December 1997

Seasons Greetings!!

Better late than never! Read on to find out why this is so late. But let’s get to the main point. This year Steve and I have meet 2 of life's major goals. We bought a house and got married.

Yes! Our place finally. It is in the “burb’s” north of Philadelphia about 30 miles. Trenton, NJ is about 5 miles away. Near by is where Washington crossed the Delaware. Levittown to be exact. For you trivia buffs, Levittown was the first totally planned community in the U.S., built by William Levitt. We live in a section called Oaktree, and yes Levitt put oak trees everywhere in the section. Our oak tree is over 50 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter. Our place is not as suburban as it sounds. Our property backs on to 100 acres of wood and grassland the electric company owns as dedicated open space.

Enough about our place, let’s get onto goal #2. Steve, in October, said “I want kids. Lets get married.” I replied “Okay buts let’s do it quick before you change your mind.” It was decided December 28, 1997 would be the day. That’s right, about 60 days to plan a wedding. I now understand why most people take 6 months or more to plan the wedding.

It was a busy two months getting our place ready for the wedding. We had the wedding in the breezeway of our new home. Kelly Hemmer (my Matron of Honor) and my mother did all of the decorating. It looked great. If you are one of the Internet generation, there are some wedding pictures at www.voicenet.com/~murphman. The wedding turned out great, it was the family party we wanted. Okay, this is why the newsletter is so late. One more thing, to answer the question foremost in everyone’s mind, no I’m not pregnant yet. We will get started in a few months.

            Enough about our goals, let’s bring you up to date on our normal lives. I have been working at a company called CHEMCENTRAL/Philadelphia. As the name implies, we are a distributor of chemicals. (Hopefully, ones for a better life.) I am an accounting clerk keeping some of the books for the office. The work is okay but the people are great. I also get really good benefits. How many companies pick up the full health insurance premium these days? When I am not at work I am still unpacking our stuff from when we moved in. Most of our stuff didn’t arrive until October. It was being stored in my parent’s basement until we found a place. Dad only brought some of the necessities (it was a full load at that) in July when we closed on the house and we finally moved in. We finally got around to getting a mover in October to bring the rest of our stuff here I have been unpacking ever since, well at least the time I wasn’t working on the wedding.

             Steve is still working for a place called Global Financial Press. Unlike my company, the name of his company does not really tell you what they do. Lets just day that it deals with printing financial documents even though they don’t print them. Steve is a top computer person there. It is too technical to tell you precisely what he does. Which means that all I have told you is that Steve works for some printing company that doesn’t print, doing something or another with computers. I don’t think I can get any more vague than that. One thing they made him do was to move the New York office (in Manhattan), to the new location on the lower West Side. He communicated with me at home for two months while doing this. The move went very smoothly. He is now back in the Philadelphia office trying to catch up on his “old” job.

 Until Next Year,

Steve, Sonya and Fuzz Vitarelli