Christmas Letter 2008

Dear Friends and Family, December 20, 2008

We find ourselves busily getting ready for Christmas. I am a horrible procrastinator, so not only do I need to finish Christmas shopping, but I also need to start. If this letter finds itself in the mail before Christmas, then miracles really do happen!

Ryan got promoted to a new position as a Lead Shift Supervisor at Wiseway. That was great news, but it also led him to new hours…second shift! That was a pretty huge change for us, but it is going pretty smoothly (knowing that it hopefully won’t last forever). Ryan got a couple of new toys this year as well: a Chevy truck and a crotch rocket. He’s spent some of his spare time tinkering around with them in the garage and getting his truck up to par. In order to help pay for his new toys, he took up a 2nd job in October and is working part-time at the 5/8 Bar & Grill in St.Paul as a cook. Working weekends helps keep him out of trouble and hopefully we’ll be out of debt by 2025. 

I also got a new position this year and am no longer on-call on weekends. It is a really great change and I feel lucky to be able to say that, the majority of days, I love my job! I get a somewhat flexible schedule and work with really great people. My spare time is spent doing anything crafty: scrapbooking as well as turning what Ryan calls “junk” into what I call “treasure”!

One thing we’re especially looking forward to in 2009 is a vacation to Riviera Maya! We’re flying down in May with our good friends Josh and Michelle (who will be newly-wed!) and Brad and Kirsten (who got married last July). I could not be more excited for the trip. We’ve all (minus Kirsten, our new addition) known each other for almost 20 years now, so sharing a honeymoon seemed like a natural thing to do.

I didn’t include him on the Christmas card this year, so I can’t bear to leave him out of our Christmas letter too: Tytan, our dog, continues to alternate between being the love of our life and making us go crazy. Ryan is lucky that he only showed me pictures of Bullador puppies before we bought Tytan; if he had shown me what a full-grown Bullador looked like, we might have ended up getting a Chihuahua instead. Thanks to Tytan we (or I) have had to replace numerous remotes and cell phones along with countless other things. He certainly likes his electronics. All in all though, he is a good dog and we can’t imagine our lives without his craziness.

Hopefully this letter finds you happy, healthy, and excited for what the new year will bring. { Lots of Love } Ryan & Sarah