2003 IN DRUMMOND-LAND
Editor's note: I wrote this after hearing from several folks after we sent out our 2003 Christmas card (really nice, professionally done photograph, but no letter) that they were disappointed that we didn't send out a Christmas letter. I figured that I had been blogging for a couple of years (my work blog is here) and could go around Anne Marie's censorship with a Christmas blog. Didn't really work out, but when we went to Colorado in the spring, it started to look like a viable option for me. Here's what I did in the first go-round, filling in for the 2003 letter that never was:
So, if you felt disappointed that there was no Christmas letter this year, I feel for you. Really, I do. Every year, it's a battle of the wills between Anne Marie and me about doing a Christmas letter. Anne Marie never wants to do one, and I always do. What usually happens is that I do one, Anne Marie cruelly criticizes what I write while providing virtually no actual positive recommendations on how to fix what I've done wrong ("it's too silly" or "make it more vague"), I re-write it going extremely in the other direction (entirely humorless or completely vague), then re-re-write it in a moderately modified fashion. Yelling, screaming, slamming doors, steaming . . . but it eventually goes out.
The basic dichotomy is (i) Christmas letters suck versus (ii) our Christmas letters are funny. Anne Marie is sensitive to the common wisdom that Christmas "brag" letters are the butt of jokes, and is disinclined to think that ours are any better. We receive tons of them, and believe me, they're all above average (in a Lake Wobegon sort of way). We do like to know what's up with friends and family, and maybe we just know a lot of erudite, clever, and witty folks. At any rate, I understand Anne Marie's point, but think that most of the letters we get aren't bad, and also think that ours are pretty good. We do get compliments on them, and while I'd love to let that go to my head, Anne Marie won't let me.
So what happened this year? Another dichotomy: I really like to write and think I'm pretty witty (I know, I'm only half that), but I'm also a deeply, truly, committedly lazy person. Given the opportunity to do something or not do something, I'll gladly postpone making a decision if I can. That's pretty much what happened to our 2003 Christmas letter: the lethargy ate it. It just got easier to not write it than to write it.
But then the questions rolled in. Folks e-mailed expressing their disappointment that there was no letter (even though there was a pretty nice picture). Mobs gathered outside our house with pitchforks and torches, chanting over bullhorns, demanding their Christmas letter. And I began to feel guilty.
Not really, of course. But I did miss writing the letter, because in fact 2003 was a pretty important year for the Dallas Drummonds. It would have been pretty hard to compress the impact of the events of the year into a letter, so this actually is a better medium for the message. And, I don't feel any qualms about letting Anne Marie edit it, either. Ah, freedom!
Not really that, either. I'm sure I'll incorporate any suggestions Anne Marie has (assuming I let her read this). But enough of this behind the scenes navel-gazing (this has been like watching sausage getting made: more inside information than you really want); let's get on with it, shall we?
Trips: We didn't do a family ski trip, since it was an odd-numbered year (we went to Tahoe in 2000 and Ruidoso in 2002, and we're going to Beaver Creek in 2004), but I did go to Ruidoso with brother Greg and a work buddy of his in early March. I was giving a speech in Houston and flew into Lubbock. Greg drove from Houston to Dallas, took my LandRover and drove it to Lubbock where he met me at the plane, and we drove on into New Mexico. Ruidoso is a pretty little town, but between Lubbock and there it's flat as week-old soda and just damn ugly. There are long, long stretches with nothing at all to break it up but the town of Roswell. I drove for 20 minutes at 100 mph and didn't pass a car in either direction.
For spring break, Gina and Ellen had back-to-back weeks off, so it wasn't conducive to a trip. We did take the in-between weekend and made an adventure out of it by travelling all the way to . . . Ft. Worth. We took a horse-drawn carriage ride around downtown Ft. Worth, saw the Stockyards, went to the Children's Museum, and stayed in a hotel. It was fun in a really low-impact sort of way.
Other trips we took during 2003: AM went to San Francisco in April to see her sister's new baby, Connor John Carone. That's Roey's first (and so far, only) kid. In late April, AM and I went to Philadelphia for AM's cousin Kate O'Brien's wedding. In June, we went to San Antonio to see our friends Julie and Karl Rivas and their two boys Justin and Paul; we went to sea world in and did some rafting, which resulted in my getting interested in kayaking. For the first summer since we've been married, we did not go to New York. Scheduling just didn't work out. So if you can't get to New York, what do you do? Go to the next best place: Florida (state motto: "Just like New York, only hotter"). We went to Naples, which was actually a lot of fun. It was definitely the off season, but it wasn't like the place was empty. I'd hate to be there in the high season.
Other stuff that happened in 2003: we went to lots of 40th birthday parties, I had a fair amount of work-related travel, Gina played multiple sports (soccer, volleyball and basketball), and Ellen did Indian Princesses with me. Other big news on Ellen: she started a new school in the fall, Oak Hill Academy, which is particularly focused on kids with learning differences (new euphemism for learning difficulties). The school really doesn't take kids with her diagnosis (pervasive developmental disorder, or PDD), but her case is so mild that she is able to go there. It has been a wonderful experience for her, and she's really a different kid than she was a year ago. She's still far behind and still pretty odd, but she's a lot more personable.
Mary is a handful. She thinks she's 10, and sure keeps AM busy.
One last point of interest from 2003: unfortunately, my mom's oldest sister Audrey Duckers died in the late summer, and I went to Kansas City for the funeral. I reconnected with some of the McHale family, including my cousin Pat Duckers' wife Brenda, who is the official McHale family historian. She sent me a notebook of her collected information on the McHale family, going back several generations into the old sod of Ireland. Very interesting stuff.
