2014: Loving Living in San Diego

We found ourselves reluctant to travel this year because we so enjoy our San Diego (Lakeside) home. The house is set up very comfortably for us. It includes a wood paneled, floored, and ceilinged living room that has glass sliding doors to the sun porch and our spectacular view (shown above) all of which remind us of a vacation home in the Catskills. We have separate offices; Steve really loves not looking at Kitty's mess. We have lots of storage space in our many closets. We have a TV den with our large flat screen and a ROKU to watch videos via the Internet from Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. Plus a guest room (come visit!) that also houses the mainly unused exercise equipment.

Kitty loves her garden and spends an hour or so most days puttering around in it. She has a wonderful gardener, Jesus, who comes for half a day every two weeks. He put in the irrigation system and does the heavy work. Our garden plus a peek at the house was on the yearly Lakeside Historic Society's tour. Naturally Kitty wrote a blog post about that with many details about the house's history and our plantings.

Travels

In the early part of the year, Kitty visited old friend Celia Lowenthal in the L.A. area; Celia lives very near one of Kitty's favorite places, the Huntington Library and Gardens. This visit, however, we went to the Norton Simon, a small gem of a museum with incredibly wonderful art.

Kitty and Steve went to Dallas in the RV for the Spring Bridge Nationals in late March. While there, Kitty managed to finally meet her 5th cousin Ed Kutz, a descendant of the sister of Hannah Kutz Thannhauser. Ed's wife Elizabeth is also a professional genealogist. Kitty has been in touch with them for years. She got Ed to do the 23andme DNA test, so now we know the Kutz's are cohanim. On the way back from Dallas, Steve finally took Kitty to see Bisbee, Arizona, a well preserved old mining town that is now an artist's colony. This included a birthday dinner at the old Silver Queen Hotel. Bisbee is of particular interest to Kitty because she loves the J.A. Jance mysteries - the Joanna Brady series - which are set there.

Bisbee strip mine	Steve wearing last year's Xmas present	Rodin's Burghers of Calais at the Norton Simon

We followed that with a visit to Bill and Adrienne Horne in Tucson. On a visit to the the Tohono Chul gardens for brunch Kitty discovered all kinds of lovely succulents in the garden shop. She encouraged Adrienne to buy enough succulents for three pots and helped her plant them. Kitty then blogged about gardening with succulents, including the lovely sunset aloe she found for herself at Tohono Chul.

Dad at the Tabernacle Choir broadcast	Rochelle with her Irises, Spring	View out Rochelle's window, November

Kitty tries to get to Salt Lake City every few months to visit with her 94 year old Dad (soon to be 95). When we travel to Las Vegas for bridge she usually tacks on a trip to see him. The problem is that the two day drive home is getting to be a bit much for her. She did get to visit friend Rochelle's garden when her irises were in full bloom, what a treat! Also the week before Thanksgiving, Kitty's son Paul combined a trip to Mountain View, California (yes he works for Google in NYC) with a long weekend in Salt Lake City to visit his grandad, and Kitty joined him there.

Our other big RV trip for the year was joining Kitty's brother Shipley and family in San Francisco for a Thanksgiving celebration. Geddes and Chase smoked the turkey in the outdoor barbecue. Although it looked black when it emerged, it was very juicy and delicious. We finally met Geddes and Jill's son, our great nephew, Quil. Kitty and Shipley also visited with Kitty's beloved cousin Lee in his assisted living facility.

Shipley, Jill, and Quil (Aquila) Munson	Cousin Lee with Portrait of our Grandad	Preparing the Thanksgiving Feast

Family

Visiting with family is always a pleasure and Steve has grown to enjoy Kitty's family since he has almost none of his own left. No siblings and all his first cousins were much older. We were particularly sad that his cousin Bernie Tieger of Bard College (click for memorial there) and Tivoli, New York, passed away in January.

Kitty received a box of her mother's unpublished novels from cousin Laura who had been keeping them. So as a plan to perhaps supplement Dad's inadequate income she is slowly editing one of them for publicaton as an ebook via Amazon. Regrets Only is set in East Hampton in the late 1960s and the protagonist is clearly autobiographical, although a serial murderess. Anyone who wants to read and critique the in progress book (click here) is most welcome to.

Sadly our dear Navajo enjoys being an only dog. She herself is getting older now and has many white hairs in her muzzle.

Friends and Visitors

Kitty and Steve both enjoy playing bridge with our friend, San Diegan. Lynne Feldman, as well as the occasional beach walk with her. Lynne and new friend Judy Rimer organize wonderful potluck home team games on a regular basis.

