7 Harbor Road Morganville, NJ 07751 19 December 2007 2007 Seasons Greetings from Suzanne and Rod: This was a quiet year for big trips. We spent more time at home, doing the typical homeowner maintenance. Rod had multiple sessions using his USAFI training on plumbing, "fixing", then fixing again the drains from the kitchen sink that had worked without problem for over 25 years since his installation of them with the dishwasher (which also needed a new belt to stop the comments about housing a banshee). The painting of wood shingles and trim was outsourced, but some preliminary carpentry work on rotted window sills and replacing shingles were done by Rod, with Suzanne watching from the ground and chanting "don't fall". More work is still needed to discourage new tenants of the eaves - carpenter bees and bats. Suzanne did manage a trip to Washington, DC for a NAWBO function in February and a flight to Cleveland in July for a speaking engagement and Janell visited in April, but Rod's first trip was a long road trip at the end of May. The annual NAWBO convention was in early June in Atlanta this time, so rock shops in NC and northern GA were the prime emphasis on the bead/cabochon hunting trail for 2007. We did the tourist thing in Asheville, NC on the way to Atlanta, moving from rock shop to rock shop along the highway. In Atlanta, while Suzanne was doing whatever NAWBOs do, Rod visited as many downtown BBQ joints as he could find, and took a guided tour of downtown. He didn't find much use for the long list of buildings and statues, but he really enjoyed the fact that the tour transportation was Segways. It wasn't the same type of 2-wheel transport he remembers from his college days, but it was lots more fun sneaking up behind pedestrians on the sidewalks. After Atlanta, the Carr family reunion on the banks of the Calcasieu river in Moss Bluff, LA was the next scheduled destination, but we managed to find a couple of stopovers on the way. One was a new national park in northern Alabama that we had not noticed before, that turned out to apparently be an old state park that was just renamed the Little River Canyon National Park & Preserve. The other was the airline unclaimed luggage sales in Scottsboro, AL. New Zealand was better. Regular readers of this missive will note that, to this point, no objectionable four letter words have been mentioned. This is your spoiler alert: read no further if you are a normal person and likely to be offended by repeated use of the b*** word. As you might guess, Suzanne is still a bead cultist. They appear everywhere - Rod wears a mask in bed to avoid silicosis from excessive inhalation of beads. He has ordered multiple pairs of new hiking shoes, since the deeper tread is necessary to provide surer footing and some counter to the ball-bearing action from spills. The mailbox required repair due to excessive weight of mailings from EBay of cabochons to serve as raw material. The postman will no longer take Express Mail packages from here, likely due to suspicions about all the heavy little packages he has to deliver on a regular basis. Even on a one day outing, Suzanne leaves no bead behind. An outing to walk the canal path along the Delaware in New Hope, PA led to her selling several necklaces to a store owner who noticed what she was wearing and inquired about it. Naturally, as a committed entrepreneur, she "just happened to have" a box of her product in the trunk of the car, so the day ended with a positive cash flow and was a "success", even if Rod had to spend an hour sitting outside the store in the cold while they negotiated. After 39 years, he knows to carry a SF paperback everywhere, so the time was not a complete loss. In October, Suzanne went from beads to seeds. She organized a local NAWBO event called S.E.E.D. (Supporting Emerging Entrepreneur's Development) which involved mailing out seed packets containing seeds for the money plant printed with the event details. The event was a cross between American Idol and The Apprentice with the audience voting on business plans and three new entrepreneurs each winning a goods and services package worth $10,000. Current plans are for a winter road trip at the end of January to Tucson, AZ, so Suzanne can stock up wholesale on rocks at an annual Gem & Mineral Show at the beginning of February. The new hiking shoes will come in handy then, in case Rod has to walk home, because of excessive purchasing of cabochons and other holey objects. We wish you a happy and prosperous 2008. Suzanne and Rod web pages: Rods home page at http://home.att.net/~rod.pease/ Suzanne's business home page at www.ampersandgraphics.com Kevin's business home page at http://www.ceruleanstimuli.com/ email: Rods email: rod.pease@att.net Suzanne's email: spease@ampersandgraphics.com Kevin's email: kwpease@comcast.net