Hello, and welcome to my 2009 Christmas Letter. For anyone reading this in the future (from when I wrote this), I’ll provide some historical context to help fully appreciate this letter. For anyone reading this while I’m writing this, please stop spying on me. I know how the industry works– radio transmitters in dental cavities, spy satellites tracking my movements from overhead in real time, and, of course, who can forget all the supposedly “free” rectal exams that are only a cover for placing global positioning devices. However, if you are still going to spy on me– even after I very kindly and clearly asked you not to– please feel free to correct any grammatical errors as I’m writing.

Now where was I? Oh, yeah, historical context. It being 2009, the hit movie of this Christmas season is the CGI filled mega-disaster “2012.” The reasoning behind this is obviously is that if the world does end in 2012 as the ancient Mayans predicted, the ticket sales for the film would really be in the crapper along with the rest of humanity if the film were to be released in 2012. The only way to prevent a grisley death would be to follow John Cusack around, since he seems to be the only one with the ability to escape the upcoming doom.

In television news, the most hyped show is the remake of the 1980’s sci-fi show “V.” The original show centered around alien “Visitors” who came to the planet with unclear motives. In a creative writing masterpiece, this time around the Visitors have acquired DNA from our 43rd President and created an army of clones to destroy our civilization. Stay tuned in early 2010 for the exciting first season finale of “W.”

OK, so back to my world. This year has been one of the most eventful times in my life. Katherine and I decided we were both ready to get married and start a family. It turns out that one of those two items requires a lot less effort than the other. (But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself for those who prefer the traditional “chronological” order of storytelling.)

After reviewing our wedding location options, we decided to get married on June 20, 2009. Most of the preparations were quite straight foward. Katherine ordered a dress and I found a nice three piece suit. I’m not sure if I ever documented this, but one of my informal “goals” in my life was to never own a suit. I made it 34 years, but I decided that I would rather buy a suit than rent another tuxedo. And who knows, maybe someday I’ll be a bigwig at UPS and need something other than company issued apperal to go to work each day. Stranger things have happened.

Next on the wedding list was to get rings. I kept my father’s wedding ring in a safety deposit box for the past ten years, and I decided to have the diamond put into a new setting for Katherine. She really likes sparkly things. That, and she found it all romantic and shit. I had my dad’s gold band resized to fit my ring finger.

We had a bunch of flowers at the wedding, but I don’t have any recollection of consulting a florist. Either the experience was so incredibly horrible that I’ve completely repressed the memories in the deepest recesses of my brain or Katherine took care of it all without me.

The best pre-wedding planning experience by far was choosing a wedding cake. In fact, I would recommend to anyone who likes cake to go to a bakery that specializes in wedding cakes and pretend you are getting married. They bring you samples of all their different cakes for you to try. Just eat all the samples and tell them you will be making your decision shortly. Just remember not to go back to the same bakery more than once every few months unless you are committed to creating elaborate disguises and fake personal histories.

Before I knew it, the big moment was upon us. And by that I mean Katherine handed me a home pregnancy test that came back positive. (See, I told you I would get back to this.) These devices have come a long way in recent years– instead of a simple plus or minus, a small computer inside the handle proclaimed, using the man’s voice from AOL mail, “You’ve got a baby-mama.”

The wedding itself went off without any major problems. One of my favorite parts of the evening was the unusual table number scheme we used. It caused a lot of confusion, which is exactly what we wanted. The other highlight was getting to use the microphone during the reception. My friend Brian wanted to hear a song, so I sung the first tune that came to my mind– the “free credit report” pirate song. It went over quite well with everyone that night– my only regret was not getting it on video.

We spent one weekend in November attending a birthing class. In retrospect, I think I didn’t go into the class with the best attitude. I told Katherine that my role in the birthing process was analogous to a father crawling inside the lower cabinets on his back to fix a leaking kitchen sink when the young son comes by and asks the father how he can help. The father looks around and hands the boy a wrench to hold while the dad finishes the job. When the baby gets here my job is to stay out of the way of all the hospital employees and hold any random object that are handed to me. That, and not pass out.

December rolled around and our baby preparations kicked into high gear. Originally Katherine was due December 5th, but after the second ultrasound that date was pushed back to December 15th. Isabel Lutfey finally arrived the night of December 23 after she was forced out of her mama-Jacuzzi by the modern marvel known as a C-section. The delivery took place at the Medical Center of the Rockies, and the experience was made as pleasant as possible considering what had to be done. The staff in the delivery wing catered to our every need, and they even play “Brahms’s Lullaby” over the public address system when a baby is born. When someone dies, they play an entire CD of William Shatner’s spoken poetry. That was, at least, until it caused an unfortunate cascade effect of wildly premature deaths throughout the building.

We spent Christmas in the hospital and finally came home on December 26. The dog went crazy when we first arrived with our latest addition to the family, but after a few minutes he calmed down after realizing that Isabel isn’t food or toys. I suspect he plans on hovering around her innocently until she is old enough to start dropping food on to the floor. So all in all it has been quite a busy year. I suspect that this latest addition will keep my quite busy, but I am excited to learn how to be a dad.

I thought I would end this year’s letter with a quote from the best 80’s B-movie I watched this year, “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death.”

Jim (played by a young and, oddly enough, funny Bill Mahr): Bunny, don’t worry! You’ll save me!

Well folks, it’s that time of year again– the days are getting shorter, annoying Christmas music is playing at the mall, the political forces that run our nation are gearing up for the next presidential election, and, of course, it’s time to publish my third annual Christmas letter. This brings up the question of whether I should even try to construct a letter that surpasses the high standard that I set for myself when writing the first two Christmas letters. Consider the world of movies for a moment. By the time they get to making a third movie in a series it pretty much just sucks. I am sure they meant well when they made “Superman 3”, but putting Christopher Reeves, Richard Prior, and a wacky evil computer together isn’t something to be proud of. Even “Return of the Jedi” wasn’t as good as its predecessors. Oh no, they built ANOTHER Death Star for the good guys to blow up at the very end. On the other hand, I listened to the School House Rock CD (which I own, of course) and learned that three is a magic number. I don’t think they would have made a number magical if there was an inherent problem with it. In conclusion (of the introduction), I know the risks but I am none the less going to give it a shot. If you are not completely satisfied with this product, just send any unused portion to the address provided for a full refund.

