Lutfey.com

  • January 1, 2024 7:04 AM: Omar’s eyes shoot open and he proclaims to his still sleeping wife, “I need to ride my bicycle on a volcano in Iceland!”

    Kat rolls her eyes. Said gesture might have been more effective if she was facing him or her eyelids were open.

    [SUDDEN LOUD VINYL RECORD SCRATCHING NOISE] Reality check: this is NOT how it “HAPPENED”, but rather how it FEELS like it SHOULD have happened. Four years ago we planned a complete trip to Iceland when, for reasons that escape my mind at the moment, a recreational international travel ban forced us to stay home. In November (when I have to pick my vacation weeks for the next year) we decided to dust off this itinerary and give it another shot. More on the actual trip later on in the letter.

    While I’m on the topic of things that didn’t actually happen in 2024, I bought a Tesla Model 3 at the very end of 2023. I ran some calculations, and apparently I would be turning 50 in April and had yet to buy a mid-life crisis vehicle. The upside to putting this off for so long is that I am now going to live to be exactly 100 years old. If you are expecting an extensive argument of why I made this particular automobile choice I would strongly recommend temporarily switching over to Elon Musk’s Christmas Letter. I am really enjoying the car and my family is more than happy with the extensive list of new rules I’ve established starting with “No farting in the Tesla!”

    So more on this turning 50 thing– while I’m generally not one to celebrate my own birthday, the fact that my age is divisible by five AND two seems like a good reason to make an exception to this rule. My first idea was to recreate “Encounter at Farpoint” (the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, obviously) where I would play the omnipotent “Q” and place my friends and family on trial for the crimes of all humanity. While in many, many ways this really is the best idea that has ever been outputted from my brain matrix, I did compromise a bit and settled on a more modest “game afternoon” theme. The event went well and Isabel and I both sang our favorite (different) “Free Credit Report” jingles. I sang the original pirate version and Isabel preferred the roller coaster lyrics. And, yes, for those who were at my wedding, it was the same version I sang when I managed to control the microphone during the reception.

    Welcome to “later on in the letter.” Moving up from the Iceland trip past-past to the past-now, we spent 10 days driving around a small island in the northern Atlantic.

    The scenery of Iceland was nothing short of amazing. I would stand in places outdoors and think I was looking at a hand-painted matte print from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Since our trip included the summer solstice we had the experience of it not ever being night time– so I guess technically we were only there for one day. Basically every movie and television show that is awesome was filmed in this country. If only Breaking Bad could have found a way to film here…

    So while I was writing this letter I placed a cup of coffee on the table next to my chair before I sat down. Once I got situated with my laptop and put my feet up I tried to reach for the refreshing beverage but it turned out to be just out of my reach. I thought to myself “Man, that cup is REALLY far away.” Then I started thinking about one of the Airbnbs we stayed at in Iceland. Here are the steps to get there:

    1. Drive to Denver International Airport
    2. Fly for seven hours to an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
    3. Take a rental car 400 miles to the less inhabited east side of the country
    4. Turn off the ring highway and drive three miles on the dirt road until you finally go around a turn and a very well appointed building magically appears with a young woman standing there to tell us which room is ours for the night.

    Now that, I must say, is REALLY far away.

    One final point to wrap up our vacation– no, I didn’t ride my bike on a volcano. First of all there was the cost of getting my bike there, and next was the logistics of moving my bike around the whole time, and finally, and probably most importantly, was that none of my fellow travelers had any interest in partaking in this activity.

    That about wraps it up for the year. I thought I would end this letter with my favorite DM exchange of the year.

    Scott: She admits she is completely into me and called me “hot” on our first date.

    Omar: That’s a big red flag.

    Scott: Things have been moving quickly since we met face to face two weeks ago.

    Omar: I’m sorry, I’m still laughing at what I just wrote. Isabel is looking at me like I’m more nuts than usual.

    Scott: Two laughing/crying emojis. No, you are not. You love it. I can literally hear you laugh.

    Wait, wait, wait– there is still a bit of space left at the bottom of the page here, so I think I can squeeze in a new segment I’m calling “Morbid confessions of a serial Christmas letter writer,” 

    Sometimes, when I can’t sleep in the middle of the night, I go downstairs, turn on my laptop, put on my headphones, and listen to Kenny Rogers music for two hours straight. If that doesn’t put me to sleep I’ll fire up Youtube and watch him on The Muppet Show. I may have said too much.

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  • The year is 2023 and I’m going back to school… to learn Dungeons and Dragons! After watching three and a half episodes of a popular Netflix original series I decided to Stranger-Things-ify my life with this classic ultra nerd role playing game that, for some reason, had yet to be added to my gaming skill set.

