Text Box: Text Box: families lived on Clayton Street. It was at a birthday party luncheon for Urie in the 1940s when Joe first experienced ravioli. We were also pleased to have a pleasant day at Lake Almanor with Dan Coutolenc, his friend Helen and Ken and Jackie McGarva. Dan and Ken are old friends from college days at UC Davis. We had not seen Dan in about 25 years and had totally lost track of him. However, his ex-wife, Sandy, receives this newsletter annually. Last year instead of using it to wrap the garbage, she sent it to Dan. He contacted us and, as they say, the rest is history. (On second thought, she might have wrapped garbage in it and then sent it to Dan.) Just before New Year’s Day Joe had breakfast with his old primary and High School buddy, Bill Phelan. They had not seen each other in many years. Bill and Joe used to be pranksters in high school. Bill became a San Jose cop and has successfully kept Joe away from his kids so that Joe can’t relate their escapades. Last summer during a visit with Joe’s classmate, Toki Takhar and his wife Amrit, we traveled to Sonoma to meet with one of our professors from veterinary school, Dr. John D. Wheat and his wife Mary Lou. Toki worked closely with Dr. Wheat during the last two years of vet school. Dr. Wheat was very kind to Ella as an employee and Joe as a student and young equine practitioner. Today Dr. Wheat is still very involved in equine work and he and Mary Lou serve as docents at Jack London State Park. Mary Lou also volunteers as a mentor for at risk students in the Sonoma School District. She gave us some great ideas for establishing a similar program here in Marin County. The visit reminded us about how lucky we were to have such great teachers in veterinary medicine — both those in vet school and practitioners who taught us as volunteers. Among the latter are Bill Mottram and Wilber Boyce. We will also be forever grateful to Joe’s mentor in lab animal medicine, Dr. Al Edward. The only way we can pay them back is by teaching others. Switching to a HMO Speaking of nostalgia, this past year we had to give up our beloved doctor of 20 years, Dr. Martel. Our insurance would not cover virtually anything he did, so we signed up with Kaiser. The Kaiser plan is one of the better HMOs in the country. Ella has had no problem with the transition. (She lies about how sick she is when she wants an appointment.) Joe has had greater problems figuring out what he should do, as demonstrated in the photo from his recent physical on page 3. The California Energy Crisis Prior to September 11th the first page story in this newsletter was going to be a parody on the California energy crisis in which we were going to suggest that all citizens have Text Box: Nostalgia Each year as we sit down to write this nontraditional newsletter we consider making it more like those we receive. Why not emphasize our family’s successes rather than failures? It would be more uplifting and would take up much less space. Our question was answered by our cousin, Doug McGlashen, at a dinner honoring his mother Betty. (Betty is moving to the state of Washington to be closer to Doug, Lisee and her granddaughter Caterina.) Doug said, “If things go well, consider yourself blessed. If they don’t, you‘ve got a story.” We decided we still prefer our stories. When is a Virus a Worm? For example, early in this year our computer became infected with the Anna Kournikova virus because we were stupid enough to open an executable e-mail attachment. It was a very embarrassing situation. Everyone in our e-mail address book received the virus as a late Christmas present and immediately knew how stupid we were for doing exactly what all of the publicity said we should not do. On the other hand, it was great hearing from so many concerned friends and business associates from all over the world who e-mailed or called to tell us we had a virus. Some told us that they enjoyed hearing from us. However, they didn’t understand the message and couldn’t, open the attachment, even though they tried everything they could think of doing. We were so inspired by their messages that we immediately updated our anti-virus program, obviously something many of our friends had already done. Phillip is Back on TV Philip Morris reminded us of the good old days, now that they have managed to get cigarette ads back on T.V. Their brilliant marketing division managed to skirt the federal regulations by writing ads to show the humanitarian works of the Philip Morris Foundation. Along with this genus, the company put out a press release claiming the 22,000 smoking-related deaths in the Czech Republic in 1999 saved their economy $27 million a year in pensions, housing and health care. This amounts to $1,227 saved for each premature death from smoking. It makes us think back to the days when Johnny used to present us with smoky Holiday Greetings and before Joe Camel was born “more doctors smoked Camels than any other cigarette.” We were going to show an ad from the Camel campaign. However, we think we’ve dealt with enough death and destruction in this issue. Old, and We Do Mean Old, Friends We enjoyed connecting with some old friends this year. Urie and Krista Walsh invited us to a delicious Italian dinner featuring ravioli and brachiole. Ure and Joe were neighbors and pals from 1942 until about 1946, when both of their

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