This Is My 'Christmas Newsletter' to Our Friends and Family

Also, I announce our next World Cruise in January 2026, which I'll narrate again. If you don't consider yourself "friends or family," feel free to delete!

Dec. 21, 2024 – Holiday Greetings from Golden, Colorado!

With no family nearby and no holiday parties on our calendar, it will be a quiet Christmas and New Year’s for us, which Rita and I don’t mind. Otherwise, we’d create a party!

We’re happy to enjoy each other’s company. Jim keeps himself busy with managing his real estate listings and writing his weekly “Real Estate Today” column, which now appears not only in the Denver Post and three Jeffco weeklies but also in the Denver Gazette (an online-only daily) and the other 21 weekly newspapers serving the Denver metro area. He loves the exposure his writings now get and delights when he gets phone calls from readers who say, “I read your article in Hustler 285…” or the “Lone Tree Voice” or the “Highlands Ranch Herald.” (Those were actual calls.) In fact, it was shortly after “Real Estate Today” began appearing in all 24 weeklies that Jim got such a call from a reader of the Lone Tree Voice, resulting in a listing which produced a $20,000 payday for Golden Real Estate. Let’s say, adding those 21 other weeklies (at a crazy low price) was a good investment!

Rita, meanwhile, continues to enjoy her retirement, which began in August 2017 when BeautiControl went out of business. She had been a “Director” with BeautiControl for over 25 years. Nowadays she keeps herself busy doing jigsaw puzzles, cooking wonderful food for the two of us, playing Words of Wonder, Gin and other games on her iPhone, and watching TV with Jim, including football games, reality shows (Survivor, The Bachelor(ette), The Voice, American Idol, America’s Got Talent, etc.), news programs, and movies on Netflix. Recently we binge-watched on Hulu two seasons of “The Bachelor Australia” and “The Bachelorette Australia,” which we loved because of how much more of Australia we got to “visit” that way. Check it out! It’s nice that Rita and Jim have the same interests and tastes in entertainment – and the same political views! Rita also pitches in at Golden Real Estate, keeping our closed files clean, sorted and archived for the required number of years. She also does the QuickBooks entries, with help from a QuickBooks expert, Heather Duffey, so that our tax accountant, Jeff Parker, gets clean books to work with each January.

Most of Jim’s professional time is spent researching and writing his weekly column, which he fits into three different PDF templates – one for the weekly newspapers, one for the Denver Gazette, and one for the Denver Post. All 26 papers publish on Thursday, but the first deadline (for the weekly newspapers) is the prior Friday. The deadline for the two dailies is the following Tuesday, but meeting those secondary deadlines only takes an hour or so, since all Jim has to do is fit the same articles into different page sizes. The final task is to publish those articles (and featured listings) on our Substack blog and as an “article” on Jim’s LinkedIn account, adding hyperlinks and additional photos/tables, etc. A photo of the Denver Post version is also posted on our Wordpress blog, which is linked to the company website. Those online tasks keep Jim busy each Tuesday evening, and subscribers get those blog posts by email at 8 a.m. each Wednesday. Whew! But the process satisfies Jim’s journalistic impulses, and these publications have become the “rainmaker” for Golden Real Estate, producing the vast majority of our buyer and seller leads without having to do other kinds of prospecting. Many successful agents spend more time prospecting than Jim does producing those columns.

2024 was a big year of travel for us, as you know. It began with our 122-day world cruise on the Viking Sky, departing from Los Angeles on January 6^th and disembarking in London on May 6^th. What a great experience, which, as you know, I documented on this Substack blog. Before the world cruise even ended, we booked an August/September follow-up Viking cruise from Stockholm to Montreal, bookended with a one-week visit to Jim’s sister Janet and husband Staffan in Stockholm…

…and a three-day hotel stay in Montreal and a one-day stay in Boston before flying home. Jim’s sister Susie, who lives in Kingfield, Maine, picked us up in Montreal and delivered us to Boston in her “new” Tesla Model X – which Jim drove, of course! Here’s a picture of Rita and Susie at a stop enroute to Boston from Montreal.

