Happy Holidays from the Kaubells

We begin with some touching haiku:

     Hobbies, work, and food;
         TiVo and reclining couch.
     Not much else to say.

That said, we can elaborate just a bit.  Now that Matt's 50th birthday has come and gone, let's start with some talk about illnesses!  Holly had long-dreaded gum surgery.  Matt had some gut pains.  All is well now.  On the more serious side, Holly's sister had a serious heart attack (!), but she's doing amazingly well now. 

Holly finished her post-doc this summer, and now has a research position at the Center for Social Work Research at the University of Texas.  She's doing research on prostitution, domestic violence, and sexual assault.  Together with her buddy Noël, she is starting up an Institute on Violence Against Women and just landed a three-year, $120,000 start up grant.  She also does training around the state for Child Protective Services workers, and is on the planning committees for two national conferences.

Matt survived recent large-scale layoffs at AMD and continues to work there and on the theorem proving software he has co-authored, ACL2.  The third ACL2 workshop was in France this year, and Matt went there in April and took a cool side-trip to Germany to visit step-brother Brian and his family (wow, Will has grown into a great kid!).  A new release of ACL2 in November was a highlight for Matt; that took a lot of effort.

We traveled a lot this year in addition to the above trip to Europe.  In January we attended our friend Jacqui's wedding in Miami Beach.  Later we took 3 trips to the Northwest:  two to Port Townsend, WA for our friend Otter's wedding and then to visit our friend Freida, and a third to Olympia for Matt's step-dad's 85th birthday, which involved a reunion with the family. Holly’s training sometimes allows fun side trips, like Galveston just to hang out, and Las Cruces to visit our friends Martha and Shaun and eat green chile.  She also took a trip to San Diego to present at a conference, and was joined by Matt for visits to their friends Marion and Richard and to Matt's dad.

Holly’s mom continues to do well in the same personal care home and she and Holly go out to movies, shopping, dinner, or whatever on a regular basis, sometimes with Matt and/or Holly's brother.  

We continue playing music for contra dances.  We also performed in the Social Work Talent Show and once for several of Matt's colleagues from work.  Matt took some piano lessons early in the year and after a lot of practice, got decent at a long (13 page) piece, "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue."  We also continue our meditation group and Holly in her quilting group.  Matt has been playing more tennis, though not necessarily getting much better.

This has gotten long.  The bottom line is that our buddy Kurt pointed us to TiVo, a digital video recorder (and more), and now we revel in the glories of selective TV watching (with no commercials!) on our reclining couch most every evening.  Life is good!

We wish you an excellent 2003.
                                                                      Holly  and  Matt