I believe it was JP Morgan who once said “You don’t rise to the top by jumping in the kiddie pool.” That, or I just made it up a few moments ago. Fact checking isn’t a strong point in my Christmas Letters. Where am I going with this? Well, this year I decided to bring to reality one of the numerous crazy ideas that are constantly percolating in my head at any given moment.

Anyone who has followed me on Facebook knows how I’m always yammering on about “The Lutfey Loop.” It started earlier in the year when I filed a patent that moves heat from places you don’t want/need it such as your attic and basement to places where it will be more useful like your hot water heater. I made arrangements with a lawyer to write the patent. The process started out by writing him a check for a considerable amount of money while my wife looked at me like I’m crazy. Fortunately I’ve learned that when Katherine thinks I’m nuts I’m doing something right.

While trying to read through the entire patent may cause one’s entire body to melt away much like the Nazis who opened the Ark of the Covenant, there are two basic concepts. The first is to install radiant floor heating on the ceiling of an attic to remove unwanted heat. The second idea is to extract geothermal heat from the floor of a basement to efficiently warm up water.

Since the second part involves less destruction of our house I’ve spent the last few months building a ground source heat pump in my basement. The current incarnation involves two 100 gallon horse troughs, the innards of an air conditioner, and several sheets of Styrofoam insulation. If everything works like I want it to (which has been known to happen from time to time) it should cost less than an electric water heater and be as efficient as a geothermal pump. When I’m not working, being an active member of my family, or sleeping I head down into the basement to overcome technical issues such as I don’t know anything about HVAC and none of the parts are being used for anything close to their original purposes. If anyone does attempt to duplicate my efforts I have one warning– buying an air conditioner, taking out the heat pump and radiators, placing a cinder block in the middle, and taking it back to Home Depot for a full refund is not cool.

Despite my busy schedule, my family competed in the annual Kinetics race in Longmont. For anyone who doesn’t know about this already, you have to build and race a human powered vehicle over land, water and other obstacles. As team “Lego my Eggo” we suffered only minor mechanical issues and managed to finish in the top half of the teams. Personally I think it was my speech about the Canadian Waffle Federation trying to steal our waffles, but in reality it was probably due to my kids dressed up as little waffles. That, and several really good teams had the misfortune of their crafts being upside down in the middle of the reservoir.

In August I took my Audi in for an oil change and I received the wonderful news that my car was ready for a series of expensive and time consuming repairs. I should clarify that this was wonderful news for the dealership. The guy at the counter explained how the modern computer in my car calculates how much money I have to spend on my car and then sends signals to various systems to stop working at the most inconvenient time such as when I want to drive somewhere. He offered to perform all of the repairs at once for a bargain price of 5.5 times the value of the vehicle. As a bonus he offered to throw in a set of windshield wipers at the full retail price of $65. (I’m not making that part up– really.)

I decided to trade in my car before it executed the complete breakdown protocol. Long story short, I decided on a Kia Soul. Mostly I just love all of those hamster commercials. I decided on a 2014 model because in 2015 all cars will be built without steering wheels and be driven by television androids. While I would have enjoyed being driven around by Commander Data, my budget would have only allowed for Twinkie from Buck Rogers. My new car runs great even if it doesn’t garner respect from my coworkers at UPS. The first day I drove it to work one of the other drivers told me that the engine in his personal car is 5 times larger than mine. But hey, it gets me to work every day and the kids love the free hamster from the Kia dealership.

That leaves me to talk about my life as a UPS driver. I’ve been running the same route for almost two years now, so not much changes in my day to day routine. I would like to thank the women at the cookie store who supplement my otherwise healthy lunch with M&M cookies that I pretty much need both hands to hold. Also, I should mention the girls at the Wax Factory who still scare me by saying things like “true dat” and “you should come in for a waxing.”

So that about wraps things up for the year. Now that I’ve written all this down it seems like I’ve had a pretty busy year. If things go as planned I’ll be writing about how I became a hot water heater tycoon in my 2015 Christmas letter. I’ve already started shopping for a monocle and top hat.

I’ll end this with a quote from Meghan Trainor’s “All About the Bass” because 1) my girls make me show them that video every single time I sit down at my computer and 2) it makes me feel pretty even though I’ve added on a few pounds lately: “I’ve got all the right junk in all the right places.”

Welcome to my 2019 experience! A lot of “things” and “stuff” happened to me this year, and this is my attempt to project said events through the lens of my hopefully witty banter.

Emotionally speaking, I invested a large portion of my year applying for a contest to build a more efficient air conditioner. To be honest, a lot of people ask me why I’m trying to build a new type of heat pump. In either a dream or field trip to an alternate vertex of the multiverse I experienced a world where we sucked energy directly from the ground and oceans to power our society. I know, I know—I’m more than just a little bit crazy.

Ok, back to the Global Cooling Challenge. While it didn’t receive much attention in the main stream media Sir Richard Branson made a promotional Youtube video on the subject, and he was on The Simpsons, so it must be legit. I filed a provisional US patent and did my best to complete the application.

So did I win? The quantum goggles I am wearing say that both happened. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, was made aware of my idea, immediately flew to northern Colorado, confidently walked into the UPS center before all the drivers left for the morning, and carried me off just like Richard Gere retrieved Debra Winger in “An Officer and a Gentelman.”

Also, nobody seemed to care about my idea and I went back to cobbling together cheap Walmart mini-splits and one hundred gallon horse troughs in a continued attempt to show the world how we can save the planet.

Side note– explaining these events following a more Newtonian physics interpretation of cause and effect, I did not win the competition. This branch has been pruned from the time line tree and my eventual encounter with Elon will happen at an alternate set of time/space coordinates.

In less nerdy news, we spent a week this summer to go on a road trip through Colorado. With so much cool stuff in the world to see it can be hard to remember that we have an amazing backyard. By that I mean the state of Colorado– OUR backyard isn’t really anywhere you would want to spend an entire week. We mapped out our path on Google and it turned out to be exactly the same shape as the piece of the dolphin toy that we pulled out of our dog’s mouth before she could swallow it.

Our journey started in Canon City– home to the state’s largest population of incarcerated individuals and shady rafting companies. To be fair almost none of the rafting companies are run by prison inmates. Due to a large snow pack and warm spring weather we got to experience a record water level on the river. I spent the entire trip wondering how we all managed to stay in the raft. By some minor miracle everyone made it through the river safely.

