The Christmas Letter

 Dear Everyone,

   Well,  here we are again after a year. Wow, where has the time gone? Lots has happened in this short time, and I don't quite know where to start, not to mention how to fit it into a concise letter that most of you will probably stop reading after the first paragraph or so. However, since I have this neurotic need to boast about my family's successes in the hopes of one-upping at least one of you other shit-braggarts at least once, let's let it rip!

   Our oldest finally came off of alcohol...again...this past autumn. Of course, he didn't have much of a choice after landing in jail for D and D (NOT  Dungeons and Dragons) for the eighth time this year. It should be noted that he was very polite to the officer when he showed him his...pride. In our son's defense, officers of the law should be more clear when asking for an ID from someone under the influence. In his state, our son thought ID meant immense..."definition". Having landed in the clink a few times myself for inebriation in the past, I can relate to him. Having been arrested so often got him in a slightly higher class of imprisonment, so he is moving up in the world. Even better, he is now the official "Queen" of C block, so now he finally has a title at 26 years old.

   Then there is our younger child. Now, I have heard all of you chortling behind her back about dressing like a hoe and being the most likely to get knocked up before turning 20. Well the joke's on you all! She's only 17 and has 3 months to go before the due date! The dad is a fine gentleman. His official title is "social director" and has an office, so to speak, close to all the local motels. He even gets a commission from all the nearby businesses for bringing them business himself! Hopefully our grandchild will carry on his family name!

   Of course, there is my wife! God bless her, she really has an interest in building our credit rating and local exposure. We went from having very little debt to well over $10,000 in credit cards alone. I was worried about her for a bit with our son's and daughter's successes and feeling somewhat left out. No sir! She has amassed an impressive new wardrobe, made local business connections at various hostels and bars, not to mention making contributions to our local police and court systems. She even unofficially modeled for a local lingerie outfit and has created a demand for more. For some reason, the cash flow has gone away rather than toward us, but I am sure she knows what she's doing.

    And then there's boring old me with the same old sales job traveling all over the place, eating and drinking alone often. Thankfully I am not always forced to sleep alone! I've often woken up as the guest of some kind stranger or another...who for some reason are often rushing me out, but hey, everyone has to get to their own job, right? After one of those trips, I did have a persistent itch and oddly colored mark that hasn't gone away. After all those pleas to get a COVID shot, I am wondering if that'll clear it up?

   Well, that's been our wonderful year! I cannot imagine being in a more loving, successful, and growing family. Hope you all have a great New Year. Try not to be jealous of us, we just do things our way!

Love, 

Phil

That does not compute!

    As I sit here typing what drivel has to come out of my head from time to time, I cannot help but marvel at the splendid progression of technology...and how I am always about 10 steps behind that progression! Seriously, even though my wife has supplied me at various times with color-changing speakers and color-enhanced keyboards, my machine is state of the art...for 1999 almost!

    Well ok, that is quite an exaggeration. The thing is, 1999 seems so yesterday to me, like I was still 27! That's how time flies. One day I'm a swinging ( as in by a thread) bachelor and the next day I'm a husband of 15 years and father of 12 years. Somewhere in this time warp I was using this damn computer to run a virtual classroom for a bit over 2 months of physical classroom exile. Still, I am fairly attached to my computer...for I built it. I have actually build a few incarnations of a personal computer over the past 13 years.

    Oh hell no, Moore! You didn't....you wouldn't! Oh shit you did....you tricked us via text hypnosis into following you down another f'n memory lane traffic jam! (sigh). Fine, let's get this over with!

    The first computer we had actually belonged to me. On Christmas of 1985, my father had apparently seen "A Christmas Story" for the first time and decided to enhance the Darren McGavin's "Hey, what's that over there?" ruse.  After putting me on a seemingly endless wild goose chase via "Look over here" notes, I was finally awarded a complete Commodore 64 hardware suite consisting of the keyboard/CPU unit, floppy disk drive, monitor, and dot matrix printer. All of those components except 1 were pretty good...except for the printer. Apparently Commodore had a jump start on the jamming tradition that has caused so much office and school alcohol consumption spikes. I believe we ended up getting a compatible yet non Commodore printer later as I did use my computer for school work as well when needed.

    My dad's office had a whole library of Commodore games and I got loaded up pretty fast on disk copies. Of course, this was long before the age of point and click ease of use with a mouse. One had to type such pesky commands as 

LOAD "NERDGAMES",8,1

and hope that the disk was of decent quality. Most of the time it was. My old Atari joystick could be lugged into the machine to play arcade-style games, so that was a lot of fun for a while. About a year later, I got a 300 "baud" modem. I believe baud was a Euro-originated word for slow as Granny's molasses, for when I called into online BBS's (bulletin board services) that had game downloads, the download speed was abysmal! I later got a higher speed one, but after a couple of years I had gotten past those as a fun pastime.

    One other thing the computer got me good at was typing. I actually taught myself to type as I created stories, many early ones influenced by my favorite show at the time, "The Edge of Night".

    I actually held on to the Commodore for several years, finally retiring it in late 1992. I don't remember if it just died or what, but my dad had already brought an older PC from work. It was monochrome to be sure, but I did some papers for school on it as well as writing more stories. I held on to that one for a long time, I believe it was retired in the early 21st century. Most of the time in the late 90s, though, I tended to use my friend/roommate Scott's iMac more than my own.

    My dad gave me another used office model when I moved to Las Vegas. It was ok, but those pesky work numbers always wanted a special password. I had enough of that so I went to CompUSA and a computer of my own...CPU, monitor, printer, and the works. Combined with my Earthlink dialup credentials, I was Internet bound on my own at last, doing lesson plans and looking for women! I was successful in the former, hit and miss on the latter.

    One thing I was not ready for with a Windows PC was the number of shady websites that had viruses and eventually the computer didn't even turn on despite the various virus scanners and "protections" I had put on. A new hard drive seemed to resolve this, and I learned to be more cautious in the sites I was navigating.

    Then came the Lesley masters program that I began in early 2008. Of the many tech related subjects I studied, the anatomy of a computer course that I took was my favorite. As a final project, I opted to build my own computer from a "barebones" kit I bought from TigerDirect for about $200. For that price I got a case, hard drive, and associated wires. All I needed was an optical (CD-rom) drive on my own. From then on I was occasionally buying a new hard drive or operating system. A few years ago, I upgraded almost entirely with a new case. That said, I think the novelty of building my own has worn off. Its just too tough to keep up with what works anymore. Granted a new computer can be expensive, so this old thing will have to do for now, provided we aren't tossed back home again..

    All right, flashbacks are now over, you may resume crash position!