don sees the world: Yule Blog - Christmas Greetings!

Dear Friends and Family,

As I write my Christmas missive, it is a wonderful, snowy day in late fall here in Lakewood, Colorado; just the kind of day that one wants to casually sip a warm cup of coffee, watch the snow fall and get into the Christmas spirit. And so, fittingly, I have popped a Christmas music rotation onto the MP3 player, poured myself a fresh cup and sat down at the computer to write my annual holiday missive. The year has been a busy one for Saga and me.

The year started at a New Year’s Eve party with friends. It was a wonderful start to an interesting year. The noteworthy news for January was the unfortunate skier who slipped partially out of the ski lift and hung mooning Vail for a while.

In February we were blessed with an early spring. But as anyone who lives here know, don’t count on spring to arrive early in the Rockies! Oh, ad I turned 47.

March, true to its nature, gave us a couple significant snowfall events (that is Coloradoan for “Blizzards”) along with the few obligatory nice days between. Professionally, the software package I have been working on since last summer finished its technical trial. We found that the software was viable. Now we just had to find the correct client.

Tax Day, Tea Parties, and Illegal Immigrants were the news of the day in April. I continued to work on the development of my software, and Saga was plagued my more snow. The worst snowfall of the season fell in April; nearly two feet of snow fell so Saga looked like a barge plying a frozen ocean of snow every time we went out for a walk.

In May the family gathered to celebrate Dad’s 75th anniversary in Minnesota. All my siblings were there; all Dad’s siblings were there, and although we didn’t take attendance, we think that there were about sixty people who turned-up to help celebrate. I scored points among my siblings and cousins of my generations by showing pictures of my grandparents and pointing out that we were now as old as they had been when the pictures were taken.

In the cliché of every small-town paper ever published: a fine time was had by all!
One other noteworthy item from the trip was that with the lovely weather on the day I left and the nearly perfect road conditions I set a personal best on the trip home. We covered the distance in just under twelve hours at an average moving time of about 78 miles-per-hour.

There is nothing much of note that happened in June. Well… except that the first of my generation turned fifty. I will not be so crass as to say which of my siblings that may be, you would have to ask my sister.

July was an interesting time... “Interesting” in that not-so-good way. The big news was that NASA had handed all the crack-pot conspiracy types who do not believe we went to the moon a boon by revealing that the “could not find” the original footage of the moon landing. Personally, it was interesting because Lakewood was hit by the first of four hailstorms. This one, as we would find out later, did about a quarter-million dollars in damage to the condo complex that I own a home in. As we would soon discover, we’d need to replace all the roofs in the complex.

August came along and brought with it more hail. Aside from that, it was a lovely month. Oh, and my brother Denis celebrated his birthday.
September was a lovely month. Fall came and it was spectacular, for the few weeks it actually lasted. We had early snowfall and a hailstorm in September. But other than that, it was a lovely month.

Doing my civic duty in September I appeared on for Jury Duty. I was not seated on a jury, but I spent the morning watching the jury selection process. It was an interesting way to pass a morning.

September also was a major milestone for me. It was my twentieth anniversary with my company. My boss had a nice party for me and prepared a bunch of factoids filling-in a timeline of the years since I was hired back in 1989. It was interesting looking back over the years to see what I had forgotten about.

October came and with it the annual family gathering to make horseradish. Saga and I drove up and spent time with the family. All my siblings made it in for the gathering. A sudden change in the weather at the end of the trip caused Saga and I to beat a precipitous exit the weekend after the gathering. What looked to be a bear of a drive turned-out not being so bad. We dodged between two fronts and aside from a bit of fog and a little freezing rain in Nebraska, we had no problem getting home.

I had a couple friends over to my place for Thanksgiving dinner. Aside from that, November is noteworthy only because of the news that the first paying client for my new software was in the last stages of negotiations.

And that brings us to today. Here is sit, listening to a Christmas playlist. I have a client that I will be supporting remotely from my parents’ home in Minnesota where I will be heading at the end of the week. Why?

Well, Dad is going into the hospital this week for surgery to correct an aneurism and I am headed up there to help out during his recuperation.

The New Year promises to be one of new and exciting adventures as my new product gets released and grows. Our first client goes live January 20th in The Netherlands.

That is about it for me. I hope my annual holiday missive finds you and your family well this year! With the snow continuing to fall outside, the only fitting Christmas song quote I could think of was from White Christmas!