December 22
A Christmas 1998 Message from the Frisingers
The lead story this year is that Diane is now a home owner with all the excitement and burdens that entails. The Seattle real-estate market is not one that is very conducive to first time home buyers so Diane in conjunction with her boy friend Scott Lindstrand found a house about 20 miles east of us in the foothills of the Cascades. The house is 4 years old and is in a development south east of North Bend. Since it is about 1000 feet above sea level as well as being farther from the ocean, the weather will definitely be cooler. The address and phone number are: 42206 SE 167th St. North Bend WA 98045. 425-888-5594
Scott is, of course, another addition to the extended family. He and Diane have been dating about a year now. Scott is a very solid, reliable person, and a good match for Diane. (Not that any matches are specifically planned you understand.) Scott manages a tow truck company in Bellevue.
Our
grand children, Kaleigh and Joshua are doing well.
Kaleigh has been taking violin lessons for about 9 months and is very
much enjoying it. She is fascinated
with the music of Vivaldi and that inspired her to take up the violin.
Joshua,
who will be two January 16th ,is just starting to get verbal and it
can be really entertaining. He was
looking at a book that had a bunch of pictures of dinosaurs in it.
While looking at a picture of a brontosaurus eating plants he commented
"Bite Chew". When a later picture featured a tyrannosaurus rex eating a
brontosaurus, he extended this sentence to be " Bite
Chew Ouch
Oh-Oh"
Ava
is staying very busy as Mayor. This
"part time" job is taking about 50 hours a week. She very much enjoys the challenges of the job.
It gives her a real chance to make important contributions to the city,
both in the way the city as a community develops and the way the city as an
organization of employees functions as an integral unit.
She is now on the other side of the executive/legislative fence so that
has given her some frustrations but ones shared by people in governmental
executive positions everywhere. In
the private sector, the executive team is charged with both setting policy and
carrying it out. (The board of directors is nominally the policy arm but they
are typically very weak) In
government, these two responsibilities are normally separated.
Being
the husband of the mayor clearly has some problems that being the wife of one
does not. It would be a very bad
spot for a "traditional" husband or one with low self esteem.
There is often a certain level of good natured kidding such as asking
what is my title?. I think "first gentleman of Issaquah" is a good
one.
You
have no doubt heard about the layoffs at Boeing.
Where I am working, the problem is not layoffs but excessive overtime.
I have been working 50 plus hours for a couple of months straight
although it has recently come to a halt. No
more is planned but the last spate of it was not planned either so it is bound
to come up again. Morale is
rumored to be problem elsewhere in the company but not in the Joint Strike
Fighter (JSF) group. We have an
airplane to build in 1999 and to fly in 2000 and we will be very busy doing
that. There is some anxiety over where the airplane will be built
if we win it, but I plan to retire before that becomes an issue so it is not one
for me.
Ava's
favorite book this year was Birdsong by Sebastion Faulks, a horribly graphic but
very moving beautifully written book about World War One. Mine was Into Thin Air by Seattle author Jon Krakauer.
It might also be described as " horribly graphic" but the other
adjectives would probably be more like "exciting and well written"
I would not recommend it to the spouses of climbers.
Rev 6/11/02