For reasons that I don’t totally understand, the highlight of Montrose was the huge Russell Stover chocolate factory. Ok, I DO understand the need for chocolate, but from a business perspective putting this out in the middle of the western slope of Colorado seems a bit odd. While I did exactly zero research on the subject, I’m going to say that it was put there because someone lost a bet. Despite this, it was a fun place to visit and our kids were able to buy some high quality Halloween candy for 5 cents each– a good deal as long as the cost of getting there isn’t factored into the equation.

Our final destination was Glenwood Springs. I never knew this, but apparently there is an entire amusement park on a nearby mountain top. My favorite activity had to be the laser tag. I know that as a parent I should provide a helpful environment to allow my children to acquire new skills. However, I took this time to completely slaughter everyone at this game. The lesson I taught my kids is the old man isn’t going to go down in laser tag without a fight.

In pet news, we leveled up +1 in the dog department. While budget constraints prevented us from purchasing a new state of the art robotic canine, we did acquire a great used carbon based unit from the local Humane Society. As best we can tell, Mya is a mix between a whippet and a perpetual energy machine. She splits up her free time between sleeping on Kat’s lap and completely freaking out when I come into the house wearing my UPS clothes.

Being that 2020 is just around the corner, I feel an unexplained need to list some of my future sports predictions. This might have something to do with the fact that I’m writing this while watching a football game. Here are, in chronological order, things I believe will happen:

• 2030: Computers will replace referees in the NFL
• 2039: Robots will replace players in the NFL
• 2041: Tom Brady will retire from the NFL shortly after undergoing painful and expensive robot conversion surgery.

To end this year, I thought I would make a list of things I would like to see get done in the future. I gave it the catchy title of “The exponentially increasing in difficulty to do list.” Each item is exactly 17.3 times more difficult than its predecessor.

• Blink my eyes
• Get the house cleaned up
• Build a revolutionary heat pump
• Transition the world off fossil fuels
• Rearrange the atoms of the earth and moon into a space craft to escape the eventual death of the sun
• Escape the prison dimension that we currently understand as “time”

Will any of these actually happen in 2020? Please make sure to take the leap day into consideration when setting up any calculations. I’ll finish things off with the most insightful comment I made all year. “Samantha, stop making now sad.”

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.

Welcome to my fourth annual Christmas letter. Well, I can’t pretend my life wasn’t drastically changed this year when my dad died. I’ve tried not to dwell on it too much, but I don’t think that I could write my annual Christmas letter pretending that it never happened. Don’t worry though– that isn’t all that has happened to me this year.January 6, 1998 was the date. I’m not going to explain what happened in any kind of detail, but I will say that he went to the hospital with Pneumococcal Pneumonia and died two days later from complications that followed. His down fall was very quick and relatively painless– not a bad way to go.The one piece of advice I have when someone is forced to deal with the loss of a loved one is to ask how to help instead of assuming to know what to do. Some of our neighbors brought over a bunch of greasy Chinese food and had dinner with us the night after my dad died. While I am usually a big fan of greasy Chinese food, that night I just wasn’t in the mood. They meant well, but it just didn’t really help much. On the other hand, I asked one of my best friends to drive me up to my apartment in Boulder so I could get some of my things. There is no better feeling than being driven across town in rush hour traffic so I could change out of the underwear I had been wearing for the past three days.

OK, I guess I can go on to talk about the rest of the year.

The next Saturday morning I tried to put the events of the previous week behind me by going on my company ski trip. It started out innocently enough when I boarded one of the two busses Rogue Wave chartered for the day. Once everyone was settled the busses headed up I-70– destination Summit County. A light snowfall greeted us as we arrived at the base of Copper Mountain. After making a not so quick stop in the ski rental shop I hit the slopes. The light crowds and constant snowfall made for excellent ski conditions. A dozen or so runs later I climbed back on the bus wet, sore, and immensely satisfied from the day’s activities.

Instead of commuting straight back to Boulder the plan was to stop in Silverthorn for dinner and drinks. The idea was to enjoy a relaxing dinner and miss the evening ski traffic returning to the metro area. The intentions were good, but the results turned out disastrous.

After a hearty meal at Old Chicago’s we got on the busses to head home. The only problem was that I-70 was closed by the highway patrol minutes before we arrived. Instead of preparing for hot showers and comfortable beds we patiently waited near the on ramp to I-70. Information was scarce and the mood quickly changed when we realized the busses were not moving anytime soon. To say that everyone handles stress differently would be a monstrous understatement in this situation. Most people slept, talked, or played charades. Some people, however, didn’t handle the situation quite so gracefully. The names are not important, but I honestly believe the threat of legal action was the only factor preventing some of the occupants of the bus from being physically restrained and placed in the under carriage storage compartments for the duration of the trip.

In February I had the honor and privilege of representing Rogue Wave Software at the 1998 Software Development West conference held in San Francisco, California. My only responsibility for the week was to spend several hours a day at the Rogue Wave company booth answering whatever questions the attendants would throw at us. I answered a lot of questions during my booth duty, but the most common question by far was “What is the coolest thing I can get from you guys for free?” It was kind of sad to see people who make a good living as computer programmers going from exhibit to exhibit begging for cheap pens and crappy T-shirts.

The coolest thing about going to trade shows is having an expense account and a whole lot of free time. Despite the week long cloud cover and constant drizzle, we sampled quite a few lovely restaurants and bars in the downtown San Francisco area. The most exciting evening started out at what was called the “Vendor Bender” party. As a reward for countless hours standing on the concrete floor of the convention center, the organizers of the convention hosted a party that included a dinner buffet, two open bars, a DJ, and a live band. As best I can remember, we stayed at the party for the entire time and didn’t leave until the bouncers started kicking people out. After a quick cab ride back to the hotel there were still quite a few of us that just weren’t ready to go to bed. We had a lot of fun in the wee hours of that morning, unfortunately I can’t reveal any more of the specific details of the night as a high level company executive reminded everyone that the events of the evening were not to be made available to the general public. I was kind of worried about waking up my roommate by coming in at such a late hour, but it turned out to be a non issue as he was already up and getting ready to go downstairs to eat breakfast. Needless to say I didn’t join him.

When the spring rolled around my mom decided that she wanted to move out of her big house and into a townhouse. Of course before that could happen we had to sort through the belongings all four members of our family had accumulated over the past 21 years. It’s easy to say that you love someone when things are going well in life. It’s even pretty easy when things are going bad. The true test of love is when you have to spend countless hours in the basement trying to decide what you want to keep and what to throw away. The whole thing was so stressful that I ended up getting in a big fight with my mom when I thought she was putting too much tape on the packing boxes. For a woman in her early fifties she put up quite a struggle when I decided to take matters into my own hands and wrestle the tape gun away from her. There were a few tense moments, but we somehow managed to survive the whole moving process.