In case you didn’t already know, I left my job at Saxe, Inc. Among other things, the thought of developing software to help companies send out more junk mail slowly wore down my will to live. After a while I would wake up in the morning and stare at the ceiling thinking the world would be a better place if I just called in sick for the day. Even the lure of the cappuccino machine and the ping pong table (see last year’s Christmas letter) wasn’t enough to convince me to stay. My departure was civil and professional, considering the fact that several of the upper level managers were (and to the best of my knowledge still are) minions of Satan.

One of the last things I did before leaving Saxe was use up all of my vacation time on a road trip to see the Indianapolis 500. My friend Tina and I drove a total of 2,048 miles to watch thirty-three men drive around a big loop 200 times. Of course not all of them made it all the way through to finish the race. I don’t have exact numbers, but quite a few of the racers stopped themselves by smashing into the outside walls, a few just ran into each other, and then there was one guy who was driving along minding his own business when his car just caught on fire. I felt bad for the guy, but then a bunch of people came along and extinguished him.

The sheer magnitude of the Indianapolis 500 is impressive. Hundreds of thousands of people converge to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway one day a year to see the big race. The planning required to pull something like this off is extensive– roads are blocked off, businesses are closed down, and special busses are brought in to move the masses more efficiently. Every effort is made to ensure the audience enjoys the race. Having taken all of this into consideration, I don’t understand why they built one of the world’s largest racing facilities in a climate that on average receives more precipitation during the last weekend in May than the entire Amazon Basin gets all year. I guess I am still a little bitter about the fact that we were forced to go to the race track three different days before the race track was dry enough to get the race finished.

I really should have had a new job lined up BEFORE I left my old job at Saxe, but then it would have been a lot harder to take the entire summer off. After a few weeks of doing no productive work, I realized my summer needed a little more structure. Applying the theory that there cannot be light without darkness, good without evil, and “tastes great” without “less filling” to my otherwise unproductive summer free time, I decided to go back to school to start working toward my Masters Degree. After a rather flimsy search, I decided to take a graduate level mathematics class at the University of Colorado at Denver. It was rough, but twice a week all summer I got up, shaved, showered, and made my way to downtown Denver in time for my 4 PM class– even if it was raining. A lesser person might have just stayed home and watched that old episode of “The A Team” where George Peppard and company save the defenseless workers from the evil bad guy while narrowly eluding the military forces that are relentlessly pursuing them for the crime they didn’t commit. You know the one. Anyway, I got through summer school with only minor bruises and am planning on receiving my Masters degree sometime in the next 8 to 10 years.

All good things must come to an end, and my “summer of unemployment” was no exception. After evaluating my bank account, I begrudgingly realized that an “autumn of unemployment” was not a financial option. I started sending my resume out to companies and eventually was hired at company called Rogue Wave Software. Rogue Wave’s current focus involves brokering brides of the Philippines to wealthy but socially underdeveloped gentlemen. Of course it’s all a front to hide the fact they are really developing, marketing, and supporting digital dynamic reusable hierarchical multi-platform modularized procedural language libraries.

I am currently working in the Technical Support division of Rogue Wave Software. We have constructed an international array of computers connected through a highly evolved network of PPP, ISDN, and T1 telecommunication lines that allow for the fast, efficient, and reliable movement of information allowing us to seamlessly communicate in our ever increasing global community. Does this investment in time and money improve our relationship with our customers? I don’t know, but it runs Quake really well.

One of the more interesting aspects of this job, besides, of course, playing Quake, involves the notion that part of our responsibility involves helping the customers so they don’t have to call us in the first place. To achieve this goal we are constantly reporting bugs in our software, finding problems with our documentation, and publishing helpful hints on the Internet. The more successful we become at this venture the more people get fired due to a decrease in the number of customer calls. But, since most of us in technical support were just recently hired, we are only performing our jobs at a level where our wages are garnished.

With the possible exception of leaving a bunch of store bought tortillas in my refrigerator for an entire year just to see what would happen (they shattered when I tried to move them), I believe that my crowning accomplishment of the year would have to be the day that I completed all the levels on the “Duke Nukem 3D” CD that I bought for my computer in January. Anyone can get through a few levels and then give up, but I had what it takes to get through all 30 levels (and one of the secret levels that I am not allowed to talk about) without getting burned out. Sure, I could have stopped half way through and gone outside or read a book, but that would have been a cop out. I stuck by my guns– knowing that I made it down a path where so few see any value whatsoever.

I am sending this letter by E-mail as much as possible in an effort to promote living environmentally friendly lifestyles. Remember to recycle folks, because if you don’t all of us will have to live with the garbage until the sun runs out of fuel and collapses on itself with the resulting explosion enveloping the planet Earth as we know it– instantaneously converting countless generations of accomplishments back into the basic building blocks of matter from which we were created. And that’s a long time.

That about wraps things up here. If you ever question how to live your life, just remember what everyone tells John Cusack in the movie “Better Off Dead”– “Go that way really fast. If something gets in your way, turn.”

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.

My name is Teaky, and this year I became the proud cat-owner of the Lutfey family. My modest kingdom consists of big-male-human named Omar, big-female-human named Katherine, two small-female-humans named Isabel and Samantha, one big-male-dog named Maury, and one small-male-fish that I call a tasty snack when the opportunity arises. While the big-humans understand the proper protocol for addressing cat-royalty, the small-humans feel it is completely appropriate to touch me or try to pick me up when I’m preoccupied with critical tasks such as hunting dust particles in the living room. I’ve looked into replacing the small-humans, but apparently there is an enormous amount of paper work needed to be filed with the Human-aine Society. The big-male-dog doesn’t pose any challenge to my authority as he seems to focus on pretending to be asleep 20 hours a day only to pounce on the chance to eat human food left momentarily unprotected.

