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.
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.