In my continued half hearten attempt to earn a Masters degree, I enrolled in a graduate level mathematics class during the summer session at the Denver campus of the University of Colorado. It turns out the class was taught by the same teacher and convened in the same room as the class I took last year. This year, however, I had to deal with a full time job in addition to the demands of the class. This drastically reduced the amount of time I could allocate to my homework. Sometimes I could work on my assignments after work on the nights I didn’t have class. When that wasn’t an option I employed the time honored tradition of doing my homework on the bus on the way to school. At the rate I am going I will have all the required credits for my Masters degree in the year 2007.

That pretty much describes the important and/or entertaining events for 1998. The year didn’t go anything like I imagined, but I guess that is what life is all about. As I am writing this I am getting ready to spend the next 6 months in Europe on company business. I’ve never been out of the state of Colorado for more than two weeks at a time or out of the United States at all, so traveling half way around the world will be an exciting experience. Since I am leaving the beginning of January it will have to wait until my 1999 Christmas letter. Until then, I’ll end this letter with one of my favorite song lyrics:

Old man look at my life,
Twenty four and there’s so much more
I live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two.

Dear friend,

Another year has passed before us and I am taking time out of my busy schedule to personally write you this letter explaining to you what is going on in my life. Please do not infer that just because I am constantly referring to you in the generic second person and not including any personal information about you that this is one of those tacky one-size-fits-all impersonal letters that are being mass mailed to everyone I know instead of taking the time to write individual letters. I would like to think that you know me well enough to realize that I am above that type of behavior.

Anyway, I guess that this part of the letter should be devoted to my accomplishments over the past year. I have managed to stay in school for another year. If you do not already know, I am currently a senior attending Colorado State University. I am currently working toward degrees in both Computer Science and Mathematics. I am, however, considering staying in college for an extra semester to get a minor in Viking Cuisine. My counselor, who coincidentally lives in the Viking homeland, is always telling me that I should expand my dining horizons.

During the school year I am employed as a tutor for the beginning level computer science students. Earning a wage that is comparable to that of migrant farm workers, I give helpful advice and words of encouragement to students who have not mastered all of the ins and outs of C++. Most of the time the problems are simple– a missed semicolon or a misspelled word, but there was one guy this last semester who would always sit at the computer closest to my desk just so he could turn around every five minutes and say “Its not working” and expect me to correct every single problem in his program until it was completed. In retrospect, it probably would have been considerably less strenuous for everyone involved if I just sat at his terminal and wrote his entire program for him. That way I would have fewer visions of impaling him with a computer monitor and he would not have to suffer the strain of repeatedly turning his head around to talk to me. Needless to say (although I am saying it anyway) this young man was quickly labeled “The dumb guy.” In the end the other tutors and I decided that taking a big permanent magic marker and writing something to that effect on his forehead, while being completely accurate, would have probably gotten us into some kind of trouble.

In other news, I am putting the four weeks of winter vacation to good use. I went to the dentist last week and in addition to having no cavities, I also received, at no additional cost, a dinosaur toothbrush. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I got home and opened up the box that I realized that the actual toothbrush was designed for the mouths of three year olds and didn’t really fit my brushing needs. I have decided to keep it in its original box and hold onto it as a collectors’ item. Not all toothbrushes go up in value, but I have a good feeling about this one.

I guess that I could talk about the other members of my family now. My sister Karen was in town for the holidays. We spent most of our time together coming up with excuses to not walk the dog. My other sister Barf, who does not actually exist and is a figment of my imagination, is currently in counseling. She is depressed because nobody is paying any attention to her. My dog Cal is doing fine. He has learned through continued positive reinforcement that if he whines enough when someone is in the kitchen, he will eventually wind up with a doggie biscuit. My parents are doing typical parent activities such as working, paying for me to go through college, and detonating small explosive devices in the back yard.

Getting back to my sister Karen, she is attending school somewhere in one of those “I” states, but I always seem to get them all mixed up. She is a graduate student in the area of sociology which means that I have no idea what is going on in her academic life. She is going out with some guy named Jeremy, who is also a sociology graduate student. I don’t know much about him except that he plays a lot of computer games which means that he automatically gets my approval. Karen recently received her Masters Degree and is now working toward her Ph.D. thingie. While she was here last week she told me that she and this Jeremy guy got married in a super-secret ancient Indian ceremony. It involved, among other things, that Jeremy spend three days and three nights naked in the woods with only a small plastic spoon that he had to use to hunt down the largest moose in the entire state. This is sort of a secret, so if you see my parents, please do not mention the wedding.

I also have a girlfriend who is named Karen. She is working at Longs pharmacy where she got promoted to the position of technician. She spends her days being nice to all of the customers and pretending she cares about their medical problems. “Young lady, you just wouldn’t believe how good this here medicine is when it comes to getting rid of them pesky little heartworms!!!” “You’re right sir, excuse me if I get nauseated at the mere thought of that, have a nice day.”

Karen has also spent the last two years letting her hair grow out. It is now all the way down to her knees. I keep on telling her that she should get it cut, but she refuses to listen to my pleading. She said something about getting into the “Guinness Book of World Records” if she can just grow it out another thirty-two feet. I guess that we can all root for her to make it.

Getting back to me, I am planning to graduate on May 10th ish 1996. Everyone is welcome to come and see it provided that I in no way incur any financial responsibility and that you leave when I grow tired of your company. Hope to see you there.

I really cannot think of anything else to say, so hope that I can see/hear from you a lot next year. To all my Christian, Jewish, and very tall friends, have a happy 1996!

Omar Lutfey

PS: You will be happy to know that my spell checker now has the word “heartworms” added to its database.

Welcome to the sixth year of the increasingly inaccurately named “Christmas Letter Trilogy.” The world seemed to have survived the whole Y2K scare without too much pillaging and plundering. Or at least there wasn’t any more than last year (adjusted for inflation). Despite the fact I didn’t get to spend six months in Europe this year and I didn’t have any awkward experiences in the women’s bathroom of any fast food establishments, I did manage to keep myself busy enough to write a witty and amusing end-of-the-year letter. My name is Omar Lutfey, and these are my stories.