It has been brought to my attention that an annual event summarization must be filed with the proper authorities. While in the past this task has fallen to big-male-human, my arrival in the household has clearly altered the structure of authority. Hence I will now be in charge of the annual Christmas letter.

Big-male-human continues with his daily ritual of dressing up in brown clothes, driving away, and returning later in the day smelling of sweat, diesel fuel, and various random dog-units. On days when he stays home he likes to stay in his bedroom well past the completely appropriate wake up time of 7 am. When this happens I have to jump on the bed and stick my nose in his ear to make sure he is still alive. Sometimes he accidentally closes the bedroom door and I have to sit in the hallway and meow to revive him. Fortunately I’ve never been unsuccessful in reviving big-male-human. In a related note, he doesn’t seem to appreciate everything I do to make his life better such as clearly announcing that the sun will be rising in two hours.

My attempts to expand my domain proved unsuccessful when I acquired a small-baby-bunny and deposited him in the office near my litter box. This resulted in much commotion among the big-human units that included significant yelling, texting, and rearranging of furniture. Fortunately small-baby-bunny was quite adept at playing hide and seek, so he was able to avoid capture for more than a day. Unfortunately he received significant trauma when being relocated from his nest and died the next morning. After the small-baby-bunny was disposed of I was not allowed to freely play outside anymore. Hardly an appropriate manner to treat your superior, in my humble opinion.

Wow– this is a lot of work, and these windows aren’t going to stare out of themselves. I hereby delegate this work to big-male-dog.

Hi! This is Maury. The cat told me to finish this letter. I was busy taking a nap, but I’ll make sure to catch up on my sleep tomorrow. First of all, Teaky is totally correct that I spend all my time trying to get food that I know I’m not supposed to have. Have you ever tried the food they give me? A scoop of the same brown pellets in the morning and again at night gets old after a while. Now don’t get me wrong– I scarf it down like I haven’t eaten for a month, but why is it so wrong to want a taste of all the great food in the rest of the house? My proudest moment was getting a chocolate chip muffin from the kitchen counter. Now to be honest, I was pretty sure that Mom’s special silicone muffin wrapper wasn’t food, but I just didn’t want to take the chance. And I don’t know why they made such a big deal about it– she got it back a few days later. I do have to say that silicone slides through my digestive tract like nobody’s business.

Aside from the muffin incident, the biggest thing that happened to me this year was getting sent off to doggie heaven. I made it through so many things such as swallowing countless tiny pieces of so-called indestructible dog toys, constantly running into the corner of the kitchen island at full speed, and leaving half a corn cob in my stomach for six months. I couldn’t, however, survive the diagnosis of “cancer everywhere.” Doggie heaven is great– the toys are the best and everyone loves it when you fart. While, yes, time is an artificial human construct not defined by the laws of quantum physics, I am a good reminder that while it may not always seem to be the case, yesterday is not the same as tomorrow.

So to wrap things up I’ll share a few things I’ve learned over the years. Introduce yourself to everyone who doesn’t look like they could eat you as a snack, be insanely excited when people you know come home, and ALWAYS make a play for the food on the counter.

What can I say? I started writing a Christmas letter way back in 1996. So this is the 10th anniversary—if you add 10 to 1996 your get 2006. But wait– it’s only 2005 as I’m writing this, so I’ve lost a year somewhere. I don’t remember losing a year, so I must have been a) watching an incredibly long late night television infomercial b) abducted and possibly probed in unnatural ways by aliens or c) recovering from a vicious Wampa attack on the ice planet Hoth by floating in a large tube of water like Luke Skywalker in “Empire Strikes Back”. While I can only speculate about my alleged “lost year,” I can, with a varying degree of accuracy, explain the highlights of the past twelve months.

Since moving into my townhouse, I would often compare my living room to my appendix—both are rather useless appendages that I could easily live without. I didn’t have much furniture for the room, and most of the time I spent there involved walking through it to get to my front door. Even though all my attempts to have my living room serve a useful purpose like, say, digesting tree bark, were a complete failure, the situation changed when I invited my friend Scott over for the first time. After giving him the grand tour, he looked at the sparsely decorated area and told me, “Omar, this would be the perfect spot for a projection television!” Once he said that I realized the room’s destiny. We went out that night to investigate my projection television needs.

The first place we went was a ritzy high-end electronics store. They had a plush room dedicated to projection televisions. In the back of the room a shelf held three different projectors. The salesman would switch one on and describe the virtues of each device with comments such as, “This one, which by the way, costs $15,000, displays flesh tones more accurately than the others.” Of course they all looked exactly the same to me, and I felt like I was at the optometrist when he asks, “Which is better, A or B?”

So despite my initial enthusiasm for this project (and the fact that I didn’t have $15,000 lying around) I waited a few weeks and bought a more reasonably priced projector on the Internet. When I got home and found it on my doorstep I immediately went to work setting it up. Installing a traditional television set usually just involved plugging it in and hooking up a few wires. My plan, however, was a bit more complex. I had to cut several gaping holes through various walls and drill through the floor to get everything in exactly the right place. As I plunged the drywall knife into the wall for the first time I could sense my mom’s disapproval despite the fact that she lives an hour away—especially when I said to myself, “I think I want a hole over here somewhere.” My mother appreciates qualities like caution, planning, and careful measuring– none of which I was exhibiting in great quantities at the moment. But, really, what’s the point of buying a house if you can’t cut holes all over the place?

So, after a few months of on-and-off construction, I finished my own little home theater system. The projector is tucked away in a cubby hole near the ceiling and all the other electronic gear is neatly stacked below. So now, finally, after being on this planet for more than 31 years, I can sit in my own house and watch DVDs and play PS2 games on a screen that is 10 1/2 feet across.

