Pat and Clay Christmas Letter 2010

25 December 2010

First, we want to wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The Houston Family has a website with all the events of our lives presented in a massive amount of photos. You are welcome to view it all at ....

clayho.com



It's been a good year for Pat & Clay with two more great-grandchildren in November. This brings the total to six married kids with 15 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. It makes for a really big Christmas party. All the kids and their spouses are college graduates, five grand children graduated college with six grand-kids are in college now with one that graduated from GT going on to medical school in Houston. Three are in middle school.

Pat and Clay went to Texas twice along with stops at Tunica MS casinos plus a party trip there. We go a hundred miles out of our way to stop and donate our money (in penny's) to the cause. We call it a religious experience.

Andy, Ken and Betty's oldest is going to Texas A&M in Aeronautical Engineering. Clay found out that they had a flight test operation and opened dialog with the boss and offered to deliver his flight test library to them. It turned out to be ten book boxes full of stuff. Both sets of grand parents and the mother took a day trip down there to see the place and drop off the papers, etc.

In May, after we returned from Texas, we put out our garden. It had reasonable results except 120 ft of green beans did nothing.

You've heard of Guard Dogs and Guard Pigs; now we have a Guard Hawk !














After the Marietta Aviation Museum "bellied up" due to lack of donations and gave their assets to the Maritta History Museum, Clay still tried to help but still no joy. Maybe years to come.

Mark is still passing gas at the hospital and building houses in is spare time. This year, however, he branched out by building an automatic car wash. It's open now and doing great. Here's the location of his second one at Powers Ferry and Delk Road.














We had a family Easter swim and stuff at Marks again. Another great time.














This was followed by Dawn's Memorial Day pool party and a great spring. Here Bill is quizing Theresa's new bo, Michael about his intentions. (They sound OK).
















There was the customary round of multi-birthdays and baseball and soccer.

In August, Ken, Betty and the boys came for a visit. This was when the new museum had an open house with their new stuff.
















In October, we sat Donna and Randy's girls and DOGs for five days while they took a "company trip" to Hawaii. The girls and Jake were great, but one of the semi-house dogs pooped a lot. As we were leaving for Texas and Tunica from their house, Pat stepped in a pile which slowed down our departure.

Just before T-Day, Mark rented a cherry picker for his limbs and came by our house to drop a few of ours. He did real good up to the last limb when it bounced off the roof and then the house and ripped the gas meter apart. We had a fire truck and police car show up and then two Atlanta Gas truck. Gas screamed out for an hour and half before they capped it. NO FIRE !














The big one of the year happened in November with the birth of two of our great-grandchildren. We did have our 4th and 5th great-grandchildren last November: Addison Creech via Tina and Mathew and Jillian Drake via Laura and Alex; both are Bob and Kathy's new grand children.

We had a big Turkey Day and they did the 1am 3am shopping thingy but were too slow in getting the really good ones. We had Alex's birthday. He was 26 as you can tell by the pie.














And to top off the year, Mark took us, Lisa, Clay and Joey to Cirque du Soleil. the one with all of the bugs and fantastic costumes. It was great !




Again, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year







Pat and Clay Houston