by 
Merry Christmas!
Dear Family and Friends,
It has been a really, really busy year here for the Moore Dynasty, but things are winding down with a Bang! Why? Because it’s time to party like it’s 1999! Or is that 1989?? After a long and often glorious battle with Sam Houston State University, Monica will graduate on December 18th and make her dream (and mine!) of being the first college graduate in her family come true. She’s made the Dean’s List numerous times and would have easily graduated Magna Cum Laude or better if not for some long-forgotten grades from a mis-spent youth that came back to haunt her!
For the past 3 months she’s been doing her student teaching at the elementary school the boys attend and doing a great job from what I hear. Way to go, Mom!!!
Monica’s graduation is the really big news of 2004, but we’ve had a few other things going on as well that I’ll rattle off in some semblance of order.
Mitch and Jake continued to play in the YMCA sports league in 2004. Early in the year I coached their basketball team and they had a pretty good season, going 5 and 2. This was a really fun bunch of 10 year olds to play with. Winning helps, but this was just a nice, fun team. The twins also played baseball in a league that was machine-pitched. This was interesting as the biggest issue in every game was getting the pitcher calibrated. Both of the twins had a good record at the plate and enjoyed playing America’s (former) National Pastime.
Mitch and Jake are both A and B students without putting forth any particular effort, just like their old man. In the spring, Mitch finished in the top 20 in his grade’s cumulative reading competition and got a nice trophy while Jake was just outside the money. Now the twins are in 5th grade, the last year they’ll go to school in the relative safety of the elementary behind our house.
We’ve decided to put our home up for sale this spring and move farther away from the city. Things are really starting to crystallize around here in terms of development. We now have a Kroger, a Wal-Mart and a Domino’s with 4-5 miles of the house. That’s the good news; the bad is that the housing developments accompanying these so-called amenities have broken out among the fields like boils on the rear end of…but I digress. Let’s get back to the family saga, shall we?
Dave’s in 2nd grade and is now older than the twins were when we bought the house. He’s getting along well in school and has made straight A’s both grading periods so far this year. I’ve been dishing out cash for good grades and he’s really been taking advantage of me!
Dave’s also taking karate lessons from a local instructor. He’s been going to him for about 3 months and really likes it. I’ve got to watch out around here because he’s likely to attack without warning from behind a doorway or whatnot. To the right is a picture of him receiving his Yellow Belt from his instructor last month.
In between his brothers’ seasons, David also played basketball at the YMCA – I coached that team, too – and did very well. He is a pretty good player for his age, something that I think comes from our games at the schoolyard. In these hard-fought family skirmishes, he’s got to go up against either Mitch or Jake, a tough assignment for him, either way.
Technologically speaking we’re a well-wired house and all of the boys are familiar with the basics of running a computer that uses our favorite monopoly’s Win-doze operating system. Thus empowered, they spend too much time playing an Internet game called Runescape that is basically the graphical next generation of the Moria game I squandered a lot of nights at A&M when I should have been studying or drinking beer. So far the addiction has not spread to Monica or me and I don’t foresee this happening, ever.
Over the summer we visited my parents in Indiana as usual and then flew out to Yellowstone National Park. For those of you who haven’t been there, this is really a neat place to see some amazing natural panoramas. The first thrill of our tour was seeing a bison walking right down the middle of the park road – cool! Before long, however, we came to the same realization that everyone else does about these giant steaks on the hoof – they are the pests of the park. Bison are everywhere you look, meandering through the cabins, wandering across and blocking the narrow, two-lane roads for an hour at a time and, occasionally, gathering in a herd on the prairie in formations like those Buffalo Bill Cody might have seen before he shot them all dead!
We took in a lot of scenery, pretty much sticking to the main tourist haunts after noticing the “Bear Danger†signs at the trailhead of our first walkabout. These signs are pretty much everywhere off the beaten path. One day we also drove down to see the Grand Tetons up close and took a nice hike around Lake Jenny at the base of them. This area has some really incredible views that you have to be there to appreciate! On the last day I took a nice jog out of the hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs, my first run ever at altitude – it does make a difference …
Later in the summer, I finished the first draft of the science fiction novel I’ve been working on for quite a while. After re-reading it, I was overcome by an urgent need to revise it further before letting anyone but Monica look at it. That’s an ongoing project that continues even now. Look for it on a bookshelf or trash can near you soon!
More recently the boys and I have run in a couple of road races here in town. At the local high school, the boys did well in a grade-level race in which Mitch finished 3rd in his grade and Jake 5thwhile Dave finished 2nd in his group.
Then, on Thanksgiving Day morning, we did a run up in The Woodlands at which we found out that those city boys are fast runners! Mitch had a so-so day and came in 11th, while Dave ran his fastest mile ever and I straggled in mid-pack in a 5 miler. In any event, we did succeed in making some much-needed room for turkey and pie!
In closing, we wish everyone out there a very merry Christmas and hope that the coming year sees you healthier, wealthier and wiser than you are now!
Merry Christmas,
Marc, Monica, Mitch, Jake and Dave Moore
P.S. Since it doesn’t snow here more than once a century, Mitch decided to make a “mud angel†for his mother today as a special birthday/Christmas present combination!
We’re so proud of him!
