Spring 2002 Postcard!!
As 2001 wound down, we were busy getting ready for the holidays but our professional lives kept us hopping as well! On December 5, Shawn was a guest on The Connection, a radio show produced by Boston’s WBUR for National Public Radio. She was part of a discussion and call-in hour titled “Reading Enron’s Meter” about the demise of Enron and the future of the deregulated utilities. The following day, it was John’s turn in the spotlight as he, together with his cohort Merle, made a presentation to the Boston Chapter of the Society for Concurrent Product Development.
On December 8, we held our annual holiday wassail and fund raiser for Globe Santa. We had a grand time with many of our dearest friends and neighbors finding new ways to raise money (it’s OK George - it’s fun!) and together we gathered $1,300 for the kids this year! (Check it out… Paolini, Papanastassiou, Intorcio… How’d Kent and Patton get in there?)
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Grams spent a pleasant Christmas eve with us. We had roast beast, went to church and set out snacks for Santa. On Christmas day, we opened our gifts in the morning and after way too short a time to play with them, it was off to the airport for our trip to Florida and the Grampa tour!
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We spent the first part of our week there with Grampa Ralph in Sarasota. We played mini-golf, swam in the pool, fed the turtles, visited the Mote Marine Laboratory and the G.Wiz Science Museum, chased lizards, and had a grand time! Grampa drove to Bradenton with John on Dec. 29 to watch him run the Manatee River 5 miler. Slowed by the unfamiliar humidity and excess Christmas cookies, John ran a personally disappointing 36:17 - but it was still good for fifth place in his age bracket!
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Then it was North to Largo and another Christmas with Papa and Grammy Susan! We enjoyed our stay in their wonderful new home! We swam in their pool, enjoyed playing with their dogs, and Shawn and John had fun running together in the ToadSucker 5k - a race they ran side by side in Tampa. We went to Busch Gardens on New Year’s Eve where we enjoyed the new Rhino Rally!! We all braved the The Scorpion where Shawn was thrilled, Jacob’s stomach “felt funny in the upside down part” and Joshua and John hung on together for dear life!
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On January 5 we made a trip out to Western Massachusetts to visit with one of John’s high school buddies, Charlie Laprade, and his family. We had a great visit with Charlie, his wife Maria, their kids Tyler and Rudy and Charlie’s folks! We ate pizza, played games, and did some exploring of a beaver pond that had appeared in the woods out behind Charlie’s parents’ house!
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In mid-January, Joshua and John had a great tour of radio station WERS in Boston with the Cub Scouts! Dave Murphy, General Manager and uncle to one of our cubs did an awesome job of showing us the studio!
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We took a week at the end of January to return to Smuggler’s Notch in Vermont. We enjoyed all types of skiing during our week: spring conditions on Monday, fresh snow on Tuesday and Wednesday, wet snow on Thursday, hard and fast on Friday, icy crap on Saturday, and loose granular on Sunday! We skied 6-1/2 of 7 days and spent some time on the other half on skinny skis.
Joshua and Jacob are mastering this skiing thing! Both have made trips to the top of Morse Mountain routine and are beginning to handle the Intermediate trails. Joshua has perfect control and can make steady turns even on the steeps! Jacob is very athletic, has no fear, and is mastering the art of skiing over the jumps and obstacles at the edges of the slope! In their lessons, Joshua and Jacob’s instructors had them working toward parallel turns while Shawn and John’s teachers had them working the bumps and skiing the glades! “Remember, we’re skiing around the trees not through them!”
Of course, we also swam in the pool, slid on the tubing hill, soaked in the spa, ate pizza, played in the Fun Zone, watched fireworks, ate Ben & Jerry’s, tried the kid buffet, watched a movie, drank hot chocolate, hugged Mogul Mouse, saw a magic show, watched Kareoke, and more… Heck, we even had a fire in our washing machine complete with fire engines and alarms and smoke and panic! Things you never thought you’d hear you five year-old say in public: “Is daddy still up there naked?” What an awesome week! Can we go back?
