About Us
We are the Barbieri family of Campbell California. Ray migrated west to find a job in High Tech as a software programmer. At his first job, he met Lynda who was trained as a computer technician and worked for the military programming satellites. (oh, I should probably have not mentioned that because at the time she had a secret clearance). They became friends years before they increased their Facebook status (OK, there was no Facebook at that time and there was barely an internet but we wanted to appeal to today’s generations)
They got married and have three boys: Travis, Alex and Ricky. Alex is living in the northwest and Ricky is in Kansas. Only Travis is still in the bay area with the love of his life – Kellen Hughes.
From the start of our marriage, we would send out cards with an included Christmas letter to share the goings on in our family with people we love. We would get the same from others and even to this day, we enjoy reading the happenings of, in many cases, folks we rarely get to talk to or visit with. In creating our letter, it seemed to me that no one wanted to get a multi-page letter and yet we would struggle year after year — especially when we wanted to include pictures of various events. That’s when the idea of a website came up. The idea was we could put all manner of multimedia on the website and possibly make it more interesting than a simple piece of paper.
It probably doesn’t save us any effort (and may in fact take way longer to create the website) but once we started, it seemed to be “our thing”.
Over the years, the technology has changed and we’ve had to accommodate those changes. Last year, we decided to switch to wordpress. This took a HUGE amount of effort to re-import the old letters. Now, this year, as I learned more about how wordpress works, I decided to switch to a multi-site mode and it took a long time to transition the original/primary page to be a sub-page. Long story short, the mechanism is now there to make it easier every year.
Interestingly, as the boys have grown and moved on, and considering that they are not as interested in conveying to the world the highlights of their year, we find that our Christmas letter has become simpler. So, ironically, the website may be more trouble than it worth! However, one thing that we couldn’t do with a simple card/letter is have the capability to read other comments and the social network that enables.
Eventually, the tech used to create this website will disappear and we will have to transition to some facebook app or some new social networking solution. Until then we thank you for taking a moment to share our lives.
1 Comment
Claire Smitley says:
Hi Uncle Ray and Aunt Lynda,
It’s exciting to hear about your visits with the boys and where they are in life. So glad to hear things are going well for you. I really appreciated your comments to cherish when things are good, that’s good advice. We hope you have a wonderful 2017, hope we’ll get to visit again sometime soon.
Claire
02 Jan 17 @ 10am
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