GroundHog Day, 1998

Dear Friends-and-relations,

Like Robert Burns’ “best laid schemes o’ mice and men”, our schemes during the past year have “gang aft a-gley.”

We had a great scheme to spend the month of October in Italy including an ElderHostel in Salerno and hiking in the Cinque Terre.  That ganged into two parts: a December week in the California deserts with kids and grand-kids and our current 12 February days in Hawaii .

Then, our usual plan to spend most of January composing our annual GroundHog Day letter and leisurely reading and answering all the delightful mail we’ve received since last February 2 got ganged into frantically trying to attend to all of the details involved in a sudden move of all of our Lares and Penates as announced on the outside of this card.  Our new apartment is exactly what we’ve been looking for ever since we moved to California.  We only heard about its availability as we were leaving for the desert, and we had to complete our move before we headed for Maui!

So, forgive us, dear friends-and-relations, if this year we omit the personal notes with which we like to acknowledge having heard from you.  We’ve saved all your cards and letters, and will try to make up for it in 1999.

With love,