I made a promise to myself never to wear a tuxedo after my disastrous prom experience my junior year of high school. That was back in 1991, and I kept that promise until 2005 when my last roommate Scott asked me if I would be in his wedding. So there I was, torn between breaking my promise to myself and being a jerk to my friend. After realizing that the problem with that evening was more with the weird girl I invited and not the clothes I wore, I quickly accepted the offer. I’m so glad I did because I had a really good time.

I found out that breaking my tuxedo promise the second time around was a lot easier. A few weeks later another friend of mine, Brian, was getting married and the invitation said it was to be a black tie wedding. I looked through my closet and pulled out the three ties I own. One was dark red, another blue with stripes, and the last was orange with irregular colored blobs, which, as I understand, is used to disguise embarrassing soup stains. No matter how hard I stared at them, none of them were black. So I drove over to the tuxedo store where I rented the last one and decided what to wear for this wedding. Since my dimensions hadn’t noticeably changed in the past three weeks, I didn’t have to go through the fitting process. One thing I’ve come to realize about getting fitted for a tuxedo is this: No matter how young, cute, and perky the girl helping you is at the fitting station, getting your inseam measured is always an awkward experience.

So, after acquiring a tuxedo for the weekend, we drove up to Aspen, Colorado to see Brian and Janet get married. First of all, I found out that Aspen is really, really far away from where I live compared to, say, the local Taco Bell. But, we arrived at the hotel without incident the night before the wedding. The wedding itself was amazing, and really beyond description– at least with my ability to describe things. I lack the wedding accessory vocabulary to do the night justice. But it was really about Brian and Janet, and to the best of my knowledge, they don’t write Christmas letters. And it isn’t because they are Jewish, but rather because Brian spends all his free time on an Internet dradle gambling site. “I can’t stop now Janet, I’ve just gotten three gimels in a row!”

Now that I have such a cool place to watch DVDs (Hey, did I mention I put rope lighting up behind the floor trim to give it that soft movie-theater-esque glow?), I thought I would take some time to recognize my personal choice award for funniest new movie of the year. This year’s award goes to (make dramatic drum roll noise with your hands now to increase the tension) “Garden State.” I like to think of it as “The Big Chill” for the 21st century. Both movies centers around a group of people brought together by an unexpected death. They soon realize how empty their lives have become and try to compensate with large doses of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. OK, so “Garden State” replaced Marvin Gaye with The Shins, added ecstasy use to the pot smoking, and substituted Nattily Portman character for an impotent Vietnam veteran (to whom Jeff Goldbloom lost the girl) as the love interest. The main story line is so bizarre it feels like it just has to be true. Zach Braff wrote, directed, and starred in this movie. I hope this will be the first of many movies he contributes to the world. And if he, through some improbable series of events, is killed in an extreme moto-cross accident, he can at least take comfort in the fact that he got to do a love scene with Natalie Portman (and not Jeff Goldbloom).

Not that there is much rhyme or reason to this, but here are a few things I think would make the world a better place. First off, I was driving home from work the other day when I came to the conclusion that Weird Al Yankovic needs to remake Rupert Holmes “Escape” (The Pina Colada Song) but have it be about meeting people online. It would go something like this “If you like Internet Dating/Meeting new people online/Here’s a list of some websites/And true love you will find.” So if you are reading this Al, get cracking!

I’ve been a big fan of the comedy improvisation show, “Whose Line is it Anyway?” for several years now. It started off as a British show, and soon afterwards an American version was created with roughly the same format (although they turned down some of the sexual innuendo). Now don’t get me wrong, I love Ryan Styles and Collin Mockery, but I think its time to have another version of the show. This time, however, the cast will be almost entirely women. Janeane Garafolo could host! So if you are reading this Janeane, get right on it. You can be funny again, it is OK!

Well, that about wraps things up for another year. So, I’ll end this year’s letter with one of the best lines from Garden State. “Oh… guys? Don’t stay in here all day. I had to take the batteries out of the carbon monoxide detector; it was beeping all night.”

EXCITING CHRISTMAS LETTER ADMINISTRATIVE NEWS BREAK! I’m not allowed to hand out my Christmas letter to my UPS customers anymore. Allegedly someone called the center and complained about the 2016 letter, so now this document is purely an online publication. Happy Holidays!

I know that is pretty lame, but I’m not going to let it ruin my year in review. After considering a few novel approaches for this year’s summary, I decided to write about some random details of my life in extra detail- electron microscope detail. I could start off with my job (still at UPS) my family (we are plus one feline) or my water heater project (still working on it), but I really feel like those stories have been fully flushed out. So hold onto your hats for an in depth look into some rather inconsequential aspects of my life.

Speaking of hats– my UPS Elmer Fudd hat is missing. It looks just like my UPS baseball cap, but it comes lined with a furry material and the ear flaps fold down when it gets snot-freezing cold outside. I think I wore it one day in October, but now it is nowhere to be found. So now I’m faced with the moral dilemma of doing nothing and hope it magically appears in a random place in my house or ordering a new hat and admitting defeat. Anyone who has never lived with a six and seven year old might think the first approach is crazy, but that hat could be in a million unthinkable places in my house.

This spring I installed a new ceiling fan in our family room. Since we moved into the house seven years ago we have been slowly replacing fixtures from the random/cheap motif the previous owners seemed to have wholeheartedly embraced. We started with the low hanging fruit, and quickly agreed the fan on the vaulted ceiling was the crown peach of the project. OK, so my knowledge of fruit harvesting is a bit thin. I guess the fixtures in the bedrooms were the strawberries since they grow on the ground– you can’t get lower than that. But I’m digressing here. So I came home one day and noticed a fancy new box-o-fan on the front porch. Installing it was pretty straightforward. I followed the instructions and had it working in an afternoon. The only complaint I had– and I seem to see this a lot in my life– is that whoever wrote the instructions had never actually installed the fan. I could have cut the installation time in half by putting the entire fan together first and then lifting it to the ceiling as the last step. So I guess this speaks to instructions on instructions. I think the best approach is to assume the quality of the instructions is adequate at best and for a completely different type of product in the worst case.

