Dec. 16, 1996 It's been a very busy year. Or should I say "bIZZY", but more on that a little later. It also seems to have been a longer year than normal, and I don't just mean because they squeezed an extra day into February. It somehow seems, as I look back across the vista of weeks stretching into months toward 1995, that events from early in the year are a very long, hazy ways away. It's been a year with some cause for reflection: I was at the sites of two bomb blasts -- not when the bombs went off thankfully, but one shortly before and one a while after. A young woman who was a good friend of our family passed on after a difficult bout with cancer. In her early thirties she left behind 4 children, the youngest only about two. To complicate matters the children had been living as a single family but as 2 were from a previous marriage the kids are now split up. And Madelyn's mother is also having a rough time with cancer. Her children are grown and spread thin but I'm not sure how much easier that's making it on anyone. And so now it's Christmas. Let's make it a good one. (2 points to those of you who spotted the John Lennon allusion in the last two sentences.) Speaking of 2 points, it's college basketball time again with Madelyn's favorite voice (not really) -- Dick Vitale. He makes any game exciting, doesn't he? I spent another week this year in Saudi Arabia, Riyadh only this trip. We ate in a restaurant whose front glass had been blown out a few months earlier by a bomb blast across the street. The crater still loomed. One Intergraph employee's wife was injured in the blast. A few people died, I forget how many. I got to spend a few hours in Zurich, Switzerland on the way home. The architecture was neat, the exchange rate was bad and it was dirtier than I'd thought it would be. The other, more senseless, bombing I was near this year was in Centennial Park, in Atlanta during the Olympics. I was there for 9 days as a volunteer. A table tennis statistician. I kept stats and ran an electronic scoreboard. I took Nathaniel and his friend Matthew, who lives near Atlanta now, to see Table Tennis, Badminton and Volleyball. We also went to Centennial Park, which was a great place to hang out. Fountains and mists to cool off in; exhibits to explore; music; and lapel pin trading -- the boys jumped right in and traded with all kinds of people. It was a real coming together of people from all over the world, literally. Oh, and Izzy was there too. Right now Madelyn's the jet setter. She used a free ticket I'd gotten from Delta when I took a bump on a hop from Atlanta to Dulles. (That means I volunteered to wait for a later flight.) It was nice because she didn't have to book it 3 weeks in advance -- called up Friday for a flight to Newark on Saturday. She comes back today after visiting her mom. I've filled the page and there's so much more that happened this year: table tennis (record rating, record participation, exhibitions), soccer, the Olympic torch was here, 2nd grade for Nathaniel, comic books, coming soon: a personal Internet homepage http://fly.hiwaay.net/~crpatton, -- oh, and we had a daughter: a beautiful, sleepless little child we named Caralyn Rebecca (yes, 2 a's in Caralyn) was born to us on Halloween. So our Star of Madison was a jack-o-lantern and folks that followed it to our child's cradle weren't Magi, but more like diminutive X-Men and Power Rangers. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Let's make it a good one. -- Chip (crpatton@ingr.com), Madelyn, Nathaniel and Caralyn