Well, it has been quite some time since
I have written one of these letters. Almost three years have gone by, and
much has happened. Time has really been flying by for me. That is part
of why it has taken me so long to write this letter. We shall see how good
my memory and notes are. Well let's start at the beginning and progress
chronologically, except for one big item of news that can't wait. I am
engaged! The wedding will be on July 20th in Southern California.
Her name is Gisleide and she is from Brazil. I will mention her many times
in this letter. Here is a picture of us from a little over a year ago:
My last letter closed after my returning from Jamaica, having attended the wedding of my friend Robert Quinton. I had such a great time at the wedding that I sort of extended the party by taking a quick trip down to Miami. A friend of Melanie's (Robert's wife) lives there, and was at the wedding. Robert and Melanie stopped by Miami at the end of their honeymoon. The four of us had a great time over a long weekend at the end of September (18-22). I did some sightseeing, and went to the beach to get sunburned. I saw Versaci's house, there was still a slight stain on the front steps from his blood from when he was shot and killed. The architecture in Miami reminded me a lot of Southern California quite a bit, the Spanish colonial style. I flew back into the newly redone and renamed Ronald Reagan National Airport early in the morning and went straight to work.
I have been going to the home Football games at my alma matre for the last four seasons. I went to the Army-Navy game the first of those seasons, but have not the last three years.
There are some new monuments in the DC area. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Monument opened in April of 1998. It is along the tidal basin, not far from the Jefferson Monument. I have not been to it yet. I was there at the tidal basin admiring the cherry blossoms one day before it opened. Other new monuments are the Women's Military Service, Star Wars Exhibit, and Black Soldier's Memorial. The Washington Monument is being refurbished. They have finished the inside, but have quite a while to go on the outside still. There is scaffolding all around it. Well, there was. They have finished it and taken it all down. The Vietnam War Memorial is now 17 years old.
The last three summers have been pretty dry. This causes the fall colors to not be very spectacular since the trees do not have as many leaves and are not as healthy as they could be.
I am now using a satellite video dish for my television viewing. I think it is great. I decided to install it myself because it would save me some money and I enjoy that kind of stuff. Well, it turned into quite a fiasco. I ended up having to pay for installation guys to come out and help me. It turned out that the RG-6 cable I bought from Radio Shack was substandard. Once that was replaced, everything worked great.
My company's Holiday Partys are quite spectacular. I have been to two of them now. The first was in Union Station, which is the big DC train station. We outgrew that and the second one was held at a local hotel. We pretty much took over the whole hotel.
One funny observation of mine is the way people around here dress. In the Fall everyone has to dress in Fall colors: brown, black, and dull. I got lots of funny looks when I wore my bright blue, white and yellow jacket in September. People really follow those fashion rules around here.
A few people have asked for a description of what I do at AOL. I am a programmer, and I do testing our networks. I help make sure that the connectivity between AOL and the client's modem is working, and also between AOL and the Internet is working. I gather a bunch of data to see how well our systems are working (that is the operational network that connects AOL to other companies). I then make web pages to display all of this data. Since our network is always growing and changing I always have lots of work to do.
AOL has pretty elaborate company meetings. We have to rent out a large hall, or basketball area. There are lots of lights and music and razzle-dazzle. Sometimes we get big name people to join in, like Colin Powell. He sits on our board, so they had him talk to us. He is quite a good speaker.
Gisleide has dragged me to watch a few plays with her. She likes Shakespeare a lot, so we saw "Merry Wives of Windsor" and "Much Ado About Nothing." The sets for "Merry Wives of Windsor" was set in the 1950's, but the words were not changed at all. It made an interesting mix. We also saw "Shirley Valentine", which is a one person play about a woman going through a mid-life crisis. It was quite good.
Gisleide and I took a trip to California at the end of August. We flew to San Francisco and visited with my cousin Scarlet for a couple of days. We rented a car and drove down the coast to Orange County. We visited with a few people, but mostly I wanted to show her around and see how she liked the area where I grew up.
I spent Christmas of 1998 in Mexico with my parents. Gisleide could not go because she lost her greencard and the she had not received the replacement yet. She cannot get back into the country without it. I spent a week with my parents. I got to see all the changes that have happened since my last visit, which had been two years before.
