Merry Christmas and the Best New Year Wishes from Northwest Arkansas! We pray that all is well with you and yours and that the past year has been a good one for you. 2002 was a much more settled year for us than the past few years have been. We continued to work at retiring and settling into Northwest Arkansas. We continue to age, reluctantly but with grace.
  Although we just finished a Thanksgiving during which we truly felt thankful for our wonderful life and many blessings, we did have a major sadness early in the year. On the first of February, Jerry’s Mother died. She was just a few weeks shy of her 91st birthday and had been quite ill with Alzheimer’s disease. We had a lovely memorial service for her in early September.
  Beyond that it was a pretty quiet year, but we kept very busy just the same. Before we retired, people asked what we would do to keep busy. After last year, we still couldn’t say exactly what it was that kept us so busy, but we can assure you that we had little spare time to just sit around. As it was, we had to work hard just to “make time” to go fishing or golfing.
  We had a couple of nice trips and some wonderful visitors. In April, Sylvia’s parents visited us for a month. In addition to a lot of miles around Northwest Arkansas, we took them to Memphis to see Graceland and we also went to Las Vegas for a few days. In late September, Sylvia’s son Paul and wife Angela visited for  a couple of weeks. Again we saw a lot of the area around here and we got in a week on the lake in Hot Springs. We had some friends and other family by for shorter periods. In addition to the sightseeing with visitors, we took a couple of trips on our own. We spent last Christmas in New Orleans with Peggy and Bryan Fields. During the better weather we got in short trips to Omaha, Iowa and Missouri. In September, we traveled to our annual family reunion in Minnesota. This year we did it on the banks of the Mississippi River near Bemidji. On the way back we got in a lovely visit and some sailing on Lake Superior with friends in Wisconsin.
  In late July, we went back to England for two weeks. We got to see all of Sylvia’s relatives and many friends in Harrogate as well as Cheltenham. Although it had been over a year since we left England, it seemed we had only been away for a very short time once we got back. We did our best to catch up on the company, food and drink we had missed. We’ll try to go back again next year, but perhaps we’ll let the price of airplane tickets dictate our schedule. It looks like tickets are about half price in late September from their high in summer. We’re also planning on Mexico in March and Yellowstone in May.
  We’ve kept our booths at the local antique mall, called True Treasures. We’ve sold a lot of redundant things we brought back from England. Everything sold makes a little more room in the garage. We never were able to make room for the truck, but we have made room for the boat so I guess that’s a couple of steps forward. Sylvia finally finished her complicated piece of cross-stitch she started before Thanksgiving last year. It measured almost three feet by two feet. It was a bunch of foxgloves in a blue and white pitcher. It kept her going for over a year. It looks pretty good hanging on the wall. She also keeps busy as an officer with our local chapter of the AARP. I help them as well doing income taxes. I also tutor a young Vietnamese man in English with the local literacy council. 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/