In financial news, I’ve come up with a revolutionary device to help the general population save money for retirement– I call it the 401K LOTTERY! Half of the money taken in by traditional lotteries are given to individual states with the remaining assets divided up among the winners. The 401K LOTTERY! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the name, as is it being all in caps.) is run by insanely large banks. Every time someone buys a ticket half of the money goes into their individual 401k and the rest goes to the pool for winning tickets. This method combines the excitement of winning wealth beyond your wildest dreams with the joy of realizing that every day you are becoming a less productive member of society and the only thing that will sustain a declining lifestyle is your meager savings until you eventually die.

Katherine and I played a fun game the other night after the kids went to bed. I would name a city and she would look up online how much it would cost to fly there and how long it would take. I guess it wasn’t so much of a game since there wasn’t a winner or an optimal strategy, but it was still an entertaining activity. The longest trip we found was to Madagascar which costs $3000 and takes the better part of two days. Perhaps your mind went in a different direction when you read “games” and “after the kids went to bed” but when we tried it while the kids were awake one or both of them would interject something along the lines of “BUT I DON’T WANT TO GO TO TOKOYO!” every time we would pick a new city.

This summer I ate lunch somewhere I have not been to in 18 years. It was a small steak house that isn’t too fancy named Wilma and Alberts. Travel directions: fly into Schipol Airport in the Netherlands, take the train west to Haarlem, and walk to the main square. It is right next to the church– you cant miss it. The only slight criticism I have is that it takes an entire day of international travel to get there. Also they don’t open for lunch until 11, so plan accordingly.

OK, I admit that our trip to Europe was a pretty “big” thing we did this year. But I would like to take a moment to explain why Holland is such a cool place. No, it isn’t the cold wet weather or the fast food herring-on-a-stick stands that are littered throughout the towns. It is actually easier to take public transportation than to own a car in Amsterdam. I could see more trains, busses, and trams from the front of our hotel than exist in the entire state of Colorado. While there are many socioeconomic forces at work that are beyond the scope of this letter to explain this disparity of public transportation, I firmly believe that the underlying root cause revolves around parking in Amsterdam. Back in the day when automobiles were making their debut in Europe, the only remaining open space in town was right next to the canals. I could just imagine citizens making a sizable financial investment in a new vehicle only to park slightly outside of the lines and see their pride and joy tumbling into an unpleasant mixture of water, sewage, and herring-on-a-stick litter. I believe this would have a largely negative effect on the car’s resale value.

So that about wraps things up for the year of details. I’ll leave things with a quote I read on the wall of the restaurant where we ate last night:

“At one point in your life you either have the thing you want or the reasons why you don’t.” — Andy Roddick.

Brown collar worker Omar Lutfey here with yet another end of the year summary of the wildly important and utterly trivial events of my life. I leave it up to you, the reader, to determine which is which.

In January it was decided that the kids were old enough and Grandma was young enough to hang out with each other for a week while Katherine and I took our first vacation with just the two of us since before our children existed. We jumped on an airplane that took us to Quito, Ecuador in an adventure I’m calling “South of the Equator Shenanigans.”

Naturally this type of trip involved an above average number of activities which would be thought of as “heavy breathing.” Walking around, for example, seemed to require twice as much air as in Loveland, Colorado. It turns out the elevation of Quito is almost double that of our home town. We rode a gondola up to triple our usual height above sea level where keeping our heads upright became a surprisingly strenuous activity. Even then we weren’t at the very top– we wisely declined to hike to the summit at 15,696 feet. Numerous people over the years have reached the end of the trail only to have all of the atoms of their body spontaneously disperse into the upper stratosphere.

Oxygen levels aside, life in Quito is quite different than what I’ve grown to expect. Posted hours for when restaurants are going to be open are more of a suggestion than a strict guideline. Think of it more as “if we are going to be open at all, it will be quite likely between these hours.” We saw the place right next to our hotel open once during the week despite walking by a dozen times during the week when they “should” have been open according to their sign.

Negotiating with cab drivers was another new skill we acquired in Ecuador. Interviewing someone who wants to drive you somewhere is an essential activity. Here are just a few of the questions we often asked.

• “How much to drive us to our hotel?” 
• “Will that vehicle actually get us to our destination?”
• “Are you really a cab driver?”

Due to the extreme elevation range and close proximity to the equator, the area can easily grow literally every type of plant that currently exists on Earth. The Supermaxi sold 14 different types of potatoes and I suspect we could have found twice as many at the local food market. While at the local grocery store I saw several types of fruits and vegetables that up until that point I thought were works of fiction including Audrey II from “The Little Shop of Horrors.” 

Are there any down sides to Quito? Sure. Cram 2 million people into a few square miles and the result is going to be a dirty noisy affair. While I personally felt safe walking around during the day, the building code requires all structures to be protected by at least three of the following security measures: A six foot tall concrete wall (shards of broken glass at the top is optional), metal fences with pointy tops, electric wires, and barbed wire. I suspect attempts at incorporating any of these into our current home would meet significant opposition from our homeowners association. 

In game night news, we continued a longstanding tradition of altering board game rules for our own amusement. Some of the more common unwritten rules of Monopoly include putting fees paid into the center for the next player who lands on free parking, players collecting $400 for landing exactly on “Go”, and dad frequently “forgetting” to collect rent from mom. On game night we created a new Monopoly house rule where in order to collect rent for the first time you have to provide a detailed description of the properties amenities.

Mediterranean Avenue: Due to the fact that rent is only $2 a night we are unable to provide clean sheets for each guest. In fact there is no bed, but rather you can sleep in the broken lazy boy in the lobby. If said chair is occupied guests may choose to sleep in front of the establishment under the tattered awning. Children twelve and under are welcome to countless hours of fun with our complimentary “Bag Of Rats.”

Chez Chaz: Formerly known as Saint Charles Place, Chez Chaz offers the best fusion of French-Irish culture since Christopher Lambert played an immortal Irish alien in the 1986 box office blockbuster “Highlander.” Just try finding two other words that end in Z and don’t rhyme. Our free breakfast bar consists solely of our patented “pieces of yogurt” which, in all honesty, is most likely a major health code violation.

