Daniel ‘n Dave
Our 2005 Update — Page 1

Joyous Chris-hanuk-zaa!

If you don’t read any more than this first paragraph, please know that our hearts are with our friends and family this holiday season, wherever you may be. We are both happy and healthy here in San Francisco and feeling very blessed in our lives. We hope that the holidays and the New Year bring you great joy.

We write this letter every year really for two reasons: to offer a little detail as to what is going on in our lives for those folks who we don’t see as often as we would like, and

to give us the chance to reminisce and relive some of the highlights of the year. We pulled out a few of our favorite photos and put them in the 2005 gallery as well, so please stop by if you get a second.

Okay, so as we said, we are happy and healthy, but it has been a busy year and we have a lot to catch up on! We’ll do this by topic so you can jump around as you please.

Work

It was a year of great change for both us this year professionally. Dave took the big leap first. In March he accepted a new opportunity at Metaformers, which is an emerging information technology and strategy consulting firm. In the role of West Region Director, he is responsible for building a brand new business based in California serving customers on the left hand side of the country. The company is based in the Washington DC area and it has been a unique challenge to start up so many activities for the firm in San Francisco, including recruiting, business development and account management. Metaformers was built around the same culture and dynamics of the old PeopleSoft, so Dave feels particularly at home there.

Daniel is still working for Oracle Corporation, but the continuity pretty much ends there. Since the first of the year, Oracle has acquired PeopleSoft, Retek, ProfitLogic as well as some other smaller firms. All of this merger activity has led to several restructurings and Daniel now works in a new group on new projects for a new boss. He is even moving to a new office this month. The change and the challenge have been exciting though, and he has worked on several projects with high impact and exposure. Oracle is now in the process of swallowing up Siebel, another huge software company, and then launching a brand-new generation of their application software, so more change is certainly in the works.

The CI

Daniel received his first cochlear implant in August 2002. In June 2004 he became one of the few people on earth to get a second implant (in his other ear, natch). A year later, he is happy to report that he continues to make great strides with this technology. He is using the telephone, attending concerts and managing conversations in larger groups with increased ease and confidence. The only downside is that he and Dave are getting increasingly lazy about using sign language and the skill is getting rustier by the day (especially for Dave).

The House

We have been in the house for 5-1/2 years now and we are finally really getting around to putting some of our own touches on the place in recent years. We installed the deck and hot tub during Christmas 2003. Last year over the holidays, we ripped up every shred of carpeting in the house and put down hardwood floors. With a shaggy dog and two cats, that made a world of difference. This spring our friend Mike Bichanich came up from San Diego and rebuilt a couple of the fences in the back yard and put up the trellises for the landscaping. Then we had a couple of landscape designers come in and really plant a special little garden. The results were amazing and we now are enjoying a beautiful retreat in our own back yard. We are currently in the planning phase of a bathroom remodel that we expect to happen in early 2006. If we stop by your house with a towel and a toothbrush, you’ll know why.