Merry Christmas and the Best New Year Wishes from Northwest Arkansas! We pray that all is well with you and yours; that the year 2001 was a good one for you. We hope that neither your life nor your welfare has suffered as a result of the national tragedies in September or the stumbling financial markets throughout the year. The entire year was an adventure for us -- one that will continue for some time to come, but we are settling in and liking it.
  At the end of May we began implementing the retirement plans we had been thinking for such a long time. With varying regrets we quit our jobs, sold the house in Harrogate, and said goodbye to the family and so many of our friends. A lot of things were pretty uncertain as we left England, we were only certain that we wanted to go to this northern corner of Arkansas. I had been looking for a computer system administration job via the Internet, but didn’t find any long-distance takers. Since we’ve been here, we haven’t had the time to go looking for a job. So the really tough decision took care of itself – at our age if you don’t have a job, then you must be retired. We’re pretty happy with our own choice of where to settle. So far, we really like the people, the pace of life, the countryside and the weather. But if Wal-Mart keeps growing as it has, we maybe crowded out of Bentonville.
  After leaving England on the last day of May, we spent a week in Minneapolis with my family. The sisters are doing well, but Mother, at 90 years of age, is not. We also stopped in Omaha for a week with Al and Sheila. Al was a big help to us in finding the right new car.
  Once we got here, it didn’t take us long to find what we think is a lovely home on the edge of Bentonville. We closed on the first week of July and moved in the second week. Since then everything has been a blur – hundreds of boxes to be unpacked, rooms to be cleaned, painted, and papered, curtains, etc. But it’s done and we’ve had several visits already. We’ve just started on the outside and we’ll be busy until spring just getting ready for spring. We’re looking forward to the day when we can put our feet up because we’ve got nothing that really needs doing.
  As it turned out, we had a lot more antique stuff from England (and st ored in Maryland) then we could ever use in our house. We’ve taken on a couple of booths at a local antique mall to start getting some of the boxes out of the garage. Hopefully we will able to have room for the truck as well as the car in the garage by next winter. We talk about golfing and fishing a lot and even took adult evening classes in both, but still haven’t made the time for any fishing and only one game of golf. We joke about going back to work so we could have more time (like before). It might be funny if it weren’t so true. Maybe next summer...
  We haven’t even done any traveling yet, except for a trip back to Minnesota in September for the annual gathering of the clan. We’re also planning four-days in New Orleans for Christmas. If all works out well, we’ll meet Bryan and Peg Fields, friends originally from Maryland but now transplanted to Texas. Working around springtime visitors, we hope to get an extended trip to the northern Rockies and mountain parks and we’ll find a few weeks to return to England in the summer.
  So that’s the news from the Argetsinger’s for now. If you are ever driving highway 71 between Bella Vista and Rogers in the NW corner of Arkansas, stop in. We’d love to see you.
 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Sylvia and Jerry
2803 Garden Place, Bentonville, AR 72712
Telephone 479-271-8572
Email: jerry@argets.com Web site: http://www.argets.com/