Mike and Clark's Year End Letter! 2020 - you can honk-off!!

 

Merry Christmas, from Mike and Clark!               

What a weird year it’s been!  We felt like March and April of this year, post-lockdown felt like an entire year, and then we had another 8 months of fun and fabulousness to go!  All in all, we’re doing pretty well, in Covid-19 adjusted terms.


The big news is that in January, we purchased a house in Richmond, VA with our dear friends David & Cheryl Lederle-Ensign.  It will be our eventual retirement destination (yes, were getting to be that old).  The work on the house began in February, then came to an abrupt stop in March when the City of Richmond went on lockdown.  The house was not in a usable condition - no working bathrooms, no kitchen, items that are rather crucial to successful occupancy!  It's a big house with a huge front porch and two spacious master-suites upstairs.  The lower level has been opened up to have an open floor plan that will be great for entertaining. The home should be in move-in condition by February 2021.  We think senior co-housing is going to be the next-big-thing for retirement options. 


Our work lives have been hectic. Mike’s job, as a program manager for government contractor Salient CRGT, has been especially demanding.  Both of us are 100% working from home, and work-life balance has been difficult to maintain, since we’re always “at the office”!   Clark’s job – as a Unified Communications Engineer for Booz Allen, usually required him to be on-site.  The firm made accessing facilities difficult, due to Covid-19 restrictions, so he transitioned to doing other things like billing analysis and process improvement. Clark is looking forward to getting back to the office.


Although, we were in a pandemic we took several fun trips. We went to Alabama to visit Clark’s parents a whopping three times this year – in January (or “The Before-Times”, which makes us sound like we’re characters a Young Adult dystopian novel), in June, then again in September.  The September visit was to celebrate several important milestones – Clark’s Mom & Dad celebrated 60 years of marriage, Mike and Clark celebrated 25th year together, and Great-nephew Tom Collins turned 3 years old (the photo was from Tom’s Birthday)!  It was a delightful visit.  Mom and Dad cancelled their annual trip to the DC area for Thanksgiving, it was the start of the 3rd surge of infections and it didn’t seem prudent for two 80-somethings to be driving up here at that time.

Mike and Clark are missing their usual pastimes of singing in choirs (Clark) acting in plays (Mike), and our beloved Clarendon Presbyterian Church moved to 100% online.  Clark’s chorus, The Harmonizers, moved their rehearsals online, and the small chorus, TBD, stopped rehearsing entirely.  The Harmonizers produced a slick Holiday show with a multitude of guests, called Christmas Coast-to-Coast – it’s still on YouTube if you’d like to view it (https://www.barbershop.org/landing-pages/christmas-coast-to-coast) Mike is on the board of Dominion Stage of Arlington and is in the process of producing a play called “Until The Flood” – a series of monologues (Covid-19 safe, since there’s no interaction) about the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO – that is set to run virtually January 22 – 24th, 2021. Details can be found at dominionstage.org. 

Well, that’s our year-in-review from this small corner of a strange year.  We hope all of you are safe and well, and we hope to see you or chat sometime soon! 

Much love, Clark Chesser & Mike Bagwell


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