A Christmas Message from Bill and Ava Frisinger, December 2000
The
lead story this year is the wedding of our daughter Diane to Scott
It
was a beautiful Summer wedding in an idyllic Northwest setting.
It was in a park at the base of Rattlesnake Ridge on the shore of a small
lake. The weather was beautiful, if
a little hot for those wearing tuxes. We
share Diane’s excitement at finding such a wonderful young man.
One of the interesting sidelights of the wedding was the person who
conducted the service. It was Ron Sims, a Baptist minister, better known to many as
the King County Executive. It was
Diane’s idea and she is the one who asked him.
He did a wonderful job and was very modest. When he was asked what church he had, he just said that he
was a chaplain and did not have a church of his own.
He never mentioned what his day job was.
You
can get to Scott and Diane’s web page from a link in ours, www.frisinger.net
The
runner up story is the Boeing Strike. We were out for about 40 days. The Company
did not think we could pull it off. We had our doubts also. It was
as successful as any strike is. We ended up with a contract with no give backs.
The main benefit was that we now have a credible threat. A major cause of
the strike was general dissatisfaction with the way the company has been run
since the merger with McDonald Douglas. The company seems more intent on
short term money making schemes then making airplanes. Of course engineers
inherently have a more balanced view of the problem then management (management
in St. Louis particularly).
Grandchildren are of course a central part of our lives. I was teaching Kaleigh how to snow board last winter. I am a novice on the thing my self. It looks like this winter she will probably get better than me. If she gets too good I will switch to my skis. I should be able to keep up with her for a few more years that way.
Last summer I started Joshua hiking and will do some cross country skiing with him this Fall. He loves hikes but gets tired and cranky the way kids his age do. It takes a careful balance to get the proper length hike.
Ava is really coming into her own as Mayor.
Next year her term will be up. She
is tentatively planning on running for one more term.
Two terms are a tradition in Issaquah.
I
took 2 trips to David Whitaker’s Island in Georgian Bay in Lake 
Huron.
Ava accompanied me on the second one.
The big job this year was to work on the harbor.
The lake was very low which meant both that the harbor was excessively
shallow and the sea wall was well exposed making it an excellent time to work on
it. Physical labor is good for a change but I sure would
not want a steady diet of it, especially at my age.
Ava and Diane attended the wedding of our niece
Suzanne MacDougall and Rob Avila October 4th in Schaumburg Illinois.
The next day they went to see Diane’s good friend Teresa and celebrate her
triplet daughters 2nd birthday.
It was about a 400 mile trip a third of it thought the first snow of the
year.
I moved down
to Lancaster California in late April to work on the flight test for the Boeing Joint Strike
Fighter, JSF,
or X32. (Video,
Pictures)
In theory I would be
done in California by the end of the year then would spend a few months at Pax
River Maryland to finish up the program.
I will still spend a few months in Maryland to finish up but it may be
this fall before that happens.
The
work is very interesting. I am
working at Edwards Air Force
Base, which
is the main Air Force test facility, so
I am surrounded with all kinds of aircraft.
B1,
B2, B52,
F22,
F14,
F16, F18,
F117, T38,
C5, C17,
X35 (our competition), V22
(Osprey), XC10
and the Global
Hawk,
are normal things to see. There
are 3 SR71’s around that
NASA uses. For
more interesting fare I have watched the Shuttle land and then
take off aboard
the 747. It looks like quite a
load. (As a side note, I
earlier worked on the horizontal tail of the 747 that carried the space shuttle) also saw the
X38 land while
it was hanging from the largest parafoil in the world.
It is being developed as an escape module for the space station.
I
have taken an opportunity to grow spiritually while down here.
I have joined the Apostolic Shepherd Fold Church.
It is a Pentecostal church which believes in the Oneness of God.
That basically means that they view the Trinity as revisionist theology.
I now view two hour services as the norm and if we get on a roll, it can
easily be three, even for the Wednesday evening service.
My
favorite book of the year was The Shipping News by Annie Proulx.
It was highly recommended by both Ava and Diane as well as a diverse
collection of friends. It is a simple story told in a very interesting way with the
most unusual sentence structure I have seen in ages. Being Mayor has kept Ava quite busy but she has gotten
some reading in. Her favorite is
any from the Patrick O’Brian British Naval series set in the time of the
Napoleonic Wars. It is a 20 book
series so even Ava has not gotten through them all.
Rob and Amber’s favorite is Deep South by Nevada Barr. The protagonist in this series, Anna Pigeon, is a law
enforcement officer with the National Park Service.
The books are always passed around the family for all to read.
My granddaughter, Kaleigh, feels Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
is the best one she has read. Diane
found both comfort and enjoyment in Take Your Time, Finding Balance in a Hurried
World by Eknath Easwaran a book that teaches the beginning steps to meditation.
Ava
and I currently have different e-mail addresses. Mine is bill@frisinger.net
and Ava’s is ava@frisinger.net
. Our web page is: www.frisinger.net
We have not
ever enclosed a picture of our house so I took the liberty to do it
this year. If you look closely you
will see the small house in back on the right that Rob and Amber
lived in when they first got married. We
thought it was great having them so close but they felt a little cramped having
a family of 4 in a one bedroom house. I do think that is a record for the
house. If
you look very close you may see the cat walk on the right side of the house that
the cats use to get to the cat door in the upstairs window.
Wishing
you all the best in this Holy Season.
May
God’s Love be with you now and throughout the year.
Yours,
Rev 8/7/15