Merry Christmas,

I know that I've been awful about keeping in touch. I want to make sure that I get a chance to wish you a merry Christmas this holiday season.

I'm still in Seattle, and I'm still working at Amazon.com. Despite the death of most of the ecommerce pure-players, we're going strong. It's been exciting to see Amazon go from startup to "real" company. In January, I moved from being a web developer to managing a group of web developers. We lauch new areas of the site like photo, kitchen, and wireless phones. Everyone on my team is wonderful and I really enjoy working with them.

Owen (my younger brother) graduated from Union College last spring. He is now working in the marketing department of Amazon.com, and is living in Seattle. I'm really excited to live in the same city as my brother and the two of us are having a grand 'ol time drinking lattes and dodging rain.

I traveled to several wonderful places this past year. During last year's holidays I went skiing in Whistler with my family. I am still seeing/dating/involved with the amazing Alex Edelman (who also works at the zon), and the two of us had an intense journey to Morocco last January.

To celebrate the college graduation of my brother and my cousin kerry, my entire extended family rented a villa in tuscany over the summer, and I finally got to see Florence. On the way home from Italy, I stopped in Detroit to visit with my close high school friend Kim Painter, and to witness the wedding of my college friends Jeff Lockman and Alison Schirmer. The wedding was in the temple Beth El and it was beautiful. It was the first time I'd been to Detroit in 4 or 5 years. In a couple of days, I'll leave for my last trip of the year. My family is going to spend the last week of December skiing in Austria.

There has been a burst of web activity in my family this year. My mother got her own domain name, haymountain.com. And she's become an html master. Now you can read all about what's going on in my family. Both of my extended families (hay & brown) have started a little web experiment. Each family has a shared weblog where we have little snippets of ongoing conversation. It's pretty interesting. If you want to post on either of them email me and I'll send you the password. I also have my own weblog, my own website and a lot of public amazon customer data. So if you have a burning desire to spy on me, it should be a fruitful endeavor.

For the past year and a half I have taken up photography. I also had a brief flirtation with Tae Kwan Do, and have become an avid spring and summer gardener. I would like to be able to say that I am hard core, organic, have my own compost bin and plant in the fall and winter as well (that's possible in Seattle, amazing eh?), but that would be a big pack of lies.

I wish you a very merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a wonderful new year.

Sincerely yours,
-jordan

I've been reading:

The Foundation Trilogy

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

The Clustered World

Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

Harry Potter 4

Harry Potter 3

Founding Mothers & Fathers

Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

The Arabian Nights

The Economist

The New York Times

Salon.com