December 1999

Greetings Friends:

It has been another crazed year in the Gibson-Smith/Martin household and unfortunately been so mad recently that for the first (and hopefully last) time we are sending a generic Christmas letter rather than individual ones, so please forgive the lack of personal touch.

Where on earth do I begin on the events of 1999? (Cliff says that he is sick of receiving happy Christmas letters and keeps telling Val that it would be amusing to send out a totally fake letter referencing people that don't exist in hideous situations. i.e. instead of "We're so glad that Julia won the Nobel Prize, Gary became president of his company and we are fabulously well and wonderful..." we should write things like "George is in rehab for his addiction, Felicity's morals charge comes up next month, the house burned down, we got divorced, everybody is sick and we do hope that Phillip returns all that money he stole.")

Anyway, 1999 has been an odd year to say the least. It started off with a bang with a surprise black tie 60th Birthday dinner and dance that the whole family put on for Clifford. He was totally stunned to see nearly all of his friends and spent most of the evening in a state of surprised shock. We ate and danced the whole night through! We then went skiing in Aspen with Val and Cliff for a week at the end of the month. I think the skiing was good but don't really remember as we spent most of the time playing bridge and drinking hot buttered rums.

It then went downhill in February when I finally unloaded the apartment I owned in Chevy Chase, Maryland. This was the first apartment I ever bought and, in keeping with the honorable Smith investment tradition of "Buy insanely high and sell ludicrously low" I lost a fortune on it. That said, however, it was a relief to finally have rid of it so as to never deal with tenants again. I can honestly say that I am the worst landlord in the world as evidenced by the fact that none of the tenants ever paid any rent. (Come to think of it, if that is the case, from a tenant perspective, maybe I am the BEST landlord in the world!)

March and April were pretty quiet and we spent most of our time gardening and putting in new beds and ponds. We build about 20 raised beds in the vegetable garden with gravel paths around them, put in four new flower beds in the garden and carved a path through the wildflower meadow so that it is now pleasant to walk through. The moment we had finished all this work and loaded every bed up with flowers, the veggie garden with vegetables and put a ton of wildflower seed down, we had the worst drought that West Virginia has seen since they started keeping records. Needless to say by midsummer the property looked like Death Valley, so we have our work cut out for us this coming spring.

At the end of April we went to Scotland for a brief visit to see my grandmother, Nana, who was getting quite frail. Val and Julia went over as well and helped Keith and Christine move her to a very nice home that was just up the road from their house.

In May we held our annual Champagne Tea fundraiser for the theatre festival. The theatre festival is a local event that commissions and produces 4 brand new plays every summer in Shepherdstown. I sit on the board and hit up everyone for donations for it regularly. We were lucky with the weather and had a super time. We also went back to Colorado Springs for Mothers Day to see Thom's mom and saw his brothers and sisters while we were there, which was lovely.

July was nuts, but loads of fun as we had the Contemporary American Theatre Festival on, as well as Thom's brother, Mike, and his family staying. We had a wonderful time with them and went all over the Washington area as well as visiting New York. They headed home to Texas exhausted and, we believe, happy! We opened our house up to the performers and playwrights from the festival and seemed to have an endless procession of parties and barbecues while they were here. All the plays went off well and, with the exception of the Post, got wonderful reviews so we were very happy.

August was our annual camping trip, and on legal advice I will say nothing of the alcoholic, canasta-fuelled frenzy that occurred. In September we headed down to New Orleans again with friends and met up with many old friends while we were there and then October brought the Maryland Renaissance Festival, which meant that our weekends through November were packed. Thanksgiving was spent at Julia and Gary's and we had our usual feast. which brings us to December, when the entire Smith clan is heading to Disney World for Christmas as Val has decided that she doesn't want to cook this year!

In between all this we had the usual and not so usual litany of disasters and successes. The first, and funniest, disaster was the saga of Ian's Pond.

In March I had the bright idea that it would be really fun to dig a pond in the wildflower meadow and fill it with water so that the deer and other wildlife would have something to drink and would thus encourage them to pass through the back. We rented a bobcat (bloody great digging machine) which I decided would be fun to operate. I got in this thing and felt like the movie "Aliens" when Sigourney Weaver is in the huge exoskeleton. I promptly hit the wrong pedal and dug up a huge gouge in the driveway by mistake. Upon getting the machine into the right area of the garden I started digging the pond which, quite apart from being about 100 feet from where it was originally intended to go, started to look quite good. After watching me operate this thing for about 2 hours and digging about 5 cubic feet total, Thom called Gary who came over, took over, and dug an entire 30 by 30 foot horseshoe shaped pond in about an hour. We then ordered the first rubber liner, which was obscenely expensive and quite useless as the young man I hired to assist me with the garden cut the thing in half "so it would fit!". I went out and bought all sorts of marine rubber glues, glued the thing together, laid it in the pond, filled it up, edged it, filled it with plants and fish and watched as the seams separated, the water poured out and everything died! This was now A Challenge!!! I spent days on the internet researching ways to glue rubber, ordered all sorts of chemicals and adhesives, resealed the liner and filled the pond with water. It held water for a week so we edged it, filled it with plants and fish and watched as the whole thing collapsed, emptied and everything died again. I then ordered a second liner, which came in 2 feet too small on all sides, so we earthed in the sides, laid in the liner, filled up the pond, added the fish etc and watched as a deer fell in, slashed the liner with it's hooves, and......the water poured out and everything died again. At this point Thom lost his patience and pointed out that the neighbours were probably tired of looking at this enormous muddy hole in our back garden and that he wasn't too fond of it either and that either I fill it in or call in a professional! The professional finished it in three days, installed waterfalls and rocks and I can honestly say that these deer have no idea that they are now drinking out of the Gucci of ponds or at least the most expensive pond in history. Ah well, live and learn!

