The Best of 2007

Greetings, salutations, and holiday cheer to you this season! After calculating the carbon footprint associated with mailing out Christmas cards to all our friends and family, we decided take this antiquated holiday tradition to the 21st century…and send Christmas letters as a blog posting. As is the custom for these Christmas letters, Meg and I will attempt to summarize the last 12 months in painstaking detail in case you missed any of the excitement.

We adopted the motto of “stability breeds complacency” in 2006 - Meg left the field of teaching, I graduated and finally got a real job with Intel, and we both moved to Portland. Like the Obama campaign, 2007 was also all about change.

One of the first things that happened in 2007 was that Meg got an amazing job with Idealist.org, an international nonprofit organization. Apparently her experience teaching thirteen-year olds is directly applicable to dealing with people who work in the nonprofit realm. When Meg is not playing foosball, she writes books (www.idealist.org/careerguide) and gives presentations on the incredible career opportunities in the nonprofit sector. Apparently “nonprofit” does not mean “does not make money;” some of the salaries people make doing nonprofit work are astounding. Unfortunately, Meg is not one of those people. However, she loves her job, the people she works with, and the fact that she’s now ranked #3 in office foosball. It must be the goggles.

About the same time Meg got her job, I got to travel to China for Intel. It was quite an adventure. The adventure began with the taxi ride from the airport to my hotel, where I saw my life flash before my eyes multiple times as the taxi ignored every single rule of the road. In the course of 30 miles, the taxi successfully passed other vehicles in every single lane on the road, including the inside and outside median as well as splitting the lane between 2 giant semis. It is a miracle I am alive. The rest of the week was filled with meetings and dinners with various Chinese manufacturers. When it came to eating, I abided by the “don’t ask don’t tell” rule - as long as I didn’t know what I was eating, I was okay eating it. I left China with a bad case of indigestion, lots of communist propaganda souvenirs, and a mild case of black lung.

The next 6 months were a blur of wedding planning. I would like to say that I helped contribute, but my biggest contribution was staying away from the wedding planning. Meg, on the other hand, did an amazing job of envisioning, creating, and coordinating a great day. We got married in the backyard of the house where Meg grew up in New Jersey. The two most overheard comments of the wedding were: “I didn’t realize New Jersey was so beautiful” and “That dog is so cute!” The dog, Oliva, is the Busse family dog and she upstaged us all night. When she wasn’t being cute, she was gorging herself on wedding food and using the kitchen as a vomitorium. I think she enjoyed the wedding more than any of us.



We spent our honeymoon traveling in the lovely Australian winter, which is a lot like the Pacific Northwest winter (cold and rainy). But we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Some of the highlights included visiting with family and friends, snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef while fighting off hypothermia, and nearly hitting a wild boar with our rented Smart Car (which was slightly bigger than an Australian banana).


The last big news item of 2007 is that we bought a house!!! Yes, Meg and I are no longer footloose and fancy free because we are now saddled in debt (the American way). It is an old cottage-style house that was built in 1930 and is in great shape but needs a bit of updating. We look forward to doing these home improvements next year. Interestingly, studies have shown that the top 5 strains on a relationship are 5) new job, 4) grad school, 3) unemployment, 2) moving, and 1) home improvement. Having overcome numbers 2 through 5 over the past two years, we decided to take on number 1 next year.


We hope you have a wonderfully stress-free, family-full holiday (is that an oxymoron?) and are actively planning a trip to Portland, OR to test out our new, soon-to-be-renovated guest rooms. Bring a raincoat and a hammer…

-ian & meg