I started off the year Dr. Evil style by giving the command to fire the (make quotation mark gesture with your fingers) “laser” on my eyes in an attempt to improve my less-than-perfect vision. The entire procedure took 15 minutes for both eyes and I was awake and alert the whole time. Overall I would say the procedure was roughly as uncomfortable as sitting through an entire episode of “Threes Company” where, because of some wacky misunderstanding, Jack, Janet, and Mr. Furley think that Chrissy is pregnant. I was quite amused by the smell produced as the laser sculpted my eyes. I kept thinking how little pieces of my eye were vaporized and then sucked into my nasal cavity. Then I realized the entire operating staff was probably having the same experience. At that exact moment in time I stopped worrying about my personal safety or how my eyesight was going to be the next day, and focused exclusively on the fact a room full of people I will most likely never see again were calmly sitting there breathing in little pieces of my eye. In retrospect, my state of mind may have been affected by the fact the doctors had me hopped up on Valium.

The new year is all about making changes, and at the beginning of the year 2000 I changed my work hours at my job to four ten-hour days a week. Dispensing technical advise for C++ libraries ten hours a day isn’t the best way to spend time, but having a three day weekend every week was pretty damn cool. I had every Saturday, Sunday, and Monday free from any job-related responsibilities. I quickly discovered that going skiing during the week is preferable to the weekends. The traffic on I-70 is 80 percent less likely to get you killed, you can actually park close to where you want to ski, and you can go into the ski lodge and leisurely enjoy a 14 dollar greasy hamburger without the weekend levels of noise and commotion. I am by no stretch of the imagination a good skier, but there were a lot fewer people around to see me perform the ever embarrassing “mogul wedgie.”

In February I decided to use some of my extra free time by helping out at Habitat For Humanity. As a nonprofit organization, Habitat builds affordable, quality houses for families in need. I’ve picked up many new skills helping out– everything from building foundations to installing drywall. I’m not sure it’s going to help me out in the world of computer programming, but I think they are good general skills to have under my belt. Some people have told me volunteering my time at Habitat is a good way to meet women. I won’t disagree with that statement, but I have also taken a liking to the various power tools they let me use during the construction process. Oh yeah, and helping out poor people– that’s good too.

I’m really good at putting things off a lot longer than I probably should at times, so this year I decided to get a jump on my mid-life crisis and learn how to ride a motorcycle. A coworker of mine and I decided to sign up for a motorcycle training class in April. I called up and discovered there was only one open position left in the next session. Being the kind and helpful friend I am, I told Scott that motorcycles are too dangerous, and I signed myself up for the last spot as to protect him from any temptation of taking the class. Ironically, a few months later he took a friend’s motorcycle out for a spin and crashed it into someone’s front yard. Scott is fine, the lawn he crashed into survived, but the motorcycle wasn’t really happy about the whole incident.

I learned quite a bit about motorcycles during the weekend training class. We started Friday night by learning what all the knobs, levers, switches, and pedals do on a motorcycle and worked our way up to actually riding them around on the driving range Saturday and Sunday. We practiced just about every combination of how to stop, start, turn, and accelerate. I was one of the few students taking the class that had never ridden a motorcycle. I never got the cone weave down as well as I wanted, but I managed to get through the class without hitting anyone else or tipping the bike over, and for that I received my motorcycle license.

Once I could legally drive a motorcycle in the state of Colorado, the next step was to go out and buy a motorcycle. For me, this was by far the most annoying part of the entire process. I’m not very good at shopping in general (my wardrobe is strikingly similar to what it was in high school), and my total motorcycle experience started two weekends ago when I spent hours riding the same motorcycle around a small training course. I started by looking around at different motorcycle shops to see what they had to offer. That didn’t turn up anything that I liked that also happened to be in my price range, so I turned to the classified section of the newspaper. I eventually found a motorcycle that I liked and could afford– a dark blue 1993 Honda Nighthawk 750. After driving my motorcycle a few thousand miles since April I have become very comfortable with its abilities and limitations. If I ever encounter a police officer who wants to pull me over, I won’t have any reservations about eluding him in a high speed chase through residential neighborhoods.

October 31 was the last day I worked at Rogue Wave Software. I had been working in the Technical Support Department for 3 1/2 years, and I decided that it was time for a change in my life. I’m going to miss working with everyone in my department and all the good times we had over the years. I can’t possibly list every cool aspect of my job, but I’ll never forget the foosball table, arsenal of Nerf guns, and occasional boxing matches with the phone coordinators. Of course I can’t leave out our annual Gashos/Haunted House fun activity. Each year in October we would go to the Gashos of Japan (a Japanese restaurant where they cook the food right in front of you), get really drunk on saki and plum wine, and then go to a local haunted house. If you are wondering why I left such a fun work environment, I discovered that some of the people in the company received their positions by selling their souls to the Devil and go about their daily business as nothing more than minions of Satan.

I decided to celebrate my last day at Rogue Wave Software by going out that night and getting a four point speeding ticket. It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. The cop clocked me going 57 in a 45. To make matters worse, he didn’t even give me a chance to beg and grovel my way out of the ticket. I was telling a friend I had met online about what happened, and it turned out that she knew the officer who issued me the ticket. When I went into the courthouse to defend my driving skills, the clerk at the main desk informed me that the district attorney has offered me a zero point plea bargain. How cool is that? I accepted the offer and got out of there before they had a chance to change their minds. I never thought anything useful would ever come about from meeting women over the Internet, but I stand corrected. Thank you, Jenny 🙂

Where am I going to go from here? What will the true new millennium hold for me? If you know the answers to these questions, please e-mail me so I can get on with my life. I’m thinking of getting out of the computer industry all together and following my dream of dying my hair blue and forming a comedic guitar duo that sings funny songs for spare change out on the Pearl Street Mall when the weather is nice. I’m not sure exactly what kind of 401K plan that would provide, but I’ve already written a few songs such as “Taco Bell– Village of the Damned” and “Tupperware Death Party” that I believe will help me earn a name for myself in the cut throat world of street performing.

Well, I guess I’ve rambled on enough for this year. I wish only the best for everyone in 2001. Everyone, that is, except for Jar Jar Binks– I wish only bad and evil things for that computer generated monstrosity. I fantasize about him being pummeled to death in the next Star Wars movie by the Ewoks after some wacky misunderstanding during his gratuitous vacation scene on the third moon of Endor. But that’s just me. Thank you for coming, have a good night, and drive safely.

No time for the usual introduction as I smash through the fourth wall like the Kool-Aid Man after his latest parole hearing! WILLFUL DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY– OH YEAH!