Enroute to Boston, we stopped in Freeport to see my old friend, mentor and first newspaper boss, Sam Smith and his wife Kathy. I worked for Sam helping him publish the Capitol East Gazette during the summers prior to my 1968 internship at the Washington Post. Here we are at a Freeport restaurant:

We also swung by what was my first home, Little River Farm on Casco Bay. Our family had sold it to Sam’s family in 1953 when we moved to Denver. They in turn donated it to the State of Maine, and it’s now the Smith Center for Education and Research, focusing on sustainable coastal farming. Almost everything in this aerial photo from their website (except the islands) was part of our farm:

Here’s the farmhouse we lived in until I was 5 years old:

Susie had flown to Denver a few days before our Stockholm-Montreal cruise began so she could drive our 2017 Model X home to Kingfield, Maine. (She dropped us off at the airport.) The car was our gift to her as we downsized from three Teslas to one. Prior to that we had sold our 2015 Model S to CarMax for a measly $7,000. Its battery and performance were still like new, but it had a bunch of body damage issues which made it unsellable for more – hail damage on the liftgate which we never repaired, and the plastic front bumper was attached to the front quarter panels by shipping tape! There were also some under-body plastic panels that had fallen off, and the right passenger door sometimes would not open from the outside. You get the picture….

We had wanted to sell Golden Real Estate before the world cruise, but that didn’t happen despite some inquiries, so we were curious to see whether the company would fare well with Jim on the far side of the planet. It did. Thanks to the Starlink connectivity of the Viking ships, Jim was able to stay connected to the industry and write his weekly columns, just like at home — and still have time to do a daily blog about our travels. Here’s the list of 18 columns Jim wrote from our stateroom on the Viking Sky:

That got Jim thinking less about retiring and more about enjoying life, especially through travel with Rita, referring the buyer and seller leads generated by Jim’s column/ad to our broker associates. It also inspired us to book a second world cruise in 2026, this time a 140-day cruise from Ft. Lauderdale to Lisbon, with surprisingly little overlap of our 2024 world cruise.

You can expect that Jim with do a daily post on this same blog for the new cruise. BTW, our 2026 cruise is not on Viking, but on Silversea’s Dawn, a 596-passenger ship built in 2021. Silversea is the luxury small-ship member of the Royal Caribbean Group, and it sounds even more luxurious than Viking. There are still some staterooms available, if you’d like to join us! I’ll never forget telling my 100-year-old friend, Howard Berger, “You can’t take your money with you!” and he replied, “If I can’t take it with me, I’m not going!” Well, it appears to be working for him! Here’s Howard at his 100th birthday party in November 2023:

No heirs are waiting for us to die, so we’re spending as much as we can on ourselves (and supporting worthy charities and alma maters).

We enjoyed Thanksgiving with Rita’s son, Bob Guinn, and his fiancée, Susan. Susan’s daughter Gia flew in from Seattle to join us, and a fun couple from Denver filled out the holiday table. A great time (and great food & drink) was had by all!

Bob and Susan are flying to Seattle for Christmas with daughters Lauren & Melissa, which is why we are without family this Christmas.

Speaking of family, Jim’s oldest sibling, Carol Robinson, passed away earlier this month at the age of 88. Her devoted son, Mike Henritze, and his wife Kristi took such great care of Carol in her waning years, for which we siblings are so grateful. Jim’s two remaining siblings are, like Carol, older than him but are in fine health, as are Rita and Jim. While Susie was in Denver in August, she and Jim got to have a final visit with Carol, which she and the Henritzes appreciated.

Life during the 6 months we’ve been home this year resembled prior years when we didn’t travel as much. Rita still goes to Las Vegas every month or so to compete in a blackjack tournament, where she usually gets into the semi-finals. What draws her, however, is the circle of friends from all over who also go to those tournaments. Here’s a picture of three of those friends, Lee, Thomas and Ashley:

Jim almost never goes with her, but this November, two days before the election and after the tournament, he drove his Model Y to Las Vegas and spent that week with Rita, visiting both the Golden Nugget, where Rita goes every time, and the strip, including the Paris and the Bellagio. Here we are having one of several meals at the Chart House in the lobby of the Golden Nugget:

And here we are at the Bellagio:

It was a fun time, and it gave Rita time to increase her winnings from the high roller tables and machines. (She almost always returns with more money than she takes, the highest haul being over $20,000.)

We left Vegas on Thursday, so we could spend an overnight in Hurricane, Utah, where Rita’s sister Lynn and brother Jeff go to enjoy warmer weather than they experience at home in Kalispell, Montana. It was a nice visit, giving Rita a chance to enjoy Lynn’s healing skills as a massage therapist. Continuing on Friday, we only went halfway home, spending the night in a Utah hotel so a winter storm could pass. When we left on Saturday morning, the roads were mostly clear of snow, which was great.

Life is good. We are happy and healthy and hope you are too! Merry Christmas or whatever celebration you honor. And a prosperous (and politically safe) New Year to all!