The Parkins Report

Events of 2002

The past year has been busy with family trips, changing job responsibilities, and health issues.

We both had our share of health scares: Larye had a retinal tear in June and spent most of the summer on restricted activity after laser eye surgery; Judy developed a frozen shoulder and spent a great deal of the fall in physical therapy. Both issues have resolved and we finished out the year working determinedly at weight loss.

Travels:

New Year's saw us in Chelan, Washington after a short visit to Tacoma, then a bioinformatics conference took us to Tuscon in January; two trips to New Mexico, one (two for Judy) to Wisconsin. Judy attended a machine quilting conference in Seattle in September. We went on several day hikes in the Bitterroot Mountains in the summer, and of course, weekends at the cabin and attended quilt shows and shops around Montana. We also spent Thanksgiving week with friends at Big Sky, Montana, with side trips to Bozeman and West Yellowstone.

"Spring Lilacs and Fall Hoarfrost," Hamilton, Montana

Jobs

Again, job changes, additions, and expansions.

Judy ordered a Gammill Optimum Plus long-arm quilting machine just before the New Year: we remodeled an insulated storeroom in the back of the garage and Realizations Fabric Arts transformed from a part-time teddy bear factory to a full-time quilting service in late February. By the end of the year, Judy had quilted more than 70 client quilts and a couple dozen of her own, and has quilts for sale in several outlets in western Montana. She is active in the Bitterroot Quilters Guild and other area sewing groups.

Larye continues to work on contract at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, National Institutes of Health, providing system administration and bioinformatics programming services. He assisted with the annotation and publication in the NCBI Genbank of the genomes for two strains of Strep. pyogenes, MGAS8232 and MGAS315. The papers describing this work were published in PNAS 99:7:4668-4673 and PNAS 99:15:10078-10083

Larye's home-based consulting business, Information Engineering Services mainly supports Judy's, keeping busy updating her quilting web site..

Contacts

Larye & Judy Parkins

PMB 435, 610 1^st St., Ste. 5

Hamilton, MT 59840

(406) 375-6139

larye@parkins.org (406) 240-3328

judy@parkins.org (406) 240-3329 http://www.parkins.org

http://www.info-engineering-svc.com

http://www.realizations-mt.com

Family

Additions: grandson Matthew Christian Jenkins-Bock, in February. Judy drove out and stayed for two weeks.

We made a short winter visit to the New Mexico Parkins clan, and returned in August for granddaughter Krysti's fifth wedding anniversary, a gala family affair.

On the Bock side of the family, Judy also spent a few days at Mark's this fall and we both visited in Wisconsin in October.

We visit a lot with Judy's sister in Polson during the summer, and this summer got to see a lot of Ben's family as he and Bing celebrated their 50^th anniverary.

Friends

The welcome mat is still out: we're in a friendly small town with great scenery, come on down.

Not many visitors this year, and we haven't traveled as much as we'd like. We put a lot of pictures of family and adventures on our web site, and update it often. We try to keep in contact by email.