Happy Holidays!!

Here is the JimAnna.com Holiday Card of 2005.

Guam: travel, triathlons, hiking, and SCUBA. Those four activities sum up our time this year. 🙂
What else have we been doing? Anna has continued her work at the SandCastle, an entertainment corporation here on Guam. She works as the executive assistant there. Part of her job was to coordinate the annual Jingle Bell run that happened over Thanksgiving. She took care of ALL the arrangements for the 1,700 runners that participated in this 5 kilometer run/walk. Not surprisingly, it turned out well, but it was quite an undertaking. She also handles all the correspondence for the company and keeps information flowing. She enjoys being part of the best entertainment on Guam!
Jim spent the first three quarters of the year as an environmental program manager in the Civil Engineer Squadron at Andersen AFB. Andersen is the one premier strategic platforms in the Pacific and as such, the base is going through a massive change. Suffice it to say, that keeps the engineers on base very busy. His two programs (Solid Waste and Recycling) became passions for him. In fact, he started the very first plastic recycling on Guam. So, now the house has a pile of newspaper, magazines, office paper, aluminum cans, glass, and cardboard cluttering up the spare room, all to help do our part. In September, however, he was selected to serve as the Wing Commander’s Executive Officer. This is an honor, but one that comes with a high price. The job is very challenging, and demands his complete focus (as to be expected, I suppose). Fortunately, he has learned to effectively deal with the mass volumes of data which must be screened/processed to help the wing and the base function properly. In fact, he actually enjoys doing what he does. It has given him a much better perspective of what the base, as a whole, does. Ok, enough about work…
Both of us have really enjoyed the outdoors here on Guam. If you ever get a chance to visit, take it! We’ve enjoyed things like hiking and camping for a long time (especially when we lived in Colorado). Here, it’s a different kind of hiking (locally called Boonie Stomping), but very enjoyable. If you’ve read our website (which you are reading right now), you know all too well how exciting the outdoors in Guam can be.
We also have taken advantage of our proximity to other Asia-Pacific countries … we started the year in Saipan, part of the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI), where we went SCUBA diving and enjoyed the beaches. Our next trip was to Australia in April. We got to spend two whole weeks in Cairns, Townsville (the city where Anna was a foreign exchange student) and Sydney. We loved the whole country and will go back, just as soon as we can! The next adventures for Jim were trips with work to Hawaii and Okinawa, Japan. In July, we used the free ticket to Japan that we won at Anna’s 2004 Christmas party. We spent a week in Tokyo seeing the sights and climbing Mt. Fuji. In September, we flew to our neighboring island nation of Palau. It is one of the smallest countries in the world with only about 20,000 inhabitants. There’s good reason the SCUBA diving in Palau is rated the #1 underwater natural wonder of the world. We saw everything from sharks to manta rays to sea turtles (and that was just on 1 dive!). The last trip of the year was to our small island neighbor to the north, Rota, also part of the CNMI. We went the 40 miles to participate in an Olympic distance triathlon. It was Jim’s first of that length (although he’s done a number of shorter races). Anna also raced and was part of an all-girl team in which she rode 24.4 miles on her bike.
The year is finishing out with Jim’s family visiting from Wisconsin. We’re having fun showing them our special place in the sun for the nine short days they are here.
Well, that about sums up our year. If you would like to know more about any of these snippets, please send us an email, or better yet, give us a call! I know it’s tough to get the time zones right, but if it’s after 5 PM (CST), it’s the next morning here.
Hope you’ve enjoyed the holiday season and talk to you all soon!
–Jim and Anna