December 2021
Dear family and friends,
Our big news this year is that, after twenty years in White Salmon, we have finally relocated our Northern/permanent legal residence to Genoa, Nevada. We will be spending the warm months there. However, we are still maintaining our winter season residence in Fountain Hills, Arizona.
Why would we leave such a beautiful place as the Columbia River Gorge? Well, we had been thinking that we should tune-up our residence locations for retirement. In 2020, Washington state passed a sizeable capital gains tax and Steve still has his fingers crossed for a good outcome from Seeq. So we decided to stop delaying and make a decision.
Why Genoa, Nevada? Genoa is a tiny town just east of Lake Tahoe at the base of the Sierra Mountains. It is served by the Minden/Tahoe Airport, which happens to be one of the world’s great soaring sites. Steve is eager to return to the sport of soaring, which he started at the age of 14.
We bought a lot in Genoa and our ‘transition’ home nearby. We are working with an architect on a ‘Mountain Modern’ design with good views (and nice guest suites). Steve has contracted for a new hangar to be built at the Minden airport and has ordered a new JS3 sailplane from South Africa. We are hoping the house design will be completed so it can begin building this spring. With luck, the sailplane will be in the new hangar this summer.
Meanwhile, we continued our seasonal nomadism between Arizona and Washington up until we left for Nevada in September.
As COVID restrictions rescinded, we enjoyed visits from several groups of friends and family over Christmas and winter/spring in Arizona. Steve stayed busy with Seeq, and Nancy focused on flying the new jet to stay current, among her various activities.
In June we traveled to St. Louis for the wedding of some good friends, then Steve traveled to Knoxville, Tennessee for his jet recurrency training. Nancy and her flying buddy Marcie followed for their recurrencies in July, adding excursions to Austin and Cape May for visits to Marcie’s family.
The rest of the summer and fall were filled with packing up our White Salmon home and hangar, then unpacking in Genoa. During the move, we learned that no matter how much we tried to reduce and simplify the last couple of years, things just accumulated. We made a couple of dozen trailer runs to Goodwill and we still exceeded our moving budget. Although we are somewhat settled in Nevada, we are glad to be back in Arizona where everything is dialed in.
Seeq has made substantial progress and Steve led a round of funding in early 2021 that actually valued the company a bit more than Insitu when it was sold to Boeing. Both start-ups went from zero to this milestone in about 7 years. Seeq has doubled its revenue again since the funding. This healthy state of affairs caused Steve to take stock of the situation.
In November, Steve negotiated with Seeq’s board and largest shareholders to step aside, take a part-time role as Vice-Chair, and let the successor team take Seeq to the next level. A major contributor to the decision was his ‘biological clock.’ Steve’s parents only made it to 64 and 72. He’s almost halfway between. Steve’s new focus is “health and fun.”
Rich and Tabitha have been extremely busy this year. Both now work full-time for Seeq, while Tabitha continues her Tea for Tabitha business (TeaForTabitha.com) and also her summer wedding/bridal make-up activities. In addition, they have been quite the real estate moguls this year. They’ve remodeled their Hood River home, sold our old White Salmon homestead, and bought some property in the even more rural Husum. They are now in the process of planning the remodel of their new Husum home.
Brandy and Beckett are now 5 years old, still cute and cuddly. They join Steve every day for long walks and snuggle with us when we watch TV. They are a joy and delight to our life.
We wish you all a joyous holiday season and a healthy and happy New Year.
Steve and Nancy
Brandy and Beckett
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