Christmas 2000 newsletter

January - I got off to an early start on my Christmas letter this year--January 3rd, to be exact. Memories of last year’s letter are still haunting me--it was a six-week search for my artistic soul, punctuated by Dawn’s stinging critique: “There isn’t anything about me!”

Y2K did not get off to an auspicious start. We flew to Pennsylvania the day after Christmas; within two days everyone was in bed with a really nasty flu bug. We slept right through the Millennium celebrations. I hope all of those people protesting that 2001 is the real millennium will put on their own celebrations, but somehow I doubt it: People who let a little reason stand between themselves and a good party, probably didn’t want to party in the first place. Besides, half the world’s population goes by different calendars, on which 1/1/00 didn’t mean squat, but they still participated.

February - For Dawn’s birthday, she got a whole new front-end for her truck. Unfortunately, the old front-end was removed by someone making a left turn into her. Except for a nasty bruise and a sore back, she was fine, but the truck went to the shop for about a month. The other driver was a sixteen-year-old boy who got his license three months ago. Dawn called a tow truck; he called his mom.

March - In the last Christmas letter, I mentioned I was going to quit my job and go independent. Less than a week after I wrote that, another project came up at my company that was local and where I would have some management responsibilities, so I decided to stay. Big mistake. My boss and I had a difference of style--I thought she should help and support me, and she thought she should harass and insult me. After three weeks, I accidentally quit. I didn’t intend to, I only intended to get some support from her boss, but he thought he should harass and insult me as well. Fortunately, Dawn and I had saved up enough money so that I didn’t have to worry about being unemployed for a few weeks.

April - Dawn announced she was going to quit. Her boss has always been a yeller, but he never yelled at her. (And speaking from experience, you never yell at her.) Well, he yelled at her. So now Dawn and I were both imminently unemployed, and the savings were looking pretty slim. Still, there was enough there to sponsor a few weeks of carefree abandonment, so I proposed a road trip--we take the convertible, in the middle of spring, and head out to see the country. It’d be like “Travels with Charley,” except with showers and stuff. “Can’t,” was all Dawn said, “school.”

We did go visit my uncle in Lawrenceville, just outside of Atlanta, however. At 74, he still has the most important thing a man can have--his hair. (He may still have his wits, but nobody was really sure about those to begin with.) Still, since my mother got her hearing aids, he’s the only family member I can torment with impunity. (I was only distracted briefly when I crushed a seven-year-old child at a game of checkers one night.) In response to his bragging about Lawrenceville, a town straight out of the '50s, I made my aunt a T-shirt that said “Lawrenceville sucks!”

The most memorable moment was when we wandered into a church (it was the only thing open on Sunday) and he pretended to be blind, suddenly exclaimed he could see again, and yelled a few “Hallelujahs” before we were dragged out. He claimed he didn’t realize it was a Presbyterian church, that they should have marked the church more prominently, and he was considering suing them. This apparently distracted them from noticing the collection plate shoved under his shirt.

May - My bid for unemployment made a bizarre U-turn. The person who was supposed to replace me, quit. Since I didn’t have any jobs lined up at the time, I agreed to extend my last day for two weeks. They found someone else but he couldn’t start until the end of April, so again I agreed to stay. The client was grateful, but I really annoyed the payroll department. By that point I had a couple of good offers in the pipeline, so I wasn’t going to extend again. Then, quite unexpectedly, the client quit! That is, the guy who was leading the client team gave notice. His boss approached me and asked if I wanted the position.

This put me in quite a quandary because, for the six years I’d been consulting, the one thing you never did was go over to the client. I struggled with this for a week, telling myself that I hadn’t approached them, that I was going to quit anyway, etc. Dawn, ever the pragmatist, kept saying “It’s close to home, you don’t have to travel, it’s more money, you like the people, don’t be a schmo, etc.” My last day was on a Wednesday; I started my new job on Thursday--except I was sitting in the same chair at the same office on the same team doing the same thing. The only way I could think to demarcate the “old” Gregg from the “new” Gregg was to shave off my beard. Nobody noticed.

Dawn finished school, marking an end to her 12-year bachelor's degree. She'd been taking five classes while working full-time in a feverish attempt to graduate before her school lost its accreditation. She has been augmenting these classes with College-Level Exam Program (CLEP) tests, which her school accepts in lieu of actual courses. With almost no studying, she achieved passing scores in business management and social sciences. Unfortunately, she missed the history test by 2 points, so she has enrolled in a televideo course with the community college.

