In praise of the Christmas letter

Growing up, my family received a few Christmas letters. One family's in particular stands out. It went something like this:

This year started off with a bang. The family rang in the new year at Time Square. I am pretty sure Dick Clark winked at Kitty. In the spring, Katherine was inducted into the National Honor Society while Nathan placed first in the science fair. Both kids kept busy studying, volunteering, and staying active in sports. The summer brought a fun trip to the beach, although Red sure ended up just like his name with that hot sun! This fall Katherine was a beautiful homecoming queen and best of all, she found out she got accepted to Harvard! She is hoping she can continue to play volleyball there while she studies science. For now Nathan is just going to have to settle for being at the top of his eight grade class and fighting off the girls. Kitty and Red have stayed busy as well, with Red getting another promotion at work, and Kitty driving the kids everywhere, delivering meals to the elderly, and continuing to make her gourmet dinners. What a great year we had this year. We hope yours was good too. Merry Christmas!

Honestly, I wanted to hurl when I read their letters (which I exaggerated just a little). Years later, I have no idea where that family is, though I suspect they are not as perfect as their letters would suggest. But their letters made me resent getting letters for years. Even if the letters were not "look-how-great-my-life-is" accounts, I often felt as if I had accomplished nothing meaningful that year. And, on the other side of the coin, I would sometimes get letters from people who recounted everything good and bad. When you have to read about someone dying or in the hospital, that kind of sucks the jolly right out of the season.

But lately I feel different. I want the Christmas letters. I don't care how much people brag. It is just nice to know what is going on in others' lives. After all, the Christmas card or letter is the only remaining connection I have with some people. If I don't hear about their trials and tribulations, I won't know that Sally had another baby or that Tom's kid had to have chemo. I just can't (or won't) keep in touch with everyone throughout the year. Besides, don't you miss letters in general? I could write an entire post on that (and probably will some day).

I don't have much to report about this year, certainly nothing that would fill a letter. Anything I wanted to share I did it right here (since I refuse to get on Facebook, at least for the time being, this is all my friends are getting). So I will send out my Christmas cards that I am picking up at WalMart today (pray for me, please; I hate that place), and I will write little if anything inside the card other than our names. But know that I truly welcome your Christmas letter and I look forward to seeing pictures of your kids. I really do.

Let's build something together!

That is one of my favorite slogan's (Or is that a tagline? Over a year removed from a design firm, and I can no longer remember). It belongs to Lowe's, although I am more of a Home Depot gal. But suffice it to say if someone handed me a $5,000 gift card to Home Depot (or Lowe's), I would be ecstatic. If I had $10,000 to spend, you could hear my shouts of joy from miles away. The things I could do with that money. Well, the things I could have Brian do with that money anyway. I love walking around Home Depot and admiring the fancy bathroom sinks and tubs. I look at the lighting and think about where I would put each fixture. I touch textured and colorful tiles and wistfully look at the fancy kitchen cabinets. I admire the various carpet styles and blinds. I look at the fancy front-loading washer and wonder what it must be like to have a steam dryer. I even look longingly at the vacuum cleaners because I can no longer buy a replacement filter for my eight year old mo...

Summer in review

This summer I made it a point to try to take at least one pic of Jordan whenever we went somewhere, which most often was a park. I wanted to capture all the great, fun things we did this summer, knowing that it was probably going to be my last summer not working for quite some time. So here goes. I have expressed my love of Frick Park, particularly Blue Slide Park, in other posts ; it really is one of our favorites. And this summer marked the first one I did not feel the need to follow J around like a little puppy dog. I actually let her run around and explore, though, admittedly, I would panic if more than three minutes went by and I had not seen her. In the pics above, J is at the end of the blue slide, and then hanging several feet above concrete (which scared the crap out of me). We also visited another section of Frick Park, the area on the corner of Braddock and Forbes, a few times. There is not as much to do as Blue Slide, but we go there to mix things up a bit. In the p...

If only I had taken pictures of my detoured drive

When I moved to the Burgh just over 14 years ago, I had a lot of anxiety about getting from "here" to "there." I found the city, which is triangular, and even some of the suburbs quite confusing. On top of that, a lot of the signs were of little help. Clearly they were put up by either natives who had no need for directions or people with a sick sense of humor who thought it would be funny to put signs in random places, leaving off important roads. At some point, I got over that fear of driving to a new building downtown. I don't recall when it happened, but eventually I just figured most of the city out; and when I had to head to a new place, I just drove around, no longer with a feeling of dread, knowing I would eventually get there. But on Sunday morning, that awful, long-ago feeling returned, thanks to the closure of the outbound Fort Pitt Tunnels. I had to pick my mother up from the airport, so there was no avoiding it. (For some reason, my family think...

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