John K. Davis, Executive Director

Happy Holidays!

This season is permeated with emotion, activity, travel, friends and family, memories, hope, and spiritual stirrings.

I attended the annual party at Carol Angel’s home this year—a gathering of friends to share a potluck meal followed by singing traditional carols. Everyone had a good time.

Janet and I also enjoyed a dinner cruise on San Diego Bay with friends during the annual Parade of Lights (a parade of boats decorated for the season on the bay). We had a great meal and had fun dancing. The parade was beautiful. The San Diego skyline is awesome!

My son, Matthew, his daughter, Logan, my other son, Jared, and his fiancée, Tina, are visiting for a few days. We are having a good visit. My ex-wife, Valerie, and her friend, Jim, will be joining us this afternoon for Christmas dinner and an evening of song and celebration.

We have friends who are dealing with potentially terminal illness and others who have suffered devastating loss. Our thoughts are with them.

We also are excitedly awaiting the arrival of baby Lauren Grace who we hope will be born in a couple of weeks. Janet and I will be traveling to Holland, Michigan, to be with Stephanie and her family in anticipation of the blessed event.

The tears and laughter of the season surround us and we participate in it all. We wish the best for you and yours in the New Year.

New Year, Get Organized!

Are you ready to get organized for a new year? One of the most powerful organization tools that I depend on every day is Nelson Email Organizer.

NEO is an Outlook plug-in that automatically organizes ALL of your email in a way that is both powerful and simple. Email is huge in my daily activities and it is hard for me to imagine how I handled it all before NEO. If you get more than 25 email messages a day, NEO will save you significant time while making any email message instantly accessible and it does this automatically, with no effort on your part.

For the month of December NEO is being offered at a 25% discount with greater discounts (up to 60%) for selected volume purchases. Click on the NEO ad in the left column and check it out.

Wallet Flash Drive

Finally, a USB Flash Drive that is truly easy to keep handy. Wallet Flash™--the world's first wallet friendly credit card sized USB Flash Drive! It is made of double laminated unbreakable plastic, it combines a great memory (up to 2 GB) in a slim body, providing speedy availability of large volumes of information on a chic and durable platform.

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Catching Up

The past few months have been a rush. My computer's motherboard fried mid-October. It took awhile to diagnose the problem and the repair required building a new computer system. Reloading all of my software, configuring it and organizing my data in a new more elegant way has been time consuming, but I took advantage of the opportunity to upgrade most of my hardware. I love the new system.

We visited Stephanie and her family early in November for a week. We had a great time. Here is a short movie showing Jamison at his karate lesson:

Download Karate Game Action

The game involved whacking someone with a foam staff. When you get whacked you have to stop playing the game and do a kata before you can resume whacking people.

By the time we got home from Michigan we had only a week to prepare for Thanksgiving. We did something special this year--we invited members of the military who where away from home for the holiday. The news media found out about our plans and interviewed Janet for the local NBC affiliate's evening news. I recorded it on our TiVo. Here is the clip:

Download Janet's news interview aired on November 23, 2005, at 5:00 PM on KNSD 7/39

Thanksgiving day was a lot of fun. It worked out that we picked up five Navy sailors at 10:00 AM that morning. We returned to Brittany Tower where three twenty-pound turkeys were roasting and too many side dishes were in the final stages of being prepared. We had six pies for dessert and wine, cold brew, soft drinks and juices to drink. Joan came two days early to assist with the preparations, so the cooking had begun the day before.