Dear friends and family,
I
hope your year has been as full of good surprises and small challenges as mine
has. I’ve lived here in Gearhart,
on the north Oregon coast, for almost 18 months and have enjoyed nearly every
minute.
I’ve
made many new friends through the groups I’ve joined: the North Coast Land Conservancy, the Pacific UU Fellowship,
the continuing education program of Clatsop Community College (ENCORE), and the
Angora Hiking Club. In addition,
there’s a group of local Gearhart residents who gather for coffee at the local
coffee shop/bakery in town and I’ve attained “regular” status, meaning that when I walk in the door in the morning, John the proprietor has my cuppa already poured.
There
have been a few big events during the year, most notably the 12 day
Scandinavian cruise that my sister and I took in September, visiting our
ancestral lands. Our mother Mona
Larson Ketcham was Norwegian and Swedish and we loved seeing the countries
where her parents were born, bringing home a few souvenirs and many photographs
and memories. I’d love to go back
for a few months and travel more extensively in Norway and Sweden. We spent three days in Norway, one in
Sweden, and also visited the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, and
Iceland. So much to see with so
little time!
Another
much-anticipated event was my 50th Linfield College reunion, for
which I served on the planning committee and as the emcee for the big
banquet. So much fun to see those
college friends again and renew those connections, this time as adults!
My
generally strong health helped me weather a couple of health situations: three weeks worth of shingles in the
spring and five months of trying to get the retina in my right eye to behave
itself. I’d had a shingles shot,
so that experience was pretty easy, though I swallowed a lot of ibuprofen! It has taken five surgeries to tame the
recalcitrant retina and I’m hopeful that it’s healed for good now. It just kept detaching and the docs at
Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland kept patching it back together
until now it’s pretty well healed up.
(Knock on wood!)
I’m
looking forward to the new year, when I’ll be leading a couple of classes for
the ENCORE group; one is Science Exchange, where attendees bring science news
to share, and the other is Life Experience, where attendees share the wisdom
they’ve accumulated over their years of life.
I’ve
been serving the Pacific UU Fellowship on a very parttime basis, offering them
pastoral care and preaching once a month and will continue that service for the
foreseeable future. The Call never
goes away!
I
hope the year to come will be as enjoyable as this one has been and I wish you
the very happiest of New Years yourself!
Much Love,
Ms. Kitty
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