On February 28, 2009, Laura and Damian tied the knot during a lovely ceremony in a little park on Coronado Island overlooking San Diego Bay. They were the second couple in the next…
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La famille de Marie-Hélène !
Marie-Hélène’s family were kind to us all during our initial years together in France. There was a flattering curiosity about us, expressed with a French reserve but nonetheless expressed, in particular about…
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2008: Ian visits aging aunts . . .
One of the pleasures of middle age has been discovering my aging aunts. Taking advantage of the low fares, I spent five February days in England and visited Aunty Vi (Violet Rose Eliza: how’s…
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We are cat people, and this page is dedicated to our cats:
“Banane” was our first cat. Virginie Bournigal, who worked with Marie-Hélène and me at our law firm in Paris and lived in the southern suburb of Malakoff, gave her to me when…
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La Grée
La Grée will be our vacation home forever, in my mind at least. The first version of this page was written in French with a lot of help from Marie-Hélène. During the…
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Alex & Charlie’s Friends
Needless to say, all of Alex and Charlie’s friends can’t all fit here. But between Happy Valley School, Scotts Valley Middle School, Scotts Valley High School and soccer, there were quite a…
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Marlow in Bucks
Marlow is where I call home. I moved away for good in 1974, making my first move to California to restart college there, but always came back regularly to visit mum and…
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Grand-Père
Our children were a little short on grandparents. After my mother died in 1996, just two years after Marie-Hélène and I and the four older children had moved in together, just one year after Charlie…
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Family Groups
The hardest pictures to get were ones of all eight of us together. And it got harder over time for the simple reason that our four older children had better things to do than…
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Thanksgiving 2005: with the Hanlons
Did we mention that the Hanlons are great cooks? Well, if not we should have, and they are! We had not a moment’s hesitation when they invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner in…
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Ian’s Friends
My friends are the ones that keep going, come hell or high water, and through the ups and downs. There are a few, at least one or two, from each period in…
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Russ, Annie and Brendan, the Hanlons
Russ and I met at law school on the East Coast in the fall of 1979, introduced by my Guinness sweatshirt. He walked right up to me and asked if I’d like to share a…
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Death Valley
For Thanksgiving in 2004, the Hanlons invited us, or at least those of us old enough to be interested and young enough to be interested in spending a long weekend with the parents, to accompany…
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Les copains de Marie-Hélène . . .
D’abord, les plus sérieuses, Camille et Amélie en état de grace, halloween 1999. We were spoiled by Amélie, as were the children. She was a student locally who moved in with us…
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Courtney and Antony tie the knot!!
On November 15, 2003, Antony Nash and Courtney Bolin FINALLY got married! Our interest in this noteworthy event is simple: the groom before the wedding, and the bride after, are family! Antony is my…
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Our Wedding: May 24, 1997, St. Hilarion, France
Here we are, at the reception in La Bellanderie, our lovely home in Saint Hilarion, southwest of Paris on the old road to Chartres. The French civil service had done its duty, and it…
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Grandma Stock
My mother left us all on July 24, 1996, but not before giving our entire new family a rousing welcome and wonderful support. Grandma took my new blended family to heart, all of…
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Fabi, Jean et les quatre filles !
The Fabi-Jean family, four children and from Paris, is very partial to the USA. And not just because Fabienne and Jean’s wedding took place in Las Vegas about nine months before ours. Regretfully, we did…
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“Kiss the World Goodbye”
My mum died in July 1996 after a long series of illnesses. At the time, Marie-Helene’s and my family was busy blending, meaning going pretty much crazy, her two children, my two…
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The Stocks, Burrells, Smiths and Duggans
Before the Stocks and Nashes, were the Stocks, Burrells, Smiths and Duggans. The Stocks and Burrells were Ian’s paternal grandparents, and the Smiths and Duggans were his maternal grandparents. (There were other names before…
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The Stocks and Nashes
Let’s start at the beginning, my beginning. That means Mum and Dad Stock, Cath (née Smith) and Jim. I was their first born, and then two years later along came Sue. There we…