Dispatch 961223
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The aliens have landed! What we mistakenly assumed was a singular creature, washed up on our earthen shore (see last dispatch) was actually an advance scout. Sightings have been numerous all over the world, including here at home base where they have threatened to overwhelm us. But we must be strong. Together we can fight back! Together we can have our independenceACK!

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Leap Year 1996 was indeed a momentous year for Jill and I. As many of you saw for yourselves, we made our commitment to each other official on Leap Day. We thank so many of you for taking the time to attend the wedding (which wasn't easy, we know, being on a Thursday), and we're sorry that some of you were unable to make it. As Jill has said, "It was so fun, I'd like to do it again." Perhaps we shouldn't go that far, but we are contemplating a possible party every four years to celebrate our anniversary. We at least have three years to think about that one. For our honeymoon, we flew to Italy. The only reservations we had were a rental car at the airport and a return ticket ten days later. Struggling along on my three semesters of Italian from college, we managed to see a fair amount of the country (we kept a diary, and a trip report, similar to the one we did for Costa Rica, is forthcoming).

Our wedding wasn't the only eventful thing in our lives this year, however. Right during all the planning in January and February, Jill changed jobs. She now works for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is operated by the Battelle Memorial Institute for the U.S. Department of Energy, where she is the Pollution Prevention Coordinator. It is similar work to her role at Westinghouse Hanford, except now she has a management that believe in Pollution Prevention. It's challenging stuff, especially in these times of government cutbacks. She says, “Don’t worry--I am spending your tax dollars wisely!”

I'm still working for Foster Wheeler Environmental. In 1995, I spent most of my time shuttling back and forth to Bellevue, Washington (a suburb of Seattle); in 1996, I've taken to spending almost half my working time in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where I'm assisting the Project Planning & Controls section of the Waste Management Program. It's strange, because I think Jill and I saw more of each other before we were married. I'm hoping that this situation will end soon (in a good way), although I am already anticipating at least two more trips out there in 1997.

Outside of work, we continue to stay busy as well. Jill just finished teaching her first college class. She and a co-teacher taught "Introduction to Pollution Prevention" at the Washington State University Branch campus here in the Tri-Cities this past semester. She liked it enough that she has already volunteered to teach another next fall. My major extracurricular activity is the many World Wide Web pages that I've developed (for those of you with access, the home URL from which you can find all these is at http://www.owt.com/users/gcox/).

In pet news, we rescued a cat from the Humane Society in February. Following the death of Megaera last year, we had decided not to get another cat. However, noticing that Ashbless (the cat we obtained in Los Angeles) was incredibly lonely, we decided to go to the pound and see what they had. When we went in, we were determined not to take a kitten, because kittens are usually adopted. What we wanted to do was to rescue a cat that maybe wouldn't have been adopted by anyone else. We made up some rules as to the cat we would adopt: it needed to be a female, at least two years old, spayed, and declawed in the front. That was where we planned to start from, and if we found a cat that didn't match the criteria, we could negotiate from there. But when we stated our wants to the clinic worker, she said, "Oh. Then you want Melwood." We call her Morgan le Fay. As soon as we got her home, she walked up to Ashbless, sniffed his nose, checked out the entire house, went into the utility room and ate from his bowl, used his litter box, then went and sat in his favorite spot. He sat in the living room while all of this was happening, looking up at us as if to say, "I wasn't that lonely!" There were some rough times between the two (Morgan's spayed, but the vet who did it missed a portion of her ovaries, and she still goes into heat in the spring), but now they seem to be good buddies.

Elaine and Linda's “grandhorse,” Rogue, is in fine condition, if a little bit fuzzy these days due to the bone-chilling temperatures that we are experiencing this year. At the beginning of the year, when the floods that swept over much of the eastern cascade region struck, Jill had to move Rogue from the stable where she is normally kept. It wasn't until May that she was able to return, due to the long time it took for the ground to dry, flood cleanup, and rebuilding to be accomplished. The stable is even nicer than it was before the flood, but there was a lot of work that went into accomplishing that feat. Rogue and Jill got to participate in a program this past summer that introduces handicapped children to large animals, including allowing them to ride if they were able.

1997 is almost here, and we have some tentative plans scheduled, among them: attending Sharon Gross' wedding in June (Sharon read the e.e. cummings poem at our wedding, and was Jill's roommate in college), taking our yearly international trip (we haven’t decided where yet), attending a science fiction convention in Denver where I have been invited to be a panelist, attending the World science fiction convention in San Antonio, and likely a few trips to Seattle. As always, we invite people to visit us in Richland--we can share great wine and wonderful seafood with you!