Garden Club friend Eileen and her husband John sold their Oak Creek house and are now walking distance neighbors with the same great view that we have.

Rochelle, who has some family nearby, managed to come for a short stay and visit. She loved all our fruit trees, as expected.

Health

Steve's PSA has stayed low since last year's radiation and we are hopeful that the problem is over for a long while.

Kitty's auto-immune condition came back (polymyalgia) and she had to go back on prednisone. Last time she gained 20 pounds; so far this time it is only 15. Dieting seems to only hold her weight steady, so perhaps more exercise? This is not life threatening, just very annoying: constant debilitating arthritis-like pain which only the prednisone seems to abate. This problem is quite common in Scandinavian populations. Her rheumatologist practiced in Wisconsin before San Diego so is fairly familiar with this disease.

Technology

This past summer Kitty attempted to give up her Blackberry for an iPhone. Although she loved the improved camera capability and the built in GPS, she kept dropping it and breaking the glass. In frustration she traded it in for a small Android tablet and went back to her Blackberry. She likes having a built in keyboard which also provides for 20 or so speed dials, one for each letter; S for Steve, P for Paul, B for brother, and three for her friend Lynne: L, F, and J.

We both love having tablets. Steve plays music and chess in the living room with his. When Kitty lies in bed with her morning coffee, she answers emails and reads the news on her iPad. She also reads in bed late at night on the lightweight little tablet. She recently added a blue light filtering app to prevent the sleep problems that blue light supposedly causes.

In her office, Kitty has two laptops. One with Windows 7 and one with Windows 8. She is proud that she managed to have so many windows open on her Windows 8 laptop that she got to see the new more user friendly blue screen of death!

Bridge

This year in bridge we won lots of regionals and had a few low overall places at the Spring Nationals in Dallas. Kitty and Lynne finished second in the Women's Pairs, but a scoring correction dropped them to third the next day.

The Nationals in Las Vegas were less successful, although Kitty had the pleasure of playing with her son, Paul Bethe, picture to the left.

Kitty achieved another bridge milestone; she went over 15,000 masterpoints. We totalled about 850 points each for the year.

Open Sky Web Design

Kitty spent less time working in web design this year as she has been spending far more time on her genetic genealogy endeavors. Her blog has become amazingly popular with 2000+ unique daily visitors, only half of whom are attempting comment spam. Therefore she has been training cousin George Pasquet's daughter Anne as a web design intern. Her plan is for Anne and her sister Susan to eventually take over the business.

Genealogy

One of the big events of the year for Kitty was attending the Rootstech conference, organized by her brother Shipley, last February in Salt Lake City. She was thrilled to interview her hero, genetic explorer Spencer Wells, on video to be posted soon at her blog. But what amazed her was how many people seem to actually read her blog; so many came up to her at the conference saying "Are you THE Kitty Cooper?" and they weren't even bridge players!

For Kitty, finding distant cousins is one of the most fun parts of genealogy and genetic genealogy. This year she found her Holland 4th cousins and a Wold 3rd cousin via DNA testing, plus many 3rd, 4th, and 5th cousins back in Norway. Naturally each of those became a blog post, so click on them if you are interested. Having a tree posted at WIKItree, Ancestry, GENI, and familysearch makes it easy for cousins to find her. A recent coup was finding her Benda cousins in London, descended from Fanny Guggenheimer, sister of great-great-grandmother Auguste.

Kitty has long wanted to be in touch with the descendants of Dad's first cousin Burton Youngman so she broke down and wrote a note to an address she found with Grace Friel's help for Peter Youngman in Clinton, New York. In an amazing coincidence she used a Claude Monet Parc Monceau notecard and Peter had spent half his life living with his grandmother just a few blocks from that park! Genes will run true perhaps, as Peter, like Kitty, exercises his artistic bent by making gardens. He and his wife Cheryl have a landscaping business. You can see a tour of their garden on this youtube video at the 17 minute 45 seconds mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_txvqNz6ttQ as well as in the slide show you can get to by clicking on his picture to the right. More about Peter, including a video his father Burton made about their family history, coming soon to the Skjold (Lee) family mailing list.

Kitty has taken on her first genealogy client and plans to change careers to genetic genealogy and genealogy consulting in the new year.

In Summary ...

My apologies for such a long newsletter, but frankly after my accident these letters were what helped me regain my memories so I have resolved to keep doing them in great detail and with lots of pictures for as long as I am able to. I am particularly grateful to my cousin Marty, whose yearly books of pictures inspired me to make these. As always, all years link to each other.

Love, Hugs, and a Merry Christmas to you all!