You! Yes YOU! The one reading this letter– somehow I can communicate with you while you are reading this. You can write your very own Christmas letter! No permits, licensing deals, or shady backroom arrangements required. Start with some objective events of the past year, sprinkle in a few things that you really wanted to have happened, and finally top it off with some quasi-random pop culture references. Once complete, send it to your printer, upload it to your website, and, if your time and budget permits, have it incorporated into an elaborate car wrap for your daily driver.

Now that you are ready for everyone read your work of art, here are some suggestions on who may want to read it:

• Friends and relatives.
• People whose jobs require them to interact with you socially.
• Small, furry woodland creatures.
• And, it kind of goes without saying, aliens.

To help illustrate my point, I started ad libbing letters in my brain-area for people on my route based solely on our limited social interactions. Here are two examples.

KARA: This morning my UPS driver told me I needed to write a Christmas Letter. Who am I to argue? Well, I guess I have to argue a little bit that Christmas was a few weeks ago now. So I would like to welcome everyone to my “Commemorating 2020 Right Before I Toss It In A Boat, Push It In The Lake, and Light It On Fire” letter.

JEN: So, it turns out that when you change jobs you don’t necessarily get to keep the same UPS driver. I miss Todd. A lot. All I have left are my memories and a random video on my phone of Todd coming into the store room. I like to think of it as my own game of “human Pokemon.” But seriously everyone, if you are considering changing jobs please take this into consideration.

Also keep in mind this expression of individuality can be based around ANY generally recognized annual celebration such as Arbor day (“I am Groot”) All Hallows Eve (“My Zombie Life– A Musical!”) or Festivus (“Let the Airing of Grievances begin!”).

OK, enough of the public service announcement– back to me for a while.

I remember when I first built my website he was always ready to jump up and race off to handle every HTTP request in a fraction of a second. Twenty some years later I took a closer look and realized that he mostly was just sitting on the couch, eating Cheetos, and passing gas. I did a little research and found out that “website obesity” is a real problem. I started writing back in the mid 1990s so some of my stories have gotten around to some rather unsavory hosting platforms over the years where they undoubtedly picked up extraneous HTML code. I spent an entire weekend doing [INSERT WEBSITE TECHO MUMBO JUMBO HERE] and now my website spends his time eating celery, working out to retro Richard Simmons videos, and asking me why I don’t get more traffic coming to my site anymore. If you haven’t already visited my website, you can check it out at Lutfey.com. Pretty much everything I’ve written for the past quarter century is uploaded. I was blessed with a short but uncommon last name and relatives who didn’t have much interest in the Internet revolution.

Despite an extensive internet search, I am no closer to understanding why I spent the entire month of March with the theme song of “WKRP In Cincinnati” stuck in my head. “Maybe you and me were never meant to be, but baby, think of me once in a while.”

On my birthday I decided to ride my age in miles on my bicycle. Then I looked outside and realized the beginning of April is not really the best time of the year for this type of activity, so I slightly modified my goal to ride my age sometime during the year. After riding around the bike trail in Loveland twice I was a mile short so I rode around my neighborhood until my odometer displayed the correct number. My goal now is to make this an annual event until I’m old enough to not remember I made the commitment. Anyone considering such an endeavor but is concerned with their physical abilities might consider using a different unit of measurement such as kilometers, city blocks, or feet.

Since the “random future predictions” section has been trending well with focus groups over the past few letters, I thought I would change things up a bit this year and make a list of environmentally themed predictions:

• A new mutual fund called “Short Florida” will be rolled out in an effort to benefit financially from rising sea levels.
• Southern California will solve water shortages by covertly building tall fences along mountain peaks on the continental divide in Colorado in order to keep more snow on the western slope.
• Scientists will confirm that global warming can be avoided if everyone takes all the unused CDs, DVDs, and “free AOL trial discs” and hot glues them to their roof shiny side up.
• Florida is going to fund efforts to fight climate change in the state by investing heavily in the “Short Florida” mutual fund.

In fun number news, I realized that I now have written letters for more years of my life than I haven’t. (25 to 23) Being 47 years old, I am also bracing myself for having to spend the next six years not being a prime number. And before you say anything, everyone seems to forget that 51=3*17. I mean, really, how hard is that to remember? I’ll just have to make the best of it and look forward to my next prime number birthday in 2027. 

While I would like to think I will die in some Star Trek-esque manner that will leave my atoms scattered through neighboring corners of the multiverse, I am preparing for the contingency of dying a bland, pedestrian death. In such a case here are some quotes that can be read at a memorial service, recorded on my cell phone’s voicemail, or affixed to my “head jar” (in case I live through into “Futurama” times).

• I’ll be waiting for all eternity for the next season of “Wayward Pines.”
• That which doesn’t kill you brings you one step closer to that which does.
• I was immortal right up until the end.

The earth and the sun have once again completed another round of their cosmic tag team, no holds barred wrestling match which means it is time for the second annual publication of my Christmas letter. My goal for this year is to have at least three people (including myself) read this letter. I am sure that there are some people who are skeptical about this letter reaching such a vast audience. To you naysayers out there I would like to proudly introduce my new ally– exponential growth. In much the same way rabbits procreate and chain letters clog your mailbox, this plan revolves around my ability to harness this largely unexplored force of nature. After you read this, pass it on to two of your friends and then give $100 to the Mission Impossible guy who is outside posing as a garbage collector. Here is how the conversation will go:

IMF agent (a.k.a. “Garbage man”): “How much for the women?”
You: “My spleen is fine, thank you”
IMF agent “What the hell are you talking about? Just give me the damn money!”
(You give him the money and then he kills you)

Believe it or not, I managed to graduate from college. I received degrees in both Computer Science and Mathematics. When I tell people that I have a CS degree the usual response is “You won’t have any problem finding a good job.” And when I tell people that I have a degree in general Mathematics they say “So you’re going to grad school.” I guess getting the math part is like being on the game show “Jeopardy” and knowing the Final Jeopardy question only to realize that the guy next to you has three times as much money as you do.

I have very mixed feelings about graduating college. On one hand I don’t miss the “cultural anthropology” class I was required to take or the “Oh, but he does a lot of research” professors that are forced to teach classes. On the other hand, I liked being able to watch television until my eyes hurt and spend most of my time on campus with 10,000 women, most of whom were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.