Dawn, having had one interview, apparently ran out of steam and stopped her job search. I’ve been trying to encourage her to go independent, and this seemed like an ideal opportunity. She just fixed me with that look--you know, clenched eyes, drawn mouth, furrowed brow--and said, “You have zero job security and zero benefits, and you want me to do the same?” “Yeah,” I said, then ran from the room before her fire-breath could overtake me.

I also visited my aunt and uncle in their new house. I still can't believe they gave a 74-year-old man a 30-year mortgage. He now lives in Carl, a place straight out of the '30s, and now agrees that Lawrenceville really did suck.

June - Dawn had a very important paper due in her history class, which was her final class required to receive her bachelor's degree. Now I won't say she procrastinated--in fact, she informed me in April that I would be writing this paper--but after a two-month standoff, I finally sat down to write the paper two days before it was due. The task was to compare and contrast viewpoints from two different history books, but instead I decided to do what I do best--lambaste both books. This was not dissimilar to the last paper Dawn asked me to write--a review of a musical performance conducted by one of her teachers. I think he was in tears by the end of the review. I don't know what grade this paper will get, but Dawn has already cancelled her graduation plans.

July - We lost our iguana this month. Literally. We reconstructed the crime scene but all we could find was one of the window screens was loose, where we assume she made her egress. We combed the neighborhood, put up fliers, looked high and low (mostly high), but to no avail. It was a quiet separation, because we are sure she will return.

Meanwhile, we had a roof guy, a gutter guy, a spa guy, a door guy, and a plaster guy all come out during the same month. Four years ago, we talked about replacing the roof, two years ago we needed to replace the roof, last year we resolved to replace the roof, and this year we finally had enough money saved to either go to Europe, or replace the roof. Luckily, there was a new shingle on the market that Dawn liked which was much cheaper than the faux wood shake we were going to use, so we had some extra money to play around the house. I found a used hot tub in the Penny Saver for under a grand (the cheapest new spa I'd found was $5,200!) which we bought immediately--even though we didn't have any place to put it at the time. (Let's just say that Dawn had to park her truck on the street for a month, and I was limping for about three days.) After the roof was done, it took the spa guy just three days to accomplish what I'd been waiting four and a half years for.

If you'll remember from Christmas '97, we bought a new set of sliding french doors to replace the crumbling french doors leading out to the spa, but decided not to install them until after the spa was in--which was before I could conceive it would take me four and a half years to get my hot tub. Also, if you'll remember from Christmas '98, we had replaced two doors with windows, but decided not to repair the plaster until the spa was in--which was also before I could conceive it would take me four and a half years to get my hot tub. Hence, the door guy and the plaster guy. The plaster guy ran the stucco right around the rim of the hot tub so you would never know it was just installed. (At least not until I whipped out the photo album.)

August -- Ever paint french doors? We painted two sets. The second set was an accident--we decided to replace one small piece of molding around the doors to the back deck, not realizing that to match the paint to the door, we'd have to repaint the entire door.

We also fixed the deck. When we bought the house, there was a huge pine tree growing through the deck, which was really cool. Unfortunately, the tree died and we had to cut it down, leaving a huge hole in our deck, which was not cool. After years of covering it up with boards, planters, chairs, and once just leaving it open with a roll of toilet paper beside it (that did *not* go over well), we finally replaced the boards. Which, of course, meant we had to paint the new boards, which meant we had to paint the rest of the deck to match, which meant that all the boards warped before we could nail them down. So with chisels, clamps, hammers, and some hefty brawn provided by yours truly, we straigtened the boards and screwed them in place. Let me tell you, Dawn's pretty scary with an electric screwdriver. I have the pictures to prove it.

We also had to paint the new deck around the spa, plus build some lattice to go around the bottom of the deck. Ever paint lattice? It's less fun than painting french doors. We got to try out our new table saw that we bought at a garage sale, which worked pretty well until we hit a staple in the lattice and it shot a glob of molten steel at warp 6 towards me. Dawn had to finish the job by herself; I was cowering in the corner.

We laid bricks along the entire west side of the house, which was also an accident. One of Dawn's co-workers announced he'd taken down a brick wall and was trying to get rid of 600 used bricks. (After Dawn had agreed to take them, he decided to charge us, but that's another story.) It took three trips, four weekends, and over 1,000 bricks to cover the area, but at least now, instead of completely neglecting the side of the house we never see, now we have to sweep it once a week.

And then we were done. We'd spent over $17,000. Dawn got a new roof, a new set of doors, a new deck, a ventilating skylight, four new dining room chairs, the back deck was fixed, the stucco was repaired, the side yard was paved, and the carpets were cleaned. But the only important thing to note was I GOT MY $%*^&(! HOT TUB!!!