    While UPS has a generous tuition reimbursement program for full-time employees, a rather awkward meeting with my center manager and a regional Human resources representative concluded that money spent learning this new skill is not eligible for reimbursement. Sorry monster figurines, you are going to be financed from my personal checking account from here on out.

    After the hustle and bustle of the holiday season died down, I wrangled Austin, the guy who loads my truck in the morning, and Jenny, the gal who helped me deliver packages in December, to help me realize this new goal. My character was a lovely one-eyed cleric who, many years ago, accidentally fell asleep next to his newly sharpened mace. Honestly, that could happen to anyone. Despite this being our first time, Jenny and I stumbled our way through the experience and successfully managed to kill a large frog type monster which was rather inconveniently eating the crops belonging to a local farmer. I need to exercise caution to keep my character from losing his other eye as everything I’ve experienced in this world seems to be in no way ADA compliant.

    The year is 2023 and I’m going back to school… to learn Spanish! I suppose a more accurate description of this situation is that I downloaded Duolingo on my phone. Katherine has a thousand-day streak going on the app so if I spend 15 minutes a day learning new vocabulary instead of advancing on levels in Candy Crush, I should catch up to her… literally never, but at least I’ll have reached my goal of knowing as much Spanish as Senor Chang from the television series “Community”. 

    So how exactly does one go about learning a new language? Here are a few pointers I’ve found useful so far: 

    1. “Volunteer” (or as I like to say, “volun-tell”) family members to interact with you in Spanish in spite of (or because of) their clear objections. A good start is to play “Lo Siento Para no lo siento” which is our version of “Sorry” but everyone has to count in Spanish. The only upside for my children is they can mock me until the end of time because I keep skipping over seven when I count in a language other than English.
    2. Set up a Netflix user where the default language is Spanish and watch children’s cartoons for hours on end. Honestly, I’m not sure which of the first two options is less popular in my house.
    3. If you really, and I mean really, want to learn Spanish, commit the “twelve months of the year” song to memory and sing it to Oscar the maintenance worker at the mall when you pass him at work. 

    In July I packed up my favorite “lounging on the beach” shirt and my three closest family members and flew off to an all inclusive resort in Cancun, Mexico. The amenities were all first rate and we I fell into the following routine at the buffet dining area: 

    1. Tell the waitress my cat joke in Spanish. “Qual es el dia favorita del gato?” “Meow-coles!”
    2. Halfheartedly glare at the kids for choosing non-vegan food from the buffet.
    3. Creating elaborate backstories for the half racoon half marsupial animals that were constantly sneaking into the dining area to steal food from unattended tables.

    We spent the better part of a week engaging in several water-centric activities such as swimming in the ocean, hanging out in the pool, and breathing the air (which, according to my phone, somehow achieved 105 percent humidity.) 

    In technology news, Artificial Intelligence is a trending topic these days, so I thought I would make up some predictions about what this means for humanity in the near future.

    In the very near future, say this Tuesday, it will be impossible to differentiate between human recorded voices and computer generated speech on Youtube videos. Sorry Stephen Hawking’s voice software, but you are to be relegated to novelty historical use only from here on out.

    To simplify the world of online dating, massively parallel chatbots are going to digest all of the world’s online personal information and start interacting with each other. If your chatbot really hits it off with another chatbot after a few months both human parties can exercise the option of meeting in real life. “Are you seeing anyone?” “No, but my bot has several promising leads that I’m keeping an eye on.”

    I’ll soon be able to submit my “Archer” movie script to the interweb and, after an hour or so of processing, watch a 90 minute video complete with animation and character voices. Boy, they really nailed Sterling yelling “LANA!”. Any skeptics of this should realize the previous version of this software has been, without any human intervention whatsoever, responsible for the past seven seasons of “The Simpsons.”

    For some reason it seems like every year 1.2 percent of the population just goes out and dies of this or that, and this year was no exception. I’m sure that everyone will agree the biggest loss of 2023 has to be Angela Landbury best known as the star of “Murder, She Wrote.” For some time I’ve known a little secret about this woman that I felt was prudent to keep to myself until after her passing. SHE MURDERED ALL THOSE PEOPLE ON THE SHOW!!! What are the odds of a novelist stumbling across more than 200 murders over the course of a decade? I ran some calculations and I say zero. And not just on the show, she killed all the people in real life! (or IRL, as the kids like to type on their phones) That explains perfectly why appearing on the show was known to literally kill an actor’s career. I really feel better having gotten that off my chest.

    Remember this, folks: you can spend life going all in on your most grandiose visions or sitting on the couch doing nothing of note. Either way the universe will reach a point where your existence has no effect on the present: you, your evil goatee-clad twin, and that-one-guy-you-are-never-going-to-like-at-work’s accomplishments will all be eroded by the sands of time. Having said that, look deep inside and figure out what you can do with your next billion heartbeats.