Editor's note: I wrote this after hearing from several folks after we sent out our 2003 Christmas card (really nice, professionally done photograph, but no letter) that they were disappointed that we didn't send out a Christmas letter. I figured that I had been blogging for a couple of years (my work blog is here) and could go around Anne Marie's censorship with a Christmas blog. Didn't really work out, but when we went to Colorado in the spring, it started to look like a viable option for me. Here's what I did in the first go-round, filling in for the 2003 letter that never was:
So, if you felt disappointed that there was no Christmas letter this year, I feel for you. Really, I do. Every year, it's a battle of the wills between Anne Marie and me about doing a Christmas letter. Anne Marie never wants to do one, and I always do. What usually happens is that I do one, Anne Marie cruelly criticizes what I write while providing virtually no actual positive recommendations on how to fix what I've done wrong ("it's too silly" or "make it more vague"), I re-write it going extremely in the other direction (entirely humorless or completely vague), then re-re-write it in a moderately modified fashion. Yelling, screaming, slamming doors, steaming . . . but it eventually goes out.
The basic dichotomy is (i) Christmas letters suck versus (ii) our Christmas letters are funny. Anne Marie is sensitive to the common wisdom that Christmas "brag" letters are the butt of jokes, and is disinclined to think that ours are any better. We receive tons of them, and believe me, they're all above average (in a Lake Wobegon sort of way). We do like to know what's up with friends and family, and maybe we just know a lot of erudite, clever, and witty folks. At any rate, I understand Anne Marie's point, but think that most of the letters we get aren't bad, and also think that ours are pretty good. We do get compliments on them, and while I'd love to let that go to my head, Anne Marie won't let me.
So what happened this year? Another dichotomy: I really like to write and think I'm pretty witty (I know, I'm only half that), but I'm also a deeply, truly, committedly lazy person. Given the opportunity to do something or not do something, I'll gladly postpone making a decision if I can. That's pretty much what happened to our 2003 Christmas letter: the lethargy ate it. It just got easier to not write it than to write it.
But then the questions rolled in. Folks e-mailed expressing their disappointment that there was no letter (even though there was a pretty nice picture). Mobs gathered outside our house with pitchforks and torches, chanting over bullhorns, demanding their Christmas letter. And I began to feel guilty.
Not really, of course. But I did miss writing the letter, because in fact 2003 was a pretty important year for the Dallas Drummonds. It would have been pretty hard to compress the impact of the events of the year into a letter, so this actually is a better medium for the message. And, I don't feel any qualms about letting Anne Marie edit it, either. Ah, freedom!
Not really that, either. I'm sure I'll incorporate any suggestions Anne Marie has (assuming I let her read this). But enough of this behind the scenes navel-gazing (this has been like watching sausage getting made: more inside information than you really want); let's get on with it, shall we?
Trips: We didn't do a family ski trip, since it was an odd-numbered year (we went to Tahoe in 2000 and Ruidoso in 2002, and we're going to Beaver Creek in 2004), but I did go to Ruidoso with brother Greg and a work buddy of his in early March. I was giving a speech in Houston and flew into Lubbock. Greg drove from Houston to Dallas, took my LandRover and drove it to Lubbock where he met me at the plane, and we drove on into New Mexico. Ruidoso is a pretty little town, but between Lubbock and there it's flat as week-old soda and just damn ugly. There are long, long stretches with nothing at all to break it up but the town of Roswell. I drove for 20 minutes at 100 mph and didn't pass a car in either direction.
For spring break, Gina and Ellen had back-to-back weeks off, so it wasn't conducive to a trip. We did take the in-between weekend and made an adventure out of it by travelling all the way to . . . Ft. Worth. We took a horse-drawn carriage ride around downtown Ft. Worth, saw the Stockyards, went to the Children's Museum, and stayed in a hotel. It was fun in a really low-impact sort of way.
Other trips we took during 2003: AM went to San Francisco in April to see her sister's new baby, Connor John Carone. That's Roey's first (and so far, only) kid. In late April, AM and I went to Philadelphia for AM's cousin Kate O'Brien's wedding. In June, we went to San Antonio to see our friends Julie and Karl Rivas and their two boys Justin and Paul; we went to sea world in and did some rafting, which resulted in my getting interested in kayaking. For the first summer since we've been married, we did not go to New York. Scheduling just didn't work out. So if you can't get to New York, what do you do? Go to the next best place: Florida (state motto: "Just like New York, only hotter"). We went to Naples, which was actually a lot of fun. It was definitely the off season, but it wasn't like the place was empty. I'd hate to be there in the high season.
Other stuff that happened in 2003: we went to lots of 40th birthday parties, I had a fair amount of work-related travel, Gina played multiple sports (soccer, volleyball and basketball), and Ellen did Indian Princesses with me. Other big news on Ellen: she started a new school in the fall, Oak Hill Academy, which is particularly focused on kids with learning differences (new euphemism for learning difficulties). The school really doesn't take kids with her diagnosis (pervasive developmental disorder, or PDD), but her case is so mild that she is able to go there. It has been a wonderful experience for her, and she's really a different kid than she was a year ago. She's still far behind and still pretty odd, but she's a lot more personable.
Mary is a handful. She thinks she's 10, and sure keeps AM busy.
One last point of interest from 2003: unfortunately, my mom's oldest sister Audrey Duckers died in the late summer, and I went to Kansas City for the funeral. I reconnected with some of the McHale family, including my cousin Pat Duckers' wife Brenda, who is the official McHale family historian. She sent me a notebook of her collected information on the McHale family, going back several generations into the old sod of Ireland. Very interesting stuff.
posted by Jeff at
11:50 AM