September -- Amazingly, Dawn did graduate. But more amazingly, her mom came to visit, exactly as she'd promised twelve years ago when Dawn started taking classes. It was unfortunate that she couldn't meet Alex. We also had a heat spell that week, so I think Dawn's mom (who we were always bragging to about the weather and our iguana) was starting to wonder about us. We took her to the Huntington Library, the South Bay Botanical Gardens, the beach, and Disneyland. She was quite impressed with our freeway system.

Two days after Dawn's mom left, we got a call from our neighbor two doors down. He was having some trees cut back, and the workers found an iguana in the jacaranda--so they moved it to the magnolia tree and continued working. Fortunately they told him about it when he came home, and were able to go back up and capture her again. By the time I got there, Alex was in a pretty foul mood, but she quickly calmed down. The vet gave her a clean bill of health and so, after her two and half month adventure, she is back home, safe and sound. (Yes, we do know how lucky we are, thankyouverymuch.) We immediately called Dawn's mom to tell her the good news, but she didn't sound very excited. She suggested we get professional help.

October -- Several years ago, I'd salvaged an old 386 computer and given it to my uncle, assuming he’d never become computer literate enough to use it. He promptly started barraging us with e-mails. Unfortunately, Irving (as he named the computer) started crashing on a regular basis. When I visited, Irving behaved just fine, which led to speculation about Munchausen by proxy being applied to a computer, but in the end we decided to throw out the baby with the bath water, and start again. Rather than send him a new computer, I sent him my old computer, and got a new one. (Of course he doesn't know this yet…)

I also got DSL with the new computer. Which is to say, for six weeks the phone company told me I had DSL, but the computer just sat there like a stump. The first time I called the help desk I was put on hold for thirty minutes, then the tech told me to turn the computer off for five minutes and try again, and then hung up on me. When I called back, I got a much more helpful tech who asked me to verify the green light was on, and then transferred me to the advanced support department. In the first two days I spent 15 hours on the phone, 13 on hold, before Dawn announced she was taking over. I don’t know what she said to them, but she had a tech at our house that day! Unfortunately, they neglected to tell us they would have a tech out that day, so we found a note on our door that since we weren’t home, the problem must be resolved and he was going to close the case. After two more visits and six weeks of constant phone calls, Dawn finally got it working. This was quite a feat—of the other two people we know of that got DSL, one took three months and the other took six months! This explains the service manager’s comment, when Dawn asked about a refund, that he couldn’t do that because we “should have expected it to take two months to get it working.”

November - We went to New Orleans for Dawn's brother's wedding. We got the invitation in June, then didn't hear from them again until we arrived. He recommended a travel agent so I called her and, once I confirmed that she didn't know what she was talking about, I went on-line and researched the airlines, hotels, restaurants, car rentals, and city info on my own. Then, just to be polite, I had her make the reservations. Imagine my surprise, then, to find later (on my credit card bill) that she had charged me $40 for the "service"!

It rained all week, the wedding was a disaster, and because I was with three women we spent half our time shopping, but one thing salvaged this vacation: Preservation Hall. This place looked like a burned-out bomb shelter, but the music was just amazing, and at $5 for all the jazz and blues you could listen to, it couldn’t be beat. Dawn and I closed it down our last night, even snagging a couple of seats on the two small benches in the otherwise SRO crowd.

December – My great-uncle passed away. He was 90 years old and still had full use of his faculties, but he'd survived his wife by 12 years, had no children, and was a very lonely man. I keep thinking that there's nothing that prevents me from ending up in the same situation. But I'm still young; I'll worry about it in 40 years, when it's too late to do anything about it.

It also got me to thinking about my family. My family has never been close and, hopefully, never will be. (As George Burns said, happiness is a loving, close-knit family in another city.) But to get them together would be…disastrous. I think the government even keeps tabs on such things. Still, the thought kept rolling in my head, what if they were together but could get away from each other? Thus, I announced to Dawn that I was going to take my family on a cruise.

When she was revived, Dawn immediately nixed the idea on the grounds of cost, logistics, and common sense. I argued that a 3-day cruise wasn’t that expensive, and wasn’t that long. But, Dawn said, what about your uncle who won’t fly? I countered that Miama wasn’t that far from Atlanta and, both of us being quite ignorant of geography, she finally agreed. Unfortunately, a quick trip to the on-line atlas showed Miami was about 14 hours from Atlanta. Dawn nixed the idea again.

Some random musings at Yahoo! turned up a cruise that sailed out of South Carolina twice a year, when it was repositioning itself between New York and Miami. That was only a six-hour drive, so I was back in business. The spring sailing was already sold out, but I was able to book five cabins in October. I neglected to tell Dawn that it was a five-night cruise, however. I’m hoping she won’t read this.