On that note, I also decided that the gardens were getting just too much to deal with on my own and that I should hire a kid to come in once a week to help with the mowing, weeding etc. Not too difficult a task one would think. The first gardener cut the liner in half, the second gardener never showed up, the third gardener stole my car, the fourth gardener was bitten by a snake, the fifth gardener never showed up, the sixth gardener was arrested for breaking and entering houses, the seventh gardener sat in the barn and smoked odd smelling tobacco all day, and the eighth gardener was hired by Thom. She is a delightful lady who comes once a week for a couple of hours and is, as far as we know, not a felon, addict or insane!

We finally decided to move ADI, Cliff's and my company, out of the garage, where it has been for the last three years. We had built another building on the property which looks like a large, two story garage. We had been using the downstairs for the business but had converted the upstairs to a guest suite and decided that it was easier all round to take over the whole building and move ADI from the house. This went off without a hitch except that we now have the most tasteful garage in history as none of the office art fit in the new building so we are now parking our cars on a nice blue carpet in a garage with finished walls and glorious maritime artwork. I just think it adds to my reputation of being ridiculously over the top. Heheheheh!

Healthwise this year has also been odd; Thom was ill in November and had a very nasty stomach infection which meant that he wasn't digesting food. It took the doctors forever to figure out what was going on, but he is now well on the way to recovery. Also Nana passed away in November so the whole family headed over to the UK. We were lucky enough to see and speak with her before the end but it still came as a great blow to all of us.

On the charity/public service front, things couldn't be more exciting! I took over as president of the Aids Network and Val and our friend Mary held a large dinner and dance to raise money. The dance itself actually took place during the period that we were in England for Nana's funeral so Thom and Gary ended up looking after all of the folks who traveled up for it. We also held a World Aids Day event in Shepherdstown on December 1st, which was bitterly cold but received great press and featured Collin on television talking about why he was there - to show support to his uncles!

As mentioned earlier, I am also on the board of the theater festival and chairing the long range planning committee which has been tasked with finding a way to build our own complex by the end of 2009. (Hmmm, if I need to raise $15 million and hit all my friends up for $50 each, that means I need just 300,000 close and personal friends!) It is actually extremely exciting as if we can pull this off it would change the face of the whole area dramatically. (That was a terrible pun!)

Thom is still chairing the Education committee for the Aids Network and is president of the Berkeley County Democratic Association but the truly exciting news is that he will formally announce on January 7th, 2000 his candidacy for the seat in the WV House of Delegates! We have both been stunned at the outpouring of support for him and know that this is a winnable race. It will also be historic in that, when elected, he will the be the first openly gay elected official ever in the state. He has been busy lining up support and has already hired his campaign manager. The primary election will be in May and he will, knock wood, be on the ballot in the presidential elections in November. We will be starting the whirl of fundraising, publicity, endorsements and old fashioned door-to-door handshaking in January, so 2000 is looking very exciting. The state legislature runs January and February and again for a few weeks in the fall, so he will keep his business, which has been going extremely well, and live in Charleston during the week when the House is in session. The whole thing is phenomenally exciting but also a little scary as it will certainly change our way of life.

On the addiction front, I am still smoking, but the family is getting ready to hold an intervention as two friends of ours, Kymberli and Pete, introduced me to an online, live, interactive role playing computer game (sort of a live Dungeons and Dragons for the 21st Century.) It is without a doubt the most addictive game I have ever played and I am averaging about 6 hours a day hunched over the computer rampaging through a virtual world. The game is called Everquest but Thom refers to it as EverCrack. Luckily for me, however, Thom quit smoking when I first started playing this game, so while he was quitting I wasn't in his hair all the time, being on the computer, and as he didn't want me in his hair he didn't mind that fact that I was screaming at a computer screen until 4 am every night. Julia and Collin have both started playing too but Gary and Cliff refuse to try because they are even worse than me when it comes to these games. Cliff just finished one game with Collin called Might and Magic, which they reckon they have averaged three hours every day on since May!

The family are very well and I am sure you will be getting updates from them so I will not go on as this letter is already way too long. We are looking forward to Christmas and are having some friends over for a dinner and dance on New Years eve. (That way when the Millenium Bug hits and the cities burn at least we will have enough vodka to get us through! Thom keeps going on about buying water, a generator and all this rubbish but I have made sure that we have the really important essentials, booze, nibbly bits, chocolate and books!)

We hope you have a wonderful and safe Christmas and New Years! All our love and best wishes to you and yours and hope to see you in the new Millenium!