My company (AOL) bought a company called Mirabilis, which makes a product called ICQ. Their operations were run out of New York city. As part of the migration of their operations down here to Virginia I went up to NYC for three days. I got to roam around a little bit, even though I worked pretty long days while I was there. I had fun.
Gisleide and I went on a trip to her country of Brazil during her Spring Break from school. We did a fast paced trip that covered three big cities in nine days. We started out in São Paulo, which is the biggest city in Brazil. Actually, we started out by visiting a friend of Gisleide's that lives an hour outside of São Paulo, in Campinas. We spent two days there and then went to São Paulo for a couple of days. Gisleide did some shopping there, of course. Only Brazilian shoes fit her feet right. I succeed in distracting her from the the dresses, though. From there we took the bus to Belo Horizonte. It was a nine and a half hour trip over winding roads. The scenery was very nice, though. Just outside of Belo Horizonte, in Santa Luzia, we visited her former step mother and family. We were driven all around the country side there. We visited an old city called Ouro Preto, which is very beautiful. It has Portuguese architecture and is situated on a group of hills, so there are steep and narrow cobble stone streets. After our visit there we flew to Rio De Janeiro. We stayed in a hotel there in the section called Leblon, which is the southern half of Ipanema. So, yes, we stayed on the beach. We walked all along the path next to the beach quite a bit. We watched lots of people playing soccer and volleyball on the beach. We also went to Copa Cobana and to Pão De Açucar. Pão De Açucar is a very tall hill that you have to take a cable car to get to the top. The view from the top is spectacular. The name means "bread of sugar", which is translated to "Sugar Loaf" in English. The name comes from the hill being white on the top, like a sugar coating. We did not go to the very famous Christ Statue, though, because we ran out of time.
Gisleide and I took a trip to Spokane, Washington at the end of August. We visited with my Uncle Vern and my parents, who were also there visiting. We spent a week there and had a good time. It had been almost ten years since I had been to Spokane.
I spent the Christmas and New Years of 1999 here in D.C. I sort of had to hang around due to the Y2K worries at work. We had no problems, so it was all for naught. It was one of the more mellow New Year celebrations I have been to in quite a while. We just went over to a friends house. Here at AOL we have a pretty elaborate Holiday Party at the end of the year. Three years ago we rented out Union Station, which is the elaborate train station in DC. Well, we outgrew that, so the last two years have been in a large hotel in Virginia. Around two thousand people attended this years party.
Gisleide and I bought a house in DC. It is a rowhouse, and was probably built in 1890, the records are not real complete. I am always amazed by things that reach that far back into the past. It was built in the time right after the Civil War, in an area that was very affected by the war. There was an addition added to the house sometime later. It is a wood frame house in the Federal style. The previous owner had divided the house into two apartments and rented them out. It had been vacant/abandoned for about four years before I bought it. Needless to say it needed some work done on it. Actually it cost more to fix than to buy. The process of buying it and fixing it up has been an epic undertaking that took about fourteen months. I got a loan which includes the rehab money. There is a lot of paperwork associated with that, though. I had to find a contractor to do the work, for the right price. When we were ready to go to closing one of the owners had a stroke and was in a coma. Well, they could not go to the closing and sign, so a governorship for them had to be obtained. A few days after that was finished, they went and died. It was all very sad, but now we had to go through the will process to be able to close on the house. These two delays held up the closing up by five months. There were many silly delays in the rehab of the house also, but I will not go into those.
All said and done, our new address is:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXYou might ask why I moved in to D.C. at all. Well, it is actually a pretty nice place these days. I have always lived in the suburbs and wanted to try living in the city. I figured that this was a good place to do it. I don't plan on living here forever, so it is perfect place to experiment.
Washington, DC
I have a web site with some information about me. Yea, I know real exciting. I do have copies of most of my letters online if you want to read any old ones. Here is my web site: http://alexkiefer.net/ and there is a link to my letters from there. They cover my Antarctica time, but not my Navy time. I am working on finding copies of those letters. If you have one, please let me know.
Well, that's all for now. I hope all is well with you. Hope to hear from you soon.
