By Joe Critchfield, Chairman

Every so often this article is hard to write. It's never easy for me but this one was hard. As we lag the market, the Dot Com Boom did not affect us until this past year when we completed some marginally profitable jobs we took in the 2003 era to keep the company busy.

Hence, though we showed a slight profit it caused us to take a closer look at many areas of the company; all of which we are confident is making us a better company for the future. The great thing for me has been to see the upper management of our company, busy as they already were, say they would each take some part of our company and scrutinize it for a better system and more productivity.

Though it has been painful and stressful, we all have said, like we did eighteen years ago when we had our only losing year in twenty-eight, it is a good wake up call and we will be a better company for the experience.

For sure, the mood here is up beat. Our billings are up. There are more potential good projects than in the recent past, and we feel the current workload will provide a good profit level for 2005.

In addition, we had two engagements--Zac Webber and Patricia Schulze and Michele Bilich and Gennadi Shapiro.

I think you will enjoy our article about CHOMP Hospital and our team down in Monterey. Our lead project manager Vijay Singh took some ribbing when his namesake won the AT&T at Pebble last year. He and his right hand project engineer Andy Rooney, along with Tim Westjohn and Joe Bello make a great team. Most people do not believe that Vijay Singh and Andy Rooney are their real names. Too bad we don't have one of our other employees Sergio Garcia on the project.

On the fun side, our entire family celebrated our grandson's 7th birthday and my 70th in Hawaii in May. The best part was watching the young ones learning to boogie board in the surf.

Have a great summer, and I'll write to you in November.

-Grampa Joe