2003 HOLIDAY WISHES FROM THE FRAHMS

1553 County Road T (or PO Box DX) Colby KS 67701 785-462-7388 http://www.carrollsweb.com/bfrahm

Our “at home” family has grown to four with the addition of Namwan, an AFS high school student from northern Thailand. We’re enjoying this expansion of our horizons that will last through June. For the 4^th year running we’ve had a hospital patient; this time it was Bruce with a gall bladder quickly gone amok in April. We enjoyed Helen Frahm’s 90^th birthday party at the church in late March; she continues in reasonably good health. We are tiling our sunroom and have new back and front porch steps. Jon has just completed his Computer Science degree work at Kansas State this month. We had a big apple crop this autumn and are still enjoying them.

Our January timeshare trip to Grand Cayman included Jon and our brother-in-law Paul. We have a sense of community with our fellow timesharers and understand more about this British colony every time we visit. And 84 degrees and sun in January on a soft carpet of beach sand is great. We won’t be going in 2004 as we traded our weeks. Spring break was in Las Vegas.at a timeshare trade condo. We enjoyed a visit from Tibi, the Hungarian exchange student who spent 1995-6 with us and now lives in San Diego. Karlyn loved M&M World and we all enjoyed the Bellagio’s water fountain, bird show at the Tropicana and just cruising the various strip attractions. Much of our time was at our condo way south on the strip, where we had 2 large Mayan-themed pools featuring a pyramid with waterslides. On our July trip to Hartford, this time without Jon, our other ex-exchange student Hibiki, living in Montreal, joined us. After Bruce’s board meetings Hibiki drove us to the ferry and we spent a week on Block Island, RI just east of Long Island. The 2x5 mile island had many beaches which we enjoyed. We shared a rental house with friends from Beloit. The main attraction for Bruce and Alan was setting up a ham radio station for operation in the Islands

on the Air contest. A ham friend from Chelmsford MA joined the Kansas pair and they made over 1200 contacts in the 24 hour competition. The group won North America high score in multioperator division. We took a whirlwind drive to Tri Cities WA for the wedding of family friend Kendra Mitchell. Our 2 days in Richland along the Columbia River were full of celebration, visiting and swimming in the river. 2 and 2.5 day drives allowed little time for stops but we did enjoy the Lincoln statue in Laramie, dinosaur museum in Ogden, Snake River gorge and Denver Aquarium as well as much intriguing geology framed in the windshield. Shortly after Namwan’s arrival we gave her an accent crisis – we had visitors from Australia and England! Glennis spent a week with us; she’s a friend from our time in Canberra during Christmas 1985. Her visit was followed with a 2 month stay by our regular visitor Barrie from Sherwood Forest.

The local farm scene resembled a repeat of last year. In a word – DRY. Yet timely June rains yielded some wheat. A vicious hailstorm around the farm had minimal impact on our ¾ finished wheat harvest, but damaged 1/3 of our irrigated corn circles. Sprinkler problems we thought we’d addressed after the droughty ’02 season showed again – we’ve discovered many wells aren’t delivering the volume we thought. We had one fair dryland corn field and some good circles, but most were mediocre. We think pressure gauges will help the irrigation situation next year. And SURELY this drought will end someday. Our family farm partners met at a 9000’ elev. home west of Vail in June; fast-running rivers and mtn. scenes were impressive and we visited a marble quarry. We 3 remained at a timeshare swap in Avon for a lakeside week busy with pool & park activities, crawdad eating and relaxing.

BRUCE maintains reduced weight. A second tower and new antennas aid ham radio. His new hobby is winemaking, with jalapeno, corn, wheat, apple and red grape batches fermenting. Three music groups keep evenings busy. bfrahm@colby.ixks.com

JANICE is finished as NW area director of Kansas FCE. Her service on the Hays District board of Ordained Ministries continues to be fulfilling and interesting. A keen pursuit is genealogy. jfrahm@colby.ixks.com

JON was Best Man at trailer mate Justin’s wedding. His final semester included a 3 hour computer science class and 1 hour each of fencing and archery. He has yet to seriously job-hunt but his dream job would be in game programming. jkf5868@ksu.edu

KARLYN enjoys second grade. His computer learning is a high point and he does well in spelling and math. He had a fall tumbling class; the group were in Colby’s Christmas Parade. Airplane Pilot has been replaced by Dolphin Trainer as his most-often quoted job aspiration. He’ll likely extend the family’s hospital patronization streak to 5 years with an anticipated tonsillectomy.

NAMWAN likes computers, especially graphics. She has a heavy curriculum and especially enjoys anatomy, Spanish and Physics. She’s taking piano lessons from AFS “cousin” Jerri and plans to play varsity softball in spring. namwann_w@hotmail.com