Winter '96

Dear Friends,

Time again for the annual letter from the Corys. As usual, this has a been an interesting year for us. Vibeké is back in Los Angeles and working, Chris and Earl moved into their new house, and all have new Jobs.

The year started out well, we were able to go skiing several times a month. We even spent New Years at our co-op ski house near Lake Tahoe. We liked it so much that we signed up again this year to be partners in the same house and have reserved it for New Years.

Two of the big events of the year are: Chris changed jobs and Earl finally got a Job. Earl started a contract in February at Marin General Hospital and by May they decided to employee him full time. He is in charge of Computer Operations and Telecommunications for the Hospital, with seven computer operators and 11 telephone operators reporting to him (that's not the fun part, making changes to the computer system is.)

As we said last year, in March we planned to move into our new home in a little town in the San Francisco North Bay area, Hercules. It has four bedrooms, three baths, fully landscaped, and overlooks the bay. But the developer continued to want to use it for it's intended purpose --- a model home. But, in May, they stopped paying rent and we had to move in. Earl spent a great deal of time building walls, cabinets, and shelves in the garage to store things (crap). He has wired a couple of the bedrooms for TV cable, telephone, and computer networking and plans to continue until all rooms are part of the CWW (Cory-Wide-Web). He has the VAX computer in the garage “talking” to the Pentium PC in the “Computer Room” upstairs, and if you run a big black cable down the hall to Chris' “office” (the master bed room) you can hook up her laptop to the network, along with a terminal server and modem in an electrical equipment closet outside.

Then in the middle of March came the week from hell.

It started out well enough with plenty of snow in the mountains. Vibeké and Adele joined us at Lake Tahoe for what turned out to be our last ski trip of the season. On the last run of the day, Chris, while trying a jump turn on a pair of hot skis, broke her leg at the ankle. This tied her up in a cast for eight weeks. She is just now getting back to “normal”, that is jumping and dancing when she is excited, but she still is wearing a leg brace to play tennis.

But that was only the beginning. On Friday, it was Earl's birthday and he got older.

The next day, on her way home from work, a woman pulled in front of Vibeké on the freeway and slammed on her brakes. Vibeké's little black Pulsar went underneath the nose diving Taurus. Fortunately, she was wearing her seat belt and came out with just some sore muscles, but her car was totaled.

On Sunday, Chris' mother, Gracie, passed away. The death was very sudden and unexpected. The family is still having a hard time overcoming the loss. Christmas was her favorite holiday and this is going to be a sad one as we all remember spending it with everyone, the kids, Uncle Bill and Aunt Xochitl, relatives, friends from work, all gathered at “Louie’s and Gracie’s” for tamales and ham and lasagne, Bingo, the Goodie Bag, and ...

As you may remember, last summer we planned to invite Josef and Feltina to tour the Sacramento Delta via houseboat, but instead, they invited us to join them in Ireland. Not wanting to pass up a great deal like that, we used most of what was left of Earl's frequent flier miles and flew to Shannon where we meet Josef and Feltina. The four of us stayed the first week in a restored Irish Stone Cottage on Mason Island, a rocky, deserted island off the west cost of Ireland, in County Galway. We spent most of our time reading, sleeping, walking, and drinking. We did have neighbors, a herd of cows (Feltina’s Freunden) and a retired BBC documentary broadcaster, Philip Donnellan, and his wife, Jill. They have spent the last 20 years restoring another cottage to the point that they can use it a couple a weeks a year as a retreat. One night, we turned the generator on, called the cottage owners on the “RT” from the main land, invited the neighbors over, and had a big party with Mexican food, potatoes, soda bread, “Jamie’s”, Poteen, Irish Coffee, music from our CD, and a turf fire.

The second week, we traveled north to a small village, Rossnowlagh, between Ballyshannon and Donegal Town. We spent that week touring parts of both Irelands, seeing Enniskillen, Belfast, Derry, Killybegs, Ardara, Belleek, Leitrim, Dublin, a lot of Irish Pubs, sheep, peat cutters, and very nice, friendly people. We plan to return to see the rest of the country.

Next summer we will do something, we don't know what yet, but something, we may yet take that houseboat tour of the Sacramento Delta.

On Memorial Day, while Earl's parents were away on a cruise on the Eire Canal. We invited Ed and Marie Gregor, and Bob Walden and Adele Schmitz to join us in taking over their home in Monterey for a three-day weekend. The “girls” took our Kayak out on the bay and met Alice, the wayward otter, while Bob and Earl peddled around town and Ed visited the sharks at the aquarium. We plan to do it again over President’s Day.

Chris is back to her old pattern of changing jobs to liven up the annual letter. She left Progress the first week of December and started at Illustra the last week of November. Illustra is an Oakland based object-relational database company. A lot of her friends from Ingres work there, including her former manager and close friend, Nadene Re. She is having a great deal of fun learning the new database technologies that will we all will be using in the future.

Another highlight this year was the birthday present Vibeké gave Chris. She took her to see Beauty and The Beast at the Shubert Theater in Century City, dad came along, but he had to buy dinner.

Speaking of Vibeké, she moved again and again and again. First, from San Francisco back to Los Angeles, where she moved into Chris' mother's house until it was ready to sell. While there, she adopted a black kitten, Nostrodamus. Her cat, Cosmic Dude, was not too happy with “Nordie” and moved out. When they were ready to start working on the house to get it ready to show, she moved to a small, inexpensive house in the Echo Park District, taking with her Gracie's two cats and Nordie. There she adopted another kitten. This time Nordie moved out (you'd think she would get the picture by now.) After a couple of months, she decided that when living in a poor area, you get what you pay for, also she did not like getting broken into daily. Therefore, in December she found another duplex in Venice, less that a block from the beach. She is now in the process of moving for the third time this year and is very excited about it. We think that we are going to get at least two cats as a Christmas present.

She was able to transfer her part-time job at Baker's Square in Alameda to the Whittier Restaurant. After they closed the restaurant in the summer, she started seeking further employment. She came up with a job, answering the phone (another of her talents) for a Beverly Hills modeling agency. She is making enough money to almost support her self! She has registered to take classes at Santa Monica City College in the spring.

Chris has continued with tennis (her leg still bothers her a little, but is getting better) every chance she has. She has standing games on Saturday and during the week (when she is not traveling). With her new job, she hopes that she can play more regularly (of course if she stops breaking bones, she could play much.

With the new house and all the shelves, networking, and cabling that it is “required”, Earl, has not found much time to resume his genealogy work. He has entered over 1500 people in his computer database. As he has promised each year, he is almost ready to print his book The Giles and Thomas Cor(e)y Family, but its not quite ready.

Well that's our life in 1995. We are always happy to hear from you and what you and your family have been doing. We accept, letters, phone calls, visits, etc. at our new house. If you are ever out our way, let us know and maybe we can get together and relive old times.

This year we put America On-Line on our PC so we can use E-mail addresses. We still have our AT&T 700 numbers so you can call either of us no matter where we are. There are recorders on both of our telephone lines.

With all this communication capability, there is no reason for us not hear from you.

Earl & Chris Cory Vibeké Cory

448 Grenadine Way 40 Horizon
Hercules, CA 94547 Venice, CA 90291

(510) 245-1830,1 (310) 396-7807

0-700-ESC-CORY  earlcory@aol.com
0-700-CCC-CORY cccory@aol.com