You have reached the Home Page of the Smoorenburg's in Santa Rosa
(Updated: 4/15/2002)
July 19,2002: Playing with security cameras... See our web pictures that are extracted and automated on the web every half hour..
July 7, 2001: Had some time to play with video's (Talia and Ocean) and posted two of them in .wmv format. Not high quality, but you get the idea. I am only limited to 10M of web space here, so could not post to large a video. I will be checking into the future to see if I can get more web space for a reasonable price.... Also been checking into some of the earthquake excitement we have been having here lately...
June 2001: I apologize for not having kept this site updated. Life has been quite hectic this past year. At this time we are forcing ourselves to reduce this hecticness and smell the roses a bit more. Talking about roses... our yard is growing and coming along very well. First thing I will do is update the web-site with a new shot of the yard. Meanwhile, we had Talia's 18th birthday. She visited for the weekend and her Boyfriend (Dillon) stayed here as well. Maria was kind enough to give up her room for him. We all had a great time. Stay tuned for more updates.... (This is the first time I have used the PC to update the web-site via DSL - wow this is GREAT performance!!! :)
Previous information:
2000: Since Marco's portion of the company split effort is now completed and his travel requirements are reducing a bit, he is taking a break - The month of July off! Time to catch up on some lost time... :). he is currently (Still:( ) working on the pictures for the April 2000 family reunion in the Netherlands. Let's keep our fingers crossed that his personal computer will remain reliable from here on. It's been quite a struggle since we bought it last year (August 1999). A modem, soundcard and almost 1 year later... perhaps now he can finally use it what he bought it for and have some fun!... :). Also doing some fine tuning in the yard, which is starting to look like a miniature jungle. Oh yeah.. and then all of those little projects that have been shelved... Well they will be addresses.. MAYBE.. It's really time to relax and California weather appears to be back to normal. YEAH!! They have been building the school across the street for a while now and seem to be able to open as planned for the next school year. We are looking forward to having Maria be able to walk across the street to go to school the next 2 years. Talia has a car now and is starting to drive to visit with us by herself. Yeicks! Time to stay off the road!
1999: Was a very busy year for us as well.. It started with chasing down the landscaper to finish the yard project, which turned out to be a 5-8 month project instead of the promised 6-8 week project! Marco worked many 12+ hour days towards the latter half of this year to help hp split the IT infrastructure for the company (Agilent Technologies and hp now, since June 2nd 2000). This effort went into early 2000 (~March) and required quite a bit of travel as well. Earlier on that year hp announced the split and efforts went underway to organize the new infrastructure team. Debbie took a new job after the summer, which she enjoys much these days. Maria did very well in her new school and started 4th grade. We enjoyed much having our yard and home basics competed. The pond was filled up this summer. Added some gold-fish and the neighbor added 4 tadpoles in August. These guys did not turn into frigs until June of 2000!!. Unfortunately, we lost one early one and another... well... Let's say that Katje (our cat) had a nice frog-leg snack one day.. we have had a talk with her since and told her she needed to get the gophers in-stead, because they were eating some of our plants. Guess what.. We still have the other 2 frogs and she caught 2 gophers in June of 2000!
1998 was a very busy year for us. In December (1997) we put in an offer on a new house and started the process of selling both our homes. In January we listed my house on which we closed escrow a day before our wedding (March 7th). The following week we were in Texas for a big family reunion. Because the completion of the new house was delayed (Mostly because of el nino), we had to move to Debbie's house temporarily. Most of the stuff went into storage and in mid April we moved to Debbie's house. Next we needed prepare it for sale. A little yard work and TLC and it was sold quickly as well. We moved out into our new home the weekend of June 7th. After all of these changes, it was time to get organized. We went through a lot of our sh..., uhh stuff, to consolidate the 2 household goods. After all of these changes, we finally got things settled a bit right in time for the holidays. We had a great Christmas dinner at our house with all of Debbie's family. During this time, we also worked with a landscaping company on some designs for the backyard and after some interesting interviews (cost estimates varied 200%) we hired a contractor right before Christmas to do this work. At this time, we are looking forward to the completion of our yard, so that we can really start enjoying our new life here. We plan to have our official house warming party some time in the last weeks of May of 1999.
Each of our family members has their own homepages as well. If you wish to visit these, just press on the links provided below.