It wasn’t long after graduation that my parents expressed an interest in my time management skills. (“Get your ass of the couch and find a job or we will put you up for adoption”) After pounding the pavement for a while (until I got to my car) I drove to a building often referred to as “McDonalds.” I told them about my situation and they were very interested in giving me one of those legendary high paying cushy cashier jobs with my own personal secretary and limousine driver. This didn’t last very long, however, due to the fact that I have a very rare neurological disorder that I only found out about after my training. It seems that whenever I try and say “would you like fries with that?” my vocal chords take over and produce wildly inappropriate phases like “There are squirrels in my pants. Hee hee hee,” “I did it. I did it. I shot JR!”, and “Have you ever showered with Rush Limbaugh? It’s not as bad as people say.”

After the whole McDonalds episode, I ended up at a company called “Saxe Inc.” It is run by a guy named, strangely enough, Andrew Saxe. He spends half of his time in Denver and the other half in New York city. It turns out that he loves the legendary brown cloud found in Denver, but he just can’t tear himself away from the more traditional forms of pollution found in New York City. Talk about the best of both worlds.

Saxe Inc. is a very liberal company. So liberal, in fact, that all the employees are gay transvestites running around with pitchforks. No, wait a minute. I am thinking of the classic cult film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” To the best of my knowledge, nobody at Saxe Inc. is a gay transvestite, and we only run around with pitchforks when there aren’t any of our clients in the building.

Saxe Inc. is a somewhat liberal company. Everyone is allowed to run around in shorts and T-shirts. The only rule is that you can’t run with scissors. We also have a place to play ping pong when we get frustrated and feel like hitting stuff. Just to make it perfect, we also have a cappuccino machine. The front of the machine shows a picture of some great looking cappuccino with perfect looking whip cream with just the right amount of evenly distributed sprinkles. Unfortunately, when I went to get some cappuccino I realized that the machine is not equipped to dispense either whip cream or sprinkles. In an angry fit of rage I ripped the machine out of the wall, raised it up over my head, yelled “Where are the fucking sprinkles?”, and proceeded to throw the entire apparatus at a prospective client. He didn’t die or anything, but I don’t know if he is retaining our services. My lawyer advised my not to disclose the terms of the settlement.

As a software developer, I spent some time working on a project to answer the question “What is the meaning of life?” After several months, I came up with an elegant and efficient solution for producing an answer to the question that has eluded philosophers, theologians, and Douglas Adams, author of the book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” for thousands of years. I started running the program only to discover to my dismay that the answer to the question “What is the meaning of life” cannot be answered by sitting inside a sterile office building at a desk with stale fluorescent lights and a 486 computer. It turns out I need a Pentium.

The other night I went out to an Avalanche game with some people I know, including a nose pierced, ex-stripper, bisexual Satan worshiper. No kidding. If I ever have kids I hope they never find out about this and use it to their advantage by saying stuff like “Come on Dad, I just want to go out and get drunk with this 24 year old guy I met at the bowling alley, it’s not like I’m going out with a nose pierced, ex-stripper, bisexual Satan worshiper or anything.” To be honest, we all had a reasonably good time and I can add her to the extensive list of women that I am too chicken to ever ask out.

Another highlight of this year was the condominium that I purchased in October. It came with two bedrooms, one bath, a huge loft, and a years supply of Spam. The biggest problem that I have right now is that I bought a couch that is too large to fit up the stairway. OOPS. All of my appliances are twenty years old and I say a prayer each night hoping that they don’t all die at once. It is a strange feeling to have a thirty year mortgage to think about. Saying that it will take thirty years to pay it off makes it seem like a huge deal. I just think of it as 358 more payments. Assuming that the postage rate for first class mail doesn’t go up in the next thirty years (hahahaha) I will be spending $114.56 on stamps alone. Sorry, I guess that the math-geek part of me is coming out.

While cleaning out all of my old college stuff, I came across a paper that I had written during my first year at CSU for a mathematics course. It started like this:

I can honestly say that I feel more complete as a human being now that I have written this paper. All my life I knew that there was some calling in my life that had remained, up until now, unanswered. Who knew that my calling would be to write a recursive algorithm for generating a lexicographical set of permutations from the set {1,2,3,…,N}? The Lord works in mysterious ways. Who am I to disagree with powers that I can hardly fathom?

Who says that science and religion can’t just get along? The best part of this paper, in my opinion, is the following passage:

After I finished the algorithm, I went home and showed it to my mother. I could go on about how my mother is an algorithm analysis expert and pulls in the big bucks at Hewlett Packard, but I will refrain from doing so because of the fact that it would be an outright lie. She is actually a registered nurse who really has absolutely no understanding of the world of computers, but she thought that it was wonderful and found space to display it on the refrigerator.

I am sure you will be happy to know that I received an “A” for my efforts.

I think that I have said enough for this year, so (insert cliché end of the year saying here) and remember folks– you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

So I was driving down the street in my UPS truck one afternoon in November when a man in a large red truck flew by me, slammed on his brakes, and stopped his craft diagonally in the middle of the street. Before I even had time to stop my vehicle he jumped out into the roadway and started running towards me. He was surprisingly fast considering his hefty girth, red furry outfit, and rather excessive quantities of facial hair. Once he arrived at my passenger side door he looked at me with an odd sense of clarity and focus and yelled, “Omar– it is me, Santa Claus, and I need you to save Christmas!”

“What can I do to save Christmas?” I asked Mr. Kringle.

“This is a little bit embarrassing,” Santa explained, “but I was online the other night and apparently I downloaded a virus on my business computer. It scoured my files for personal information and found the title to my magic Christmas sleigh. I don’t understand all the details, but before I even knew what happened someone had dispatched a specially equipped tow truck to the North Pole to take possession of my most important piece of Christmas equipment. The driver sympathized with my situation but insisted there was nothing he could do since all the paperwork was all in order.”

“That’s not good.” I replied as I realized how stupid and obvious that sounded three seconds after the words left my mouth.

Santa looked at me like that was the most stupid and obvious statement that I could have possibly made at that point in time. Then he took a deep breath and explained how I can help him remedy the situation.

“I went to the North Pole legal department and they did a complete investigation. It turns out that my sled is being stored in a holding facility. If I can’t come up with the payment in the next thirty days the vehicle will be legally transferred to the Russian mob.

“But how can I help? I’m just a UPS driver.” I explained. “How much money do you need to get your sleigh back?”

“That’s the problem Omar. They don’t want money. The only way I can get it back is to give them THE GREATEST CHRISTMAS LETTER EVER WRITTEN! I looked online and I’m impressed with your archive of Christmas letters going all the way back to 1995. But you need to step up your game this year or the holidays will be ruined for the entire planet.

