World Vision charitable project trip to Tijuana.  The trip was a worthwhile experience that had a lot of impact on us.  We visited three communities and helped make improvements to their community facilities.  The communities we visited were desperately poor, with "houses" built out of salvaged materials such as garage doors, no heat, and no potable running water.  Yet the people were very hard working and very willing to come together to help their community progress.  World Vision is very smart and efficient in how they provide aid.  Rather than just showering aid on the communities, World Vision assists the communities to help themselves and to achieve self-sufficiency.  After the trip, we decided to sponsor two children from the Tijuana communities.  You can learn more about World Vision’s efforts here:   WorldVision.org



Here's Nancy on the bucket brigade, pouring a concrete slab to expand a community's health clinic.  No cement mixers here!



Here's Dan, just after scoring a goal, playing soccer with the kids in one of the Tijuana communities

     Our fun travel for the year included our late-winter trip to our timeshare in Park City, Utah for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing; a Memorial Day weekend trip to the Washington D.C. area where Dan’s sister lives; a trip to Boston over Labor Day weekend to visit Nancy’s family; Thanksgiving in Pittsburgh to cook for Dan’s family; and a week on Oahu.  While we have visited most of the other Hawaiian Islands, this was our first trip to Oahu.  We took the opportunity while there to visit with Dan’s cousins Angie and Darren and Angie’s boyfriend Bryce.  Angie blogged about one of our dinners in Honolulu; you can read about it here:   Aloha Yinz Mangia

Diamond Head, as seen from Waikiki Beach

Sunset on the beach at Ko'Olina, near our resort

     Dan’s business travel is somewhat less in his new job role, but still significant.  He will have flown about 55,000 miles, stayed about 90 nights in hotels, and rented 48 cars in 2011.  These are actually lower figures than other recent years!  Dan’s business destinations are somewhat different in the new role.  He had his first trips to Israel & Poland, as well as a return trip to Germany and the usual U.S. trips to various computer companies.

Headed home:  Sunset over the Rockies from 35,000 feet, flying from Denver to Seattle

     In addition to our ongoing hobbies of cooking, restaurants, and running, Dan is revisiting golf.  Dan took a series of golf lessons and upgraded his 35-year-old clubs in preparation for a company event at Chambers Bay, site of the 2015 U.S. Open.  It was well worth the dozen or so lost balls to experience this beautiful, but very difficult, links course….  Dan has also volunteered to interview local high school students who are applying to MIT.

     Best wishes for a merry Christmas, and a healthy and prosperous 2012!

          -- Dan & Nancy

All photos and text (C) Daniel & Nancy Perich, 2011