Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to You and Yours

I hope you had a wonderful 2017! It was a year of change and upheaval for me. For one thing, I started 2017 in a different office. I’m proud to say, it only took until June for me to stop going to the old one. I’ve been on the same end of the building for more than twenty years, so moving was one way get me to clean out my desk. On the downside, my new office is farther from my company’s breakroom, but that hasn’t kept me from going there.

I practically got a new house and a new car in 2017 too. Actually, what I got was a new roof, some new siding and $8000 worth of car repairs after a doozey of a hail storm in August. People who know we have a two-car garage wonder why my car was damaged. I’ll tell you why. Because it wasn’t in the garage.

When I heard the storm warning on the radio, I raced home, pulled up to my garage, hit the remote and watched the door open to reveal that someone else was parked in my spot—someone I’m married to. His half of the garage was taken up by a building project he’d been working on for months, so there was no point in asking if he could wrap it up and move it out before the storm hit.

I was barely recovered from that when I heard the news about the breach at Equifax, the credit reporting agency. I know this is the season of goodwill, but all I want for Christmas is for Equifax management and the hackers who stole our data from them to go to jail and share a cell.

My cellphone died this year. The good news is, all it took was a factory reset to revive it. The bad news is, the factory reset locked it. In other words, for several days, my phone thought I was a thief trying to break into it. This is the world we live in. Hackers break into giant corporations and steal our financial data, but we can’t get into our own devices.

Fortunately, I was able to unlock it after an hour and a half talking on my landline to an Apple representative. Unfortunately, until I got everything reloaded, my cellphone couldn’t do a thing except make and receive phone calls. And yes, I realize there was a time that would have been enough.

I might be the only person in history to get braces and bifocals in the same year. I can still manage without glasses most of the time, but they do come in handy now and then. You might think this is better than having to wear them all the time, but it just means I spend more time looking for my glasses than I do wearing them.

There is no misplacing braces, though at times I wish I could. At my age, the best thing I can say about having braces is that it beats wearing dentures. When you have braces, you’re compelled to make frequent visits to the orthodontist for adjustments and I need adjusting as much as the next person.  But I feel out of place in the kid-friendly waiting room. I swear they’re putting braces on baby teeth these days. I’m probably exaggerating, but I bet my bicuspids I’m the only one there having hot flashes.

Wishing you a merry Christmas and a wonderful new year. I’m just happy I got this holiday letter done before Valentine’s Day. Procrastination can be a problem for me. I’m still kicking myself for not writing a column about the Great American Eclipse. There won’t be another total solar eclipse visible from North America until 2024, so I should have time to get one done by then.

(Dorothy Rosby is the author of the humor book, I Didn’t Know You Could Make Birthday Cake from Scratch: Parenting Blunders from Cradle to Empty Nest. Contact drosby@rushmore.com.)