Vogt Christmas Newsletter 2008

Megan’s Getting Married
A New Business Is Born
Gene’s Been Traveling… Again
Lynn’s Been Quilting… Still

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Happy holidays from our family to yours!

One year has passed, and another is bearing down on us like a speeding car on a highway, and we’re the poor frightened deer, caught in the headlights.

We’ve had a busy year in 2008, with new cars and work-related travel and businesses being started and marriage proposals and beginning to make plans for retirement and presidential elections and financial meltdowns and a perfect football season followed by an almost perfect playoff series (except for the last 29 seconds of the Superbowl) and almost-another-world-series and… WHEW!

 

Getting Married, Getting Promoted, etc.

The big news – in a lot of ways – is the pending marriage of Megan and Daniel Morneau!

Megan and Dan met a few years ago at a work function, and found out that they both lived in Lowell MA. Only afterwards did they realize that they both have many mutual friends in the area. Dan proposed in May, and after a few months of cogitating, they picked October 17, 2009 as the big date.  The wedding ceremony and the reception will be at Stonehedge (not Stonehenge) Inn in Tyngsboro.  The happy couple will be escaping to the wild north country of Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia Canada for their honeymoon.

They’re living in Lowell, in a condo built in one of the old factory buildings right down town.  It’s a fabulous location and relatively convenient (via 495) to their work in Westboro.

Earlier in the year, after working her way up the ranks of the Technical Support crew (she was one of the nice voices on the phone when people called for help), she applied for and got a new position in the company. She is now the Technology Integration Project Manager for Interactive Display Development at Bose Corporation. She works with a crew of people developing and installing the interactive Bose displays in big-venue retail stores.

She’s still knitting up a storm, going to knitting getaways, buying lots of yarn. There must be a 12-step program somewhere for this!

 

Leaving One Job, Starting Another

Audrey’s had an eventful year. She bought a used 2005 Honda Element (one of those distinctive boxy minivan-sized cars) earlier in the year, with the intent of being able to use it in a new endeavor she has been talking about for a long time. She’s now the sole proprietor of Scholars With Collars, a dog training and walking business she’s started on her own (www.ScholarsWithCollars.com). Starting a service-based business with the economy going into the toilet is extremely difficult, so she has supplemented her income with a dog training job at the local Petco as well.

She got the ball rolling in late summer when she realized that she had been in retail sales for about 14 years now, so she quit her managerial position at Game-Stop to start her business.

It’s been a lot of hard work, and business hasn’t been easy for her to drum up. Luckily she doesn’t have to carry an expensive inventory of products; her product is her skill with - and knowledge about – dogs, and how to help owners train them, and she is very good at it!

 

Traveling, Traveling, Traveling, Traveling…

Gene did some serious business traveling this summer.  He was part of a survey team that visited certain Army installations, reviewing IT staffing and functions for each organization. The challenge was that these installations were all over the world!

The trips started in June, with most of them chewing up a full week each.  Everyone on the team would fly out on Sunday, and hit the ground running on Monday morning. The team worked through Friday, and flew home Saturday to do laundry and collect notes. Then the team would fly out again the next day (Sunday) to do it all over again someplace else!

First up was a week in Darmstadt Germany in June, with no time to do any genealogy work or visit friends. Then there was a week in Washington DC at a conference, then out to Augusta GA for a week.Gene then had two weeks at home over the 4th of July to catch his breath, then it was off to San Antonio TX and Baltimore MD for a week each, then a two-week jaunt, first to Honolulu HI, then from there to Seoul and Pyongtaek Korea! Travel pictures are on the family web site, in the Scrapbook!

 

Quilting, Retiring, Planning…

Lynn’s been quilting up a storm most of the year. In addition to her time working and teaching at the Cambridge Quilt Shop, she’s made a few quilts as gifts for people, begun renting time on a long-arm quilting machine to learn their ins and outs, and even gone on a “quilt retreat” of sorts, up near a friend’s quilt shop near Damariscotta Maine.

She fell in love with the Damariscotta area, so we spent a week’s vacation in the area in October, and we’ve begun preliminary planning for purchasing a second home up there in the future, with the long-term goal of retiring to that neck of the woods eventually.

We spent about half our week looking at real estate with an eye for figuring out how much we could afford, and understanding what’s available, and the other half eating lobster!

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!