olutfey – Page 5 – Lutfey.com

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.

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.

Author: olutfey