WHAT'S HAPPENING WITH THE HUGHES FAMILY?

June 2008
Karin has graduated from San Jose State University with a degree in Recreation & Leisure Studies. She is now off to YMCA of the Rockies for a four-month internship, to complete her academic requirements. She is blogging about her adventures here.

May 2006

Kaitlin has graduated from high school. In between all of the extracurricular activities, she and her friends wrote, arranged and recorded a song that they performed for the Bacculaureate Mass, called "Purple Dress Up Box" that celebrates their transition from childhood fantasies to the "real" world. To download the song, right-click on this link.

December 2005

After 20 years of publishing their annual Christmas greeting as a desktop-published and hand-assembled 16 page booklet, Doug and Diane decided to pull out all the stops this year and create The World's Longest Christmas Newsletter™. They had just celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary in November, and figured it was a good time to do a retrospective of their quarter century together.

The newsletter is posted on a self-publishing website called lulu.com and available for purchase in printed form as a 160-page, 6x9" full-color, perfect bound paperback book. You can also download the electronic version free of charge. Highlights include:

• How their love story began
• The complete Hughes Christmas Carol parody songbook
• Quotable quotes
• 10 years of holiday stories
• Updates from the relatives
• A 25-year photographic retrospective of the Hughes family's history

This unusual publishing feat was a publicity stunt suggested by the marketing department at lulu.com, which offered to pay for printing the books in exchange for the right to promote it as a world's record. They issued a press release, which has led to interviews on three radio stations including the Canadian National Public Radio program, The Current (visit their website to listen to a replay and click on "Part1" of the broadcast). The story also appeared in the Sacramento Bee, the Silicon Valley Wave, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Tacoma News Tribune, and the Baton Rouge Louisiana Advocate newspapers.

Want to see last year's (shorter) 2004 newsletter?
Just click here.

Highlights in last year's edition:

• Kevin graduates!
• Family reunion
• Involvement in theater
• Trip to Disney World
• More song parodies
• Annual photo highlights

Don't have time to download our record-setting book? That's OK. The big news for 2005 is that after seven years at Philips Semiconductors, Doug has taken a new job at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company as Manager of Employee Communications. In order to land the new job, Doug built an online portfolio of his work samples collected over the past 20 years. Take a peek by going to: www.doug-hughes.com.

Looking for the stories that used to be on the home page? Visit the archive.

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