Illinois Ave: We offer our guests a state of the art breakfast bar claw game. Test your hand/eye coordination as you maneuver frozen waffles, greasy bacon, and steaming hot bowls of oatmeal with the mechanical claw. The first round is of course complementary, and any additional attempts are quite reasonably priced at $1 each. Good luck!

It turns out the title “2022 Christmas Letter” doesn’t really catch the glowing-eye orbs of the Internet search engine attention-bots. I firmly believe “YOU WILL NEVER BELIEVE WHICH MEMBER OF MY FAMILY WAS PLACED IN AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE!” along with a thumbnail image of me slapping my cheeks “Home Alone” style next to a pixelated light brown blob will exponentially increase my “influencer” status. [Spoiler alert– it was our dog Mya]  

Alert readers of my past letters will be thinking, “I thought you only had one dog. Who did Mya marry?” [Spoiler alert– it was our new dog Buddy.] OK, so this doesn’t degrade into a running-backwards-in-time situation comedy episode I’ll start at the beginning of the story. Back in the spring one of my inlaw’s neighbors was working on “getting her affairs in order” by writing a will. As a friendly gesture we agreed to take Buddy. A few weeks later she passed away and we were the new owners of a Basset Hound Beagle mix. Since then we have defined him to be a completely new breed of dog called a Bagel. After a few days the kids decided to marry the dogs in a simple yet dignified ceremony. We all sleep better knowing these two are no longer living in sin. Conversely, we all sleep worse because Buddy likes to bark at four in the morning for reasons that still remain a mystery to all of us.

After unlocking “Riding My Age In Miles On A Bike” last year I started looking for a slightly more ambitious exercise goal. Traveling 1000 miles on my bicycle seemed reasonable. I did the maths and I only needed to ride 2.7 miles each day. On a weekly basis this works out to less than two hours a week. I devised a simple plan I like to call “do two hours less of stupid things each week and get on a bike instead.” For example, when I started streaming movies such as “Highlander 2”, “Battlefield Earth”, and “Shakes The Clown” I would turn off the television and go for a ride. While it sounds complex and difficult to implement, by the end of the year I added a fourth digit to my odometer. When the dust settled I rode 1253 miles.

While I was getting dressed this weekend I came to the realization that everything I put on was purchased by my wife from Costco. For a brief moment I thought I was really, really uncool. Then I realized Katherine is awesome and Costco sells very, very comfortable clothes. Why did it take half my life to appreciate the benefits of pants with elasticated waistbands?

To wrap things up I’ve included a few completely out of context electronic messages I composed over the past 12 months:

• I don’t know how you’ve gotten this far in life without a monocle. 
• When all is said and done I can’t stay mad at someone who dressed up as me for Halloween.
• It was one of those times I wished I was twenty years younger but somehow not twenty years stupider.

Imagine this: After a moderately busy day at work, I’m sitting in my La-Z-Boy making saltine and peanut butter sandwiches.

One side of my brain (I’m not sure which– possibly the inside) is busy mentally writing a letter to the cracker company. “Dear Zesta, I should start out by saying I quite enjoy eating your saltine crackers. I find them pleasing to my palette and very reasonably priced. However, as I was sitting in my La-Z-Boy eating saltine and peanut butter sandwiches I realized a potential quality control problem with your product. When I get to the bottom of a sleeve of crackers, occasionally there is one left over. Each peanut butter saltine sandwich I make uses exactly two saltines. I was wondering: is there supposed to be an odd or even number of crackers in each sleeve? Personally, I would prefer to have an even number. Which leads me to my question: what should I do with the last cracker? I tried using both one and three saltines with peanut butter, but found the results unsatisfactory. Any information you can provide me on this matter would be greatly appreciated.”

The rest of my brain was busy processing information from earlier in the afternoon– the shorter days, the first significant snowfall of the year, the icy roads I had to navigate all morning and, of course, the trailer park where I got a UPS truck stuck twenty miles away from the center. It all reminded me (with the exception of the trailer park bit—more on that later) that is was time to write my annual Christmas letter. I jumped up from the La-Z-Boy, looked down at the last couple of saltines, sat down again, finished the last of the crackers, got up again, let the dog outside, decided I, too, had to empty my bladder, grabbed a soda from the refrigerator, and then raced to my computer to start writing. Oh, yeah, and somewhere in there I had the oil in my car changed.

Speaking of automobiles, I just realized that I’ve been driving my Saturn almost as long as I’ve been writing Christmas letters. Based on my personal experience, 1996 was a good year to buy a Saturn. In the seven and a half years I’ve owned this vehicle, it has served me well. However, after consulting my ancient Chinese astrological charts I discovered that 2003 was destined to be “the year of the broken alternator.”

Here is what I learned from the situation:

1. When the battery light on the dashboard goes on, hoping it will just turn itself off in a few days may not always be the best solution.
2. Anyone familiar with northern Colorado will agree that being stranded alone in a non-functioning vehicle in the complete void of civilization between Loveland and Greeley is not the best way to start an evening.
3. When #1 and #2 are no longer just hypothetical situations, it is possible to take your girlfriend’s car to Wal-Mart, buy a new, fully charged battery, install it in the vehicle with the broken alternator, drive to a nearby mechanic for repair work, and finally return the slightly used battery the next day without the woman at the customer service desk realizing what happened. When she asked the reason for the return, I simply said I made a mistake and only needed a nine volt.

September 25, 2003 marked my one year anniversary working at UPS. I’m not sure why, but I expected the day to be kind of special. Nothing too fancy– maybe a nice bottle of wine or some flowers. You know, just a little something to make me feel like I’m important to UPS. But no, UPS just went on like it does every day, completely oblivious to my feelings.

