The Christmas Letter Blog!

Dear friends and family,

This year, we got our Christmas cards a little later than expected, so many of you will still receive the card in the mail after Christmas (provided we have your address. If you're not sure, email Jen at jmbperry@att.net). So we decided to go ahead and do a card through the ever-wonderful blog!

There have been a lot of changes over this past year: new jobs, new moves, and it looks like 2010 is going to be just as crazy!

Just before Christmas of last year, Jeff started working at Gap in NewPark Mall in Newark. After being there only a few weeks, he was promoted to an assistant at the Gap Kids in Los Gatos, and was there for about 6 months. When we were certain about our move (more on that in a bit) he decided to transfer out and be closer to where "home" would be, and so he is now the assistant manager at the Banana Republic in Brentwood, CA. He is also still plugging away at his undergrad courses online. Right now he is taking a few courses through Colorado State University until everything begins to settle down.

Jen has also had an exciting year. She is still working for Stanford, but now in a different department. At the beginning of December, she moved to the Child Health Research Program and is currently working in the Department of Pediatric Oncology, in a study that examines how a specific drug used in chemotherapy may cause heart problems in patients. She is also still working on her second bachelor's degree so that she can get her Master's in Speech Pathology. Originally, this spring was supposed to be her final semester. However, this past fall, she had been having a lot of migraines, which forced her to drop out of a few classes and set her back. Her new graduation date is for the end of Summer 2010.

2009 has brought us many adventures. We traveled to Las Vegas 3 times (that we can think of) for Jen's work, as well as to Sequoia National Forest, San Francisco, Monterey, Lake Tahoe/Squaw Valley and the ever-glorious... FRESNO!! We also reached a milestone: this past November, we celebrated our 5-year wedding anniversary. We had a blast touring San Francisco (on a Tuesday in November, so it was extremely peaceful!) and finishing it off with a dinner at Ruth's Chris on Van Ness. Now we anticipate the next holidays and adventures: Christmas, New Year's, Jen's birthday and (possibly) Valentine's in Las Vegas. What can we say? We love it!

We are still in the process of moving. For those who didn't know, our offer was accepted on a house in Tracy at the end of July, and the house was finally put into escrow in November. However, the current residents were putting up a fuss and not cooperating with the brokers, the inspectors, or anyone, and so, before we lost our deposit, we decided to rescind the offer. Now we are back on the hunt for a house and are looking for a rental in the meantime. Right now we are staying in Jen's parent's house, but we are eager to get into our own place (and to get our things out of storage!)

We are hoping that you all have a wonderful Christmas season and hope that the New Year brings you and your family all that you want and more. We love you all.

Love, the Perry People

PS - A sneak peek of what your Christmas card will entail this year :-)

Life of Brian

It's been a bittersweet weekend. This morning, Jen got an email saying that one of our guys, Brian, had died on Friday.

Brian was our white and black chinchilla. For those of you who don't know the story, Jen found four chinchillas at a garage sale. They were sitting out in the sun last summer during a horrible heat wave, which is deadly for chinchillas. Rather than leave them, she made an offer on them and the cages and took them home. We didn't know anything about their history, and the woman who owned him said they guessed he was about 2 years old, but then again, this same woman said that his cagemate Stewie was a boy (she's not!) and that the other girl was sterile (again, we proved that one wrong as well). We honestly weren't sure if the four would even make it through the weekend, but with some love and care, they did survive and grow to be healthy chubby little guys. After we rescued him, we took him to the vet, where we did discover he had a heart murmur, a very common ailment with chinchillas, but it never stopped him from living a full life.

Although a small boy, he was very mellow and overall a friendly guy. We guess that he was at least 5, making him one of our oldest boys, but our unique boy as he only had a half-black tail and dark ears.

Fortunately, Brian passed on his wonderful traits to his two babies, a little girl named Boo and a little boy named Scout, who also has his white coloring, but is beige (like his mother) where Brian was black.

We have both enjoyed having Brian in our lives for this past year. Although we wish he had stayed with us a lot longer, we are glad that he did not suffer, and rather, was found cuddled with his little boy in their chinchilla house. He died peacefully in his sleep.

RIP Brian. Hopefully we'll see you on the other side.

The New Casa de Perry

So, it appears to be 99% official. We will be moving into a house. Specifically, this house!





For those who didn't know or haven't heard, we have been looking for a home on and off for over a year now, and have had a lot of tough luck with this. Overall I believe we put in offers in nearly 40 houses, came close to getting a few of them, but never got the whole deal closed, until now. It has been a long struggle, but it is seems to be done... at least, the house hunting part.







This is a 5-bedroom, 3-bath house in Tracy, about an hour east of where we are currently in Fremont. It will add a bit to Jen's commute, but on the bright side, she won't have to drive. The ACE train will take her from Tracy to Fremont, and the shuttle will take her from the station to her office at Stanford.







Overall, it's a great house, but needs a bit of work. We have to paint the entire interior of the house because there are a few holes that need patching as well as some odd colors that we would like to change (two bedrooms are bright blue throughout, and one is Pepto pink). A good deal of the flooring needs to be changed as well, because the previous owners had allowed their animals to mess them up. Also, the master bathroom is carpeted, something that baffles Jen, and so we would likely tile that bathroom instead.




We've also got to redo the back yard to make it nice and comfortable for Chris. It's pretty much dead grass and gravel, but there are a lot of fruit trees which give us some much-needed shade in the Tracy heat.

The only scary part is the brief period that we are nomadic. Our lease in our apartment expires on the 15th, so in about a week, we will no longer have an address until we move into our new place, but because the paperwork is in the last-minute detailing, we will likely be homeless for a week, until we move into the new house.

So, if you don't hear from us for a while, we're either not with internet or we're buried in the fixer-upper stuff.