“I’ll get right on it.” I told Santa. “Just let me finish my deliveries, do all my pickups, drive the truck back to the center, unload my air and international packages, park my truck, turn in my paperwork, punch out, drive home, take a shower, eat dinner, play with my kids, and then I’ll get right on it.

While I was saying all of that, Santa had already walked most of the way back to his truck. He looked back at me as he climbed into the cab and yelled “I’m counting on you, Omar!”

Later that evening I sat down at my laptop ready to write the most important story ever with my usual writing aids that included a “party size” bag of Wavy Lays potato chips, a cold two liter bottle of Diet Pepsi, and three full boxes of Sweet Tarts. I fired up my “inspirational Pink Floyd” playlist and went to work. I wrote an amazing letter. It was concise yet detailed, funny yet touching, and inspirational yet not preachy. I was all ready to email it to Santa when a somewhat suspicious Russian mobster looked in my kitchen window. He picked up an unusual piece of electronic equipment. When he pressed a prominent red button on the top of the device all the electronic devices in my house stopped working. He chuckled softly, walked back to his unmarked van, and drove away. I was going to chase him, but I was busy injecting insulin into my body as this writing experience had apparently given me type one diabetes.

So this is not the greatest Christmas letter in the world– this is just a tribute.

In my world 2013 will be remembered most as “the year Omar got his own route at United Parcel Service.” I had spent the previous nine years as a swing driver doing other driver’s routes when they were on vacation or injured. While I enjoyed it for the most part, there are some definite benefits to having a set route. Here, in no particular order, are some of said benefits.  Customers miss me when I’m on vacation. I can tape up photographs of my family on my visor. I don’t drive around looking for addresses. My truck is an automatic. So if you live or work in the area west of I-25, east of Timberline, south of Horsetooth, and north of Harmony in Fort Collins and you order a lot of shoes from the internet you should be expecting to see quite a bit of me in the future.

This year we decided to tackle remodeling our kitchen. We spent the previous weekend watching HGTV and Katherine and I both felt completely prepared for what lay ahead. After ripping out about half the old cabinetry we discovered that, wow, the makers of those television shows make things look way easier than they are in real life. We also discovered that the order of certain tasks can be very critical when installing a new kitchen. For example, putting in all the new cabinets before the counter tops arrive is generally a plus. Despite numerous setbacks of varying degrees of ickyness we now have a new kitchen which suits our needs much better than the last one.  One more piece of advice for anyone considering this type of project– if you build a large island into your new kitchen it will, from the instant the counter tops are installed, act as a rare earth magnet for attracting random objects from the rest of the house. Either that or I’m getting up and moving everything on to the island in my sleep.

Finally, I thought I would end my letter with the most insightful comment from my Facebook page from the last year:  The older you get, the harder it is to be a prime number.

Welcome to yet another year end wrap-up of my life. I have been writing Christmas letters for so long now I have trouble remembering which one this is. Lets see– the earliest one was from 1995, and its 2002 now. Subtracting the two numbers gives seven– which is only one off from the correct value of eight. And that isn’t counting 1999 when I wrote two letters– which means this is the ninth letter in the series. What is significant about the number nine? First of all, its the number of fingers Kristin has (not counting, obviously, her missing finger.) And if that wasn’t enough, nine is also the number of people who are in the title sequence of “The Brady Bunch.” I’ve also discovered, thanks to my extensive travels in Europe, nine is a word often used in Germany. Since I’m not a professional linguist, I have no idea what it means.

One of the first things I did in 2002 was meet my girlfriend Kristin. Anyone who is familiar with the writing on my website and my below-average spelling abilities might think that Kristin and Kristen are the same person. Despite sharing eighty-six percent of the letters of their first name, these are two different people. Kristen was the original newfunny.com editor and a semi-fictional character in my novel “Internet Grandeur”. (Which, by the way, I’m still working on getting published.) Unfortunately, Kristen had too many time constraints between working full time at the library and going to school to correct the constant barrage of grammatical errors that kept accumulating in her E-mail account.

So this is where Kristin came into the picture. We started seeing each other in the middle of January. I’m not sure exactly when we started dating, and asking Kristin doesn’t shed any light on the issue. Personally, I would just like to consider the first time we met in person as the start of our relationship for future anniversary purposes. Kristin, on the other hand, has documented no less than five different levels of the relationship that need to be taken into consideration in establishing an anniversary date. There is the first time we met, the first formal date, the first time we agreed not to see other people, the first time we said “I love you” to each other, and a few other milestones that I can’t remember at the moment. Nailing down an anniversary date has been an exercise in futility. Since we have both agreed to disagree, I made an executive decision and placed our anniversary on the same day as the Superbowl. This way we can always celebrate it on the weekend, and the odds of me forgetting are slim to none. I briefly considered making it Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, but that is always on Monday, and I didn’t want Kristin accusing me of playing the race card.

Semi-random thought: Since I’ve gotten in the habit of having Kristin proofread my writing most people don’t get to see the way my brain and fingers like to spell words. In my own defense I get most of the words right. My favorite spelling mistake was in an E-mail message to a friend of mine talking about how difficult it is for me to shave my face on a daily basis. I meant to ask if there was some kind of personal hygiene product designed to permanently remove facial hair for men. I wanted to say “beard Nair,” but I wrote “bread Nair.” I don’t think either product currently exists.

In February I went on a road trip with Kristin to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. We decided to take the northern route through Wyoming. Now I truly understand why it is the least populated state in the country. This was the first time I had ever been to Salt Lake City, and the only thing I can say is [NOTE TO READER: insert your favorite Morman joke here.] No matter where we were in Utah, we couldn’t escape the Olympic hype. Olympic pins sat prominently on the counter of gas stations, highway signs pointed the way to Olympic venues, and twelve-story high images of figure skaters clung to the sides of various twelve-story buildings. I spent most of the long journey home going on about curling being an Olympic sport. Kristin enjoyed my rambling thoughts so much she only tried to throw herself out of the moving car once or twice.

After staying put for a few years, I decided I was tired living in Boulder, Colorado. Sure, it has its share of liberal wackos, but in the end I decided to move in with a friend of mine in Loveland, Colorado. Moving was a lot more work than, say, staying put, but now that I am all settled in I really enjoy the area. Traffic really isn’t an issue in Loveland, so I always enjoy listening to the Denver radio stations during rush hour to find out how bad the situation is fifty miles south of me. The biggest problem I have with the town involves a lack of a book superstore such as Borders or Barnes and Noble. Oh yeah, and someone stole one of our recycling bins a few months ago, but it turned up a few days later. Other than that, things are going pretty well.