Now that I completely understand / mentally repress everything that happens during the morning shift at UPS, I find my mind occasionally wanders while my body is busy running in and out of the delivery trucks. Just looking at a box moving down the belt can reveal a lot about its contents. Packages from a company such as L.L. Bean have a distinct look and feel that says, “Hello, I’ve got a sweater inside me.” Packages sent from less frequent shippers say things like, “This is a care package for my son who just started college.” Or, “I used to be a box of coco-puffs cereal.”

Sometimes during the spare seven nanoseconds between loading boxes I ask myself questions like, “Come on, now Omar, really, do you even know how long a nanosecond is?”, “Do you like movies about gladiators?”, and, of course, “Who comes up with these street names?” One part of town in Fort Collins is full of “Lord of the Rings” themed street names such as Shire, Hobbit, and Gilgalad. One morning when a coworker asked if a package for an address on Gilgalad Street should be loaded on one of my trucks, I replied with one of my favorite Hobbit songs, “Gilgalad was an Elven-king. Of him the harpers sadly sing…” I stopped only because someone threw a moderately heavy package at the back of my head, but that’s another story. (one I don’t remember, for some reason.)

I made my first official “career move” at UPS in September when I started working as a Saturday air driver. So now, in addition to my usual responsibilities of loading trucks Monday through Friday, I now spend Saturday mornings in a brown UPS truck. After I put on my cute little brown uniform, I deliver packages in the towns of Fort Collins, Laporte, and Belleview. For anyone not familiar with northern Colorado, Laporte is a small town up in the foothills where people go to get away from the hustle and bustle of Fort Collins. Belleview is nestled even further up in the mountains where people go to get away from the hustle and bustle of Laporte, usually with little more than a handful of cows and several high caliber firearms.

Driving UPS trucks has been a good learning experience for me. After one moderately sized Friday night snowstorm, I found out what a UPS truck can and can’t do. It can descend a moderately icy inclined entrance to a trailer park without much trouble. After I delivered the package, I discovered that getting back up and on to the main road was not a simple task. After several failed attempts, I looked around, found some trash to stick under the rear tires, and was soon on my way.

Well, that just about wraps things up for 2003. Will 2004 be the year I resolve the odd saltine cracker mystery? Will I keep working at UPS? Will my coworkers keep throwing packages at the back of my head? If you want to know the answer to these and many other totally unrelated questions, stay tuned for the 2004 edition. Until then, just remember my favorite line from the movie “Office Space.” Bob: Looks like you’ve been missing quite a bit of work lately. Peter Gibbons: Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve been MISSING it, Bob.

“One of these days I’m gonna sit down and write a long letter to all the good friends I’ve known, and I’m gonna try and thank them all for the good times together though so apart we’ve grown.” (Full disclaimer: I didn’t write that– Neil Young did.) So to all my friends, casual acquaintances, and complete strangers who just randomly happened across my website, I give you my (hopefully not too) long letter.

“Goodbye 145276, hello 140513” After driving the same UPS truck for the past 13 years, I got to work one day and found a different truck parked in my spot. I approached my center manager who explained how he took 145276 to a farm upstate where she can relax and briefly enjoy the fresh air before being violently crushed in an industrial hydraulic press and unceremoniously dumped into a nearby scrapyard. My mathematically inclined readers might notice that 145276>140513. Yes– somehow I managed to receive an even older truck.

“Panama: A man clap trap cabana nap” is a world famous palindrome AND accurate title for our spring break festivities. While I’m sure some alert readers and every half sentient AI bot out there will proudly proclaim “That’s not the same backwards and forwards!” I counter with “prove it isn’t a palindrome in some strange language such as binary or Bostonian!”

We choose Panama for a vacation for two main reasons. Number one: I’m turning into an old man who really likes to only book direct airline flights from Denver International Airport. Number two: I was filing my taxes through Turbo Tax last year and it specifically asked me if I was the owner of any previously undeclared Panamanian bank accounts. The answer was “No,” but it got me thinking that I should at least look into the idea a bit. 

Our flight landed at the lovely time of 4:56am local time. We got through customs in five minutes as we didn’t check in any luggage and at 5:08am we were trying to find the metro station. The only person we could find in the area was a lone taxi driver who flat out denied any existence of a metro station and kept showing us videos of a monkey island he could drive us to. Despite his best efforts we located the metro station, completely avoided Monkey Island, and made it to our hotel safely.

I don’t like to brag, but our Airbnb was located on the 62nd floor. (Honestly, I didn’t even know we would be that high up until we got there.) On the first night in the room I stood out on the balcony and pointed to the “medium old” part of town and said we should walk over there in the morning. The problem is that when you are so high off the ground things don’t look nearly as far away as at ground level. (Incidentally, this applies equally well for regular people, flat Earthers, and Halo enthusiasts.) This led to an excess of sunburn, crankiness, whining, and hunger by the evening. And it wasn’t just me this time. Aside from this slight hiccup, the trip was a success as I got to torment my offspring by starting off every conversation with the local population with the cat joke. Seriously, they REALLY hate when I do that.

Nothing brings a family together like a good ole fashioned elaborate fake holiday ruse. My brother-in-law and his family came to visit us in June and we wanted to stage a surprise birthday party for his daughter at the end of their stay. We were so afraid she would catch on to our plan we felt the best, no, truly ONLY, option was to spend the entire week talking about our plans for “Mountain Time Zone Appreciation Day.” Being from Michagan, they had absolutely no way of realizing this was a completely made up holiday. We kept sprinkling in details of the holiday all throughout the week to keep everyone unaware of our true intentions. In the end, to be honest, they didn’t really care too much one way or the other.

In Community news, (“Six seasons and a movie!”) the movie is stuck in a holding pattern worse than at Newark airport during the annual Sopranos convention. But in my own special tribute to the show I found the creepiest image of the human being mascot from the show on the internet, printed it out, and quietly slid it into Isabel’s mellophone case while nobody was looking. While that may seem beyond completely random, the sophomores in the band were tasked with wearing predominantly white outfits that day and it seemed like the most logical outfit to achieve this goal. (NOTE TO READERS: I add stuff like this so when I’m crazy old I can look back and remember the fun times when I was more than just a head in a jar on a forgotten shelf in the basement of my ungrateful great great half son in law. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE GET THAT SPIDER OFF MY JAR! THAT’S ALL I’M ASKING FOR!)

