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Okay, okay!
Enough is enough. I, Duchess, FM
(Family Mutt) and NOHP (Number One Household Pet) am taking over this Christmas
epistle. Being busy of late with my
duties as Webmistress of the Duchess-Younkin-Miller (DYM) family website (www.dracorex.com for those of you who
don’t already know), I found myself with little free time to draft this year’s
Christmas letter, so I made the now OBVIOUS mistake of turning that task over
to the Assistant Webmaster in Training (AWIT) Petronius (aka Pete). Well, I believe the above pitiful result
speaks for itself. Obviously the AWIT
needs a lot more TRAINING. Then again,
considering that the AWIT is a cat, what do you expect. (Hey, have you ever noticed how acronyms
seem to be popping up everywhere in our society?) But I digress. Let’s
start this letter over from the beginning.
The Not-So-Deep South
December 2005
Merry
Christmas and a Happy New Year to Family and Friends of the Miller-Younkin
clan,
The first and most important news from the DYM
household is…(drum roll)…as I mentioned above, the creation of a DYM
website—the Triangle Press. Make sure
you use the .com suffix when connecting.
www.dracorex..net is some other turkey’s
website. At first we were going to use
Triangle Press as the website comain name but it turns out that was already
taken by 1) a publisher of Christian books for chilcren and 2) a gay site (and
I con’t mean gay as in “Now we con our gay
apparel.”) Anyway, the most exciting
thing about the site is that it contains an archive of all of my previous
Christmas letters (save the very first), thus allowing one untolc hours of joy
and intellectual fulfillment in rereacing my increcible prose from past years. Hmmm…I’ve succenly noticec that everytime I
type the letter c, I get the letter c
insteac. Now that I think about it, I
cicn’t have a problem until I got back from taking a break to watch a Lassie
rerun on TV. (Yeah, I know that Lassie
is a boy cog. Why co you think I watch
it?) One moment please. I smell a RAT
here, and the rat is spelled CAT.
Testing, testing, testing. DDDDDD. dddddd. Okay,
problem solved. On to the newsy part of the letter, starting with the most
famous and talented member of the family---ME.
I’ve had an eventful year patrolling the yard,
chasing squirrels and voles, barking at people, learning HTML (Hyper Text
Mangling Lunacy), and protecting the house from politicians, liberals, trial
lawyers, timeshare salespeople, and other low-life scum who try to get their
measly paws on your hard earned wealth (including dog biscuits which is my
normal form of reimbursement for services rendered) and then, unlike honest
criminals, attempt to convince you that it’s for your own good. I also perfected my Houdini act of getting
out of the fenced backyard (yes, dogs can climb fences just as good as
cats). Finally Jean and Jim threw in
the towel (figuratively speaking) and built me a brand new six foot high,
chain-link fenced enclosure in which I reside when no one else (excepting the
cats) is at home. It’s for my own good was their lame
excuse. (See above comment about
politicians, etc.)
All is well here except that the family is still
undergoing Lord of the Rings (LOTR) Withdrawal Syndrome this holiday season
just as they did last year, although rumor has it that a new Peter Jackson
(maker of LOTR) movie about some giant hairy animal is about to be
released. No doubt the animal is a very
large DOG.
Derek is still a Hokie, and I still have no idea
what that is—and I'm not sure Hokies do either. He just says it’s better than being a Wahoo, which certainly
explains a lot. Anyway, he’s in his
second year studying Theatre (notice I use the more prestigious English
spelling) and Engineering (notice I again use the more prestigious English
spelling which just happens to be identical to the American spelling) at Hokie
High, also know as VA Tech, also known as VPI, also known as Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University, which no matter how you scramble or
abbreviate it doesn’t give you Hokie.
While home over Thanksgiving, Derek was busy building a model of a stage
design for Antigone. (For the benefit of the more uncultured readers out there,
that’s the name of an ancient Greek play and not a diva.) He's displayed a talent for drawing in his
Costume Design class that no one in the family suspected he had. Last February Derek joined Jim in
Charlottesville (home of the not-so-fighting Wahoos) for a boardgaming
convention (STW, that is, “see the website”) where Derek honed his Texas
Hold’em skills while Jim got some sleep.
Then in August they attended the World Boardgaming Championships (WBC)
in Lancaster where Derek scooped up the 2nd Place Plague….oops,
Plaque (those g’s and q’s can be tricky) for Hannibal (STW). Derek went to the BA (Big Apple) in June
with a couple of friends to see the Broadway show Wicked, and the next
thing you know he was back in NYC again with neighbors Hilary and Debra for a
couple of more shows.
Devon’s year was busy as usual throwing people
around in Judo, attending two different high schools at the same time, and
starting a robotics club at one of her high schools (just when Jim and Jean
thought they had seen the last of mechanical monsters). The team’s robot, Little Skeeter, reeked
havoc at the FIRST (hey, another acronym, what a surprise) Regional
Competition. Being the only
bottom-feeder in the competition (don’t ask), they were the rookie team to
beat. For the summer Devon was off to
Mexico with her friend Liza and her family (STW). Fortunately, Montezuma didn’t have his revenge on this trip. Devon is also working Cotillion, swing
dancing, dating (STW), and (gasp, choke) driving! She continues to pursue a technical education with CAD (hmm,
maybe a better acronym would have been CAT—Computer Aided Technology) and
electronics. To relax, she pulls out
her bow and puts a few cloth-yard shafts through some targets—pesky varmints,
those targets. That’s probably one
reason the cats stay indoors.
In May (yeah, I know the chronology is all messed
up, but being a dog, I don’t dwell on the past) the family met Aunt Ginny Lee
and cousin Shannon at the Virginia Renaissance Faire which, based on post Faire
reports, was nothing to brag about. It
certainly didn’t compete with Mexico.
In October Jean finally got a weekend off with a trip to Virginia Beach
(okay, summer would have probably been a better time, but sometime one has to
take what one is offered) with some friends, and Devon and Jim attended the
Celtic Festival to view some…Celts.
Devon just finished mentoring a FIRST Lego League (FLL) team which is
kind of like little league robotics.
Jean is still molding young preschool minds at the Creative Learning Center in an attempt to save them before the government education system attempts to turn them to mush, and Jim is still working with eunuchs—er, correction, UNIX at Dominion (formerly Virginia Power, formerly VEPCO) molding young pre-fission nuclei for generating power.
So once again, as space grows short and I'm out of
dog food, may we wish you and yours all the best of Christmases and a wonderful
new year, and once again leave you with that important bit of wisdom which I'm
sure many of you have forgotten from last year's Christmas epistle: cats
is a four-letter word, but dog is
only three.
P.S. As a reminder to those of you who would
probably rather not be reminded, here are our vital sadistics, er, statistics:
Address: 204 Tamarack Road, Richmond, VA 23229 Phone:
