It’s been another busy year for Pam and Steve.

Some of you know that they’ve been involved with the local affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Steve has been the membership coordinator for a while and Pam had recently become vice president. Even more recently, because the previous president had to leave and Pam didn’t duck fast enough, Pam became president of the affiliate. As part of her presidential duties, Pam flew out to Seattle to attend the national NAMI conference. Steve is quite proud of her but only calls her “Madam President” during the affiliate meetings.

Steve turned 60 in March. To celebrate, Pam threw a surprise party for him with a bunch of friends, family, and she even sneaked up Morgan, Beth, and the grandkids.

Steve’s brother Jasper visited Toronto in March so Pam and Steve drove over to visit him and the rest of the Toronto crowd.

In February, Morgan had to go to NYC (“The City So Nice They Named It Twice”) to attend a class (“Why Actuarial Studies is not Boring” or something). Pam and Steve flew down to babysit the grandkids while Morgan and Beth explored the Big Apple.
Pam and Steve also visited San Antonio in July to help celebrate Morgan’s becoming an associate actuary and the nation’s birthday.
Pam went by herself to San Antonio in November to split babysitting duties with Becky while Morgan and Beth went gallivanting in Honolulu. While Morgan was in Honolulu, he was recognized for becoming an Associate Actuary by the Casualty Actuarial Society.

Corwin has been keeping himself busy. In addition to his career as a web developer, he’s set up a business in peer to peer support and also taken a part time job at an after school program.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, in January and May, they drove over to Bloomington, Illinois, to visit Pam’s brother and his family.

There were three weddings this year with the Thirsty Thursday Bunch. One was in Oregon in May but only the women folk went to that one. The other two weddings were in August in Chicago and Grand Rapids.

Speaking of the Thirsty Thursday Bunch, 14 of them, including Steve and Pam, went on another cruise in the Caribbean. The trip was basically a repeat of the one from 2 years ago except that they went to St. Maarten instead of St. Kitts and there were no power outages or water outages or natural disasters and no one had to carry two 5-gallon buckets of water up 12 stories.

By year’s end, our heroes were ready for a well-deserved rest. But, instead, they planned to fly to San Antonio again for Pam’s significant birthday.