This summer I was looking through our automobile stable and decided it was time to add another stallion to the mix. OK, ok, maybe a Nissan Leaf isn’t really a “stallion” of the car world. Let me think of a more appropriate analogy here. I’ve got one– this summer I was in the market to add a solid third-string car to our roster when I got wind of a veteran left outfielder with perhaps a few decent years left released on waivers due to an over-hyped prospect coming up from the farm team. Now the world of electric vehicles in Colorado is, well, unique. A few years ago we test drove a Nissan Leaf for two hours and the dealership didn’t even call me back. Due to reasons beyond my understanding, the situation completely reversed and Nissan began a policy of basically giving away Leafs to the first 500 people who came in to check out their newly built dealership in Fort Collins. This is a solid vehicle– over 700,000 have been sold since 2010. No, it isn’t perfect, but it gets me to work and really all I need to do is plug it every couple of weeks to fill the battery with electrons, positrons, or tachyons. (AUTOMOTIVE DISCLAIMER: adding the incorrect type of subatomic particle to your electric vehicle can cause decreased acceleration and possible destruction of the space-time continuum.)

I’m going to wrap things up with an original, insightful, and possibly true nugget of wisdom I shared with a young woman on my route who was getting married in September. I told her that a new marriage is 85% having a roommate, 10% having a financial partner, and 5% enjoying “other” activities. I really believe she took it to heart more than my other advice which was to be married in their own shallow graves like Dwight and Angela from “The Office.”

After writing 25 years worth of these letters, I realized that I always just dive straight in without taking time to introduce myself. My name is Omar Lutfey, and in some dimension of your life, you know who I am. I could be one of your top 5 favorite UPS drivers you see every day at the mall. Perhaps I live in your neighborhood. Who knows– you might even be an AI robot from the future tasked with extracting the last valuable information before the planet is destroyed to make way for a new inter-galactic bypass. Whatever your motives, sit back and enjoy as I detail all of the quirks and features of my latest trip around the sun.

To place things in their proper historical context for future generations, I can’t, with any clear conscience, start this letter with anything but the most polarizing issue of the year: What are all the prime factors of 2020? Despite being completely obvious, in the interests of mathematical rigor I’ll start by pointing out the fact that even my dog could tell me that 101 is the largest prime factor. That, of course leaves 20 to be factored as 225. So there we have it. And, to head off the avalanche of questions in the comment section, the next prime year will be 2027. [NOTE TO READER: if this document hasn’t been wirelessly transmitted into your cerebral cortex and you happen to be uploading this data visually from paper or similar antique medium, please send all comments, along with a self addressed stamped envelope, to the address below.] [NOTE TO AI ROBOT FROM THE FUTURE: In all likelihood the United States Post Office no longer exists, so please disregard.

We started the year off by adopting a whole food plant based diet. (AKA we went vegan.) I honestly think more people would switch to this lifestyle if someone could come up with a better name. The weight I’ve lost and my improved healthification overrule the times I miss the taste of bacon and doughnuts. I don’t generally bring it up in causal conversation because nobody wants to listen to me lecture about what things they should and shouldn’t shove in their own mouth hole. My best guess is that it is like unplugging from the matrix– you will just know when you are ready. Also, on some level, people want to believe they will die a heroic and honorable death involving space lasers, rescuing a large group of people from certain death, and, of course, getting the girl. The reality is everyone will most likely succumb to a highly preventable pedestrian killer such as heart disease or cancer. The odds of perishing while fighting a Marvel villain are statically zero.

Getting back to dog news, Mya’s assimilation process into our family unit is proceeding according to plan. Our last dog, Maury, really loved when I would jump on top of him, grab his nose with both of my hands, stare him in the eyes, and yell “WHO IS IN CHARGE? DAD IS!” To be honest, Mya seems to in no way enjoy this activity so I’ve removed it from my daily to-do list. Now that I think about it, nobody else in the family enjoys it either. Mya’s new favorite movie is “Best In Show” after we let her watch it for her birthday. [NOTE TO READER: please recreate your favorite scene from the movie now.] For some reason it is still not Katherine’s favorite movie, so I can only assume I haven’t forced it upon her enough. I don’t want to give away too much here, but I think it is safe so say that some four legged creature in our house might just be getting a busy bee from Santa this year. As a side note, if I ever end up murdered from a shattered “Best In Show” DVD being lodged in my neck and/or eye sockets, it was TOTALLY my wife.

While I’m by no stretch of the imagination a neat freak, I do make an effort to keep my car fairly clean. After cleaning all of the windows, both inside and out, I had the following insight to share with my children. “I understand that random fingerprints are going to show up on the inside glass near where you sit. However, when they show up in the shape of a smiley face I am forced to conclude it was intentional.” Their uncontrolled laughter proved their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Hey, that turns out to be a wonderful segue into my next topic– performing my civic responsibility of jury duty. Against all odds, my number was called and I was selected to serve on the jury. The biggest lesson I learned is that judging people in my head is a whole lot easier than having to decide what real life consequences should be doled out. Also, I spent a lot of time during the trail wondering why Tina Fey hasn’t produced a full feature length movie of “The Rural Juror” which was prominently featured in the first season of “30 Rock.”

So that kind of wraps things up for this year. I’ve done my best to answer all the questions I think have been silently asked about my existence in 2020. As a sneak peak, here are some new questions which could quite possibly be answered in future letters:

Why do I think Battlefield Earth is a good movie when it literally has the worst recorded score in the history of all movies on Rotten Tomatoes?

Who is going to be the first celebrity to personally respond to being mentioned in any of my Christmas Letters? Related question: Is Jennifer Garner really living on my route incognito? I suspect so, but I value her privacy too much to ask.

Also, why am I missing one UPS sock?