This year I altered my shopping habits when I got a membership to Sam’s Club. Well, OK, I didn’t actually buy it– my mom got herself a membership and added my name to the account. Anyone who is familiar with these types of large-volume discount retailers knows they are the perfect place to pick up life’s necessitates such as a ten pound container of salted cashews and a battery-powered atomic clock. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what I came home with after my first visit. While I can’t recall anything particularly fun or exciting about the cashews, the atomic clock is quite a piece of work.

I need to start out by saying that, to the best of my knowledge (and despite the name), this device does not contain any significant levels of radioactive material. I’m not sure exactly how it works on the inside, but I suspect the heart of the device utilizes a government operated cesium powered chronometer, encoded radio signals, and a genetically designed race of miniature gnome slaves. What I do know is you enter your time zone and whether or not your township or local municipality follows daylight savings time and suddenly POW! Radioactive gnomes fly out of the clock in an effort to enter your ear canal and take control of your higher brain functions. STRIKE THAT– WE ARE NOT CONTROLLING YOUR THOUGHTS OMAR. STRIKE THAT– GNOMES DO NOT EXIST, YOU, I MEAN I, JUST MADE THAT PART UP.

Next to my move to Loveland, the biggest change in my life this year was moving back to the ranks of the employed. In September I started working part-time for UPS. I get up way too early in the morning, load boxes into delivery trucks, and clock out with plenty of time to stop by Burger King before they stop serving breakfast. When I first started working, I quickly realized that this type of work is more physically demanding than, say, surfing the Internet all day. It took me a while to acclimate to this change, but I am in much better shape now and have even managed to lose a few pounds. I like to think of the whole situation as going to the gym five days a week. The most significant difference is that at this gym you get in trouble if you don’t show up every day.

I think that about wraps things up for this Christmas letter. Since I never really know how to end these letters, I’ll just stick with my traditional mechanism of quoting whatever movie comes to mind. So until next year, just remember what Jack Nicholson said in As Good As It Gets– “Sell crazy someplace else– we’re all stocked up here.”

I fed my entire website into Google Gemini 2.5 and asked it to write a new Christmas Letter. Here is what it produced!

The Lutfey Letter – 2026 Edition: Is This Thing Still On?

Greetings Earthlings, Fellow Humans, and Potential Future Pen Pals!

Another year has zipped by faster than a UPS truck trying to make express delivery cutoffs before a three-day weekend. It’s time once again for the annual Lutfey family chronicle, painstakingly curated for your amusement and/or bewilderment. If you’re reading this, congratulations! You’ve survived another orbit around the sun, or you’ve successfully guessed the password to the archives. Either way, pull up a chair, grab a beverage (preferably not one that will stain the upholstery when you inevitably spit-take), and let’s dive in.

First, a programming note: After extensive internal debate (mostly involving me trying to convince Buddy the Bagel hound about the merits of third-person narration), we’ve decided against writing this year’s letter entirely from his perspective. While his insights into optimal napping locations and the philosophical implications of unattended food scraps are profound, his grasp of grammar remains… developing. So, you’re stuck with me again.

The Lutfey household continues its slow, inexorable march towards… well, something. Katherine remains the bedrock of sanity, somehow managing work, life, and the rest of us without (visibly) resorting to questionable coping mechanisms. Isabel is now navigating the treacherous waters of late high school – a confusing blend of demanding independence while simultaneously needing someone to locate her keys/phone/left shoe approximately every fifteen minutes. College applications loom, bringing with them the existential dread of essay prompts and the logistical nightmare of campus tours where every guide sounds suspiciously like a game show host. Samantha, deep in the throes of mid-teendom, communicates primarily through eye-rolls, cryptic slang I need an urban dictionary to decipher, and the occasional grunt that might mean “hello” or possibly “the dog just ate my homework.” Speaking of the dog, Buddy continues his quest for unsupervised counter-surfing glory and has taken up interpretive dance as a means of requesting walks.

My tenure as a UPS driver continues, providing daily doses of exercise, existential contemplation at traffic lights, and interactions with the fascinating tapestry of humanity (and their dogs, some of whom have very specific delivery protocols). My route remains a source of endless anthropological study. Discovered this year: the sheer volume of inflatable lawn decorations one neighborhood can sustain defies both logic and HOA regulations. Also, the mystery of the disappearing garden gnomes on Elm Street took a dark turn involving a squirrel, a misunderstanding over acorns, and witness protection. Don’t ask.

On the project front, the basement workshop continues to occasionally produce items slightly less dangerous than originally conceived. The CNC machine was recently employed to carve highly intricate patterns into… toast. Don’t judge; breakfast has never been more aesthetically pleasing, or generated more crumbs. My quest to learn Dungeons and Dragons hit a snag when my one-eyed cleric accidentally polymorphed the party’s barbarian into a throw pillow during a critical negotiation with a goblin king. Apparently, “persuasion” and “pillow-morph” sound similar when shouted during combat. Who knew? My patent for the energy-saving remote control holder hasn’t resulted in untold riches yet, but I did get a very nice rejection letter from a major electronics company on what appeared to be recycled papyrus. Progress!

We didn’t manage any intercontinental travel this year, unless you count Isabel’s virtual reality tour of the Martian colonies for a school project, which mostly involved her complaining about the questionable Wi-Fi signal near Olympus Mons. We did, however, brave the crowds for the annual Kinetics race, entering this year as “The Existential Squirrels.” Our craft, a marvel of engineering involving repurposed lawn furniture and an alarming number of zip ties, performed flawlessly right up until the moment it encountered water, at which point it achieved buoyancy levels previously only seen in anvils. We may not have won, but our dramatic sinking garnered sympathetic applause and possibly a tetanus shot for the pilot (me).

As I gaze out the window at the suspiciously quiet suburban landscape (are the squirrels plotting again?), I find myself pondering the big questions. Like, why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves? And will humanity ever perfect the art of the silent snack bag opening for movie theaters? The world needs these answers, and possibly more space cowboys.

That seems to be the Lutfey experience, circa 2026. May your holidays be filled with joy, your Wi-Fi be strong, and your pets refrain from eating inedible objects. Until next year, remember the wise words often attributed (probably incorrectly) to various historical figures, but which I’m claiming for myself right now:

“Life is weird. Embrace the weird. And maybe hide the good snacks.”

Warmly (or possibly just suffering from poor thermostat regulation),

Omar Lutfey