Greetings to our family and friends from the Borcherts.  It’s been a year of memory-making as life transitions pace our life – graduations, weddings, and wonderful times spent with many of you.  Match the captions to the photos as we catapult through this hectic year:

(Here is the link to the collage for 2002)

 January: Dave and Pat travel California late in December, and Karen and Jutta fly with Jane on January 1 to settle Jane into a condo in San Diego for January and February.

• Pat and Dave camp and hike in the sculpted high desert of Joshua Tree National Park.  Crystalline tranquility quickly transforms into an opaque sky and a maelstrom of freeway traffic as they descend into Los Angeles on their way to Pasadena and a viewing of the Rose Bowl Parade with Rick and Barb Swanson.
• Jutta, Karen, Pat, and Jane conduct a floating inspection of  the U.S. Pacific Fleet in San Diego harbor.

 February:  The family goes north for a quick trip to find snow.

• Jutta, next to our rented cabin off of the Gunflint Trail during a cross-country-ski trip.  Jutta, our student from Hamburg Germany was a great addition to the family, and game for any adventure.

 March: Let’s see what Tom and Katharina are up to during their senior year.

• Tom and Katharina at the spring formal dance. Doesn’t Tom look dashing in a white tux?

 April: Spring break trip to New York.  We rented an apartment in midtown Manhatten complete with a very furry cat, we walked the city many times, and generally soaked up the chaos and the character of the city’s streets and neighborhoods, its  museums and parks.

·         Karen, at the John Lennon memorial in Central Park across from the Dakota on the Upper West Side.  … and hopefully “the world will live as one”.

• View towards lower Manhattan from the Empire States Building.  Twin beams of light from ground zero.  I think they represent human diversity and tolerance, the two key ingredients necessary for civilization.  Both of which are found in New York City like nowhere else on earth.

May: We accompanied Karen’s Destination Imagination team to Knoxville Tennessee. What fun to keep working with this great bunch of kids for so many years!

• The Destination Imagination team.  Leslie, Brett, Luke, Hans, Karen, and Nick display a few of their props from their archaeology comedy, which they present at the DI Global Finals in Knoxville.  Team based creative problem solving is central to DI, and they get to practice a lot of this during the tournament as they fix their solution many times.

June:  Jutta graduates from Hopkins High, and Tom graduates from CalTech in Computer Science (officially, Engineering and Applied Science). Say good-bye to California, Tom.

• Dave, Pat, Karen, Mike and Tom at the Cal Tech graduation reception at President Baltimore’s house.  We think every college president has a side garden specifically for these events.  Makes a great backdrop for pictures!
• Mike and Karen flank Tom, the happy graduate.  All that remains is the packing….   
• Tom and Katharina wedge one more box into the reaction chamber for their research project.  The goal is to determine the critical mass and density of personal possessions required to sustain nuclear fusion.  The truck didn’t explode, and they drove it from Pasadena to Boulder, where Katharina is pursuing a PhD in astronomy and Tom is pursuing Katharina.

 July :Fourth of July, and a week later, niece Kimberly weds in Door County, Wisconsin.

• Introducing Jutta to Minnesota summer life, as Elizabeth, Mike, Jutta, Pat and Jane consume strawberry shortcake out on the deck at Cedarcliff.  Wait a minute Pat, that isn’t in our diet. 
• Peter, Dianne, Kim and Dan.  Kim and Dan start the wedding season with a wonderful wedding on Peter and Dianne’s golf course in Door County Wisconsin.  We were all rooting for Dan as soon as we met him a few years ago.  Mysteriously, Dan had his eyes closed in almost every wedding picture we took.  We can provide them with an entire album of blind Dan wedding pictures.

August:  We kick off a month of wedding related events with a trip to Boston, Elizabeth’s home town.

• Mike and Elizabeth unite the Borchert and Olsen clans.  The movable wedding feast begins at this clambake in the Boston area. 
• Peter Sand (Pat’s nephew) takes Pat, Karen, and Dave sailing on the Charles River from the MIT Sailing Pavilion.

September:  The big event is finally here – Mike and Elizabeth wed.

• Proud moms, Pat and Lin, in the foreground on Mike and Elizabeth’s wedding day.  Rich, Tom, and Jane are in the background.  Note that it is not raining, yet.
• Rich and the pastor standing by the wedding altar, checking last minute preparations. 
• Mike and Elizabeth.  They’re hitched!  What a great couple!  They are standing on the new landscaping and steps they helped build weeks before.
• The wedding banquet in the Grand Ballroom at the Palais du Scandia, formerly Jane’s garage. 
• Relaxing after the wedding, the cousins played a creative game of Monopoly using an elaborate set of changes to the standard rules.  Greg, Karen, Evelyn, Wendy, and Erik. 

 October:  A few glimpses of life at the Borchert’s.

• The Coning.  “Dear Karen, the Golden Valley police stopped by tonight while you were sleeping and requested that you contact your friends and have them return all 39 of the construction cones to the locations they borrowed them from as soon as possible.  Love Mom.”
• Some really cute allergens.  

November: Pat spends time “with the girls” and Dave spends time with one of our new relatives – Elizabeth’s father, Rich

• Pat with her “women’s night out” friends on a weekend trip up on the North Shore of Lake Superior.  Two nights before this, Pat accidentally introduced many of them to a night hike through the north woods, sans flashlight or compass.
• Rich Olsen flew Dave out in his single engine plane from Boston to the Twin Cities for an extraordinary Thanksgiving treat.  Highlights were flying over the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania and up the Mississippi from the Quad Cities to the Twin Cities.  Ask Dave and he will be happy to e-mail you about a gigabyte of aerial photos!

 December:  Concerts and dinners, time spent with friends and family.  Memories yet to be created and captured.

 Our warmest wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season goes out to all our friends and family – as we all get older, our relationships with each and every one of you becomes more precious. 

Peace and Love,