Early February was the Cub Scout’s Pinewood Derby. Joshua entered the “Tiger Cub 7″ car that he’d built with help from dad. Though he wasn’t the top finisher, he did win one one of his heats and proudly brought home a ribbon awarded by the judges! The whole family had fun cheering on his car!
The mild winter made for comfortable days on the roads as we did a lot of running in February and March. On February 9, Shawn and John ran together in the Bradford Valentines Races. Their combined times (Shawn’s at 6k and John’s at 5 miles) placed them 16th out of 27 Husband/Wife teams.
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Photos
by Jim Rhoades from Coolrunning.
The following day, it was off to church for the annual pancake races to celebrate Mardi Gras and kick off the Lenten season. All four of us ran with Jacob’s second place in the under 10 division being the best finish among us! Still, we had fun and ate a lot of pancakes!
Near the end of February, we got the chance to visit with John’s college buddy Steve Gorman. In Massachusetts visiting his family, Steve ran in the USATF New England Indoor Championship track meet at Harvard’s Gordon Track. We all went in to watch and had a great time cheering Steve on - he’s really fast!!
We spent most of March enjoying the relatively mild winter we had in New England this year. We got to do a lot of outside things we normally couldn’t have - neighborhood bike rides, walks in the woods, and lots of running. On March 10, Shawn and John ran the 5k and Half-Marathon courses at the Massachusetts Law Enforcement Memorial races in Wakefield. While John used his run as a training opportunity and cruised to a 1:45 finish, Shawn embarked on an all-out sprint for her race and ran at personal record setting pace for the first 2/3 of the course before stretching a muscle and limping home for a disappointing 29:16 result. She’s going to have that perfect race yet!
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Photos
by Jim Rhoades from Coolrunning.
On March 15, Shawn and John left Grams running things on the homefront and took off for the annual ski weekend in honor of Toni’s birthday! We ate, we skied… well, some of us skied… We ate some more and then we ate again. Come to think of it, it was more of an eating weekend than a skiing weekend - but it sure was fun!
On March 24, John made his inaugural full-length run in the inaugural Washington DC Marathon! He found some fun people to chat with on the race course, enjoyed every bit of the run (except maybe that two mile hill that started at mile 20), and was quite pleased with his sub-3:30 result!!
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What made the weekend extra special, however, was that Grampa flew up from Florida to watch John race and they both got to get together with a herd of McCoy-side cousins for a fantastic Colombian post-race carbo-reload dinner! It’s always a special time when family gets together and this was certainly no exception! Many thanks to Kim and Johnny and everyone for putting together an awesome victory celebration for John!
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On Easter Sunday, we were honored to have Grams and several of our good friends at our house for a traditional Easter dinner. We had a raft of kids too and fortunately the weather was nice so they ran amuck mostly outside. We hunted eggs, ate too much, and generally had a good time!
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Of course, March also means basketball and this year was no exception as the annual pool was held again! John actually beat Shawn this year - a first!
At the start of April, Shawn and John got away for a weekend in Maine. They enjoyed a visit to Sunday River where the combination Bust & Burn and Parrothead weekend was in full swing! They stayed at the Black Bear B&B, a great little place just down the road, where innkeepers Faith and Phil made them feel right at home with comfortable lodging, awesome blueberry pancakes, and an outdoor hot tub that was just the thing after a long day on the slopes! The boys got to hang with Ms. Erin, their former daycare teacher, who spoils them rotten! We all had great weekends!
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We celebrated Joshua’s 7th birthday a few days early with a bunch of his friends at Plaster Fun Time. The kids painted plaster art, enjoyed mom’s Harry Potter cake and ice cream, and unwrapped a mound of presents!
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We celebrated again at home on Joshua’s actual birthday with more presents (including a new bike!), more cake, and more fun! Turning seven is great!
John and the boys celebrated Patriot’s Day by watching the Boston Marathon. They made signs and cheered for all of Shawn’s and John’s friends in the MVS and IRRR running clubs!
That’s pretty much what we’ve been up to! We hope you’ve been having fun too! If you get a chance, sign our guestbook or drop us a line and, by all means, if you’re in our area this summer, stop on by!
