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.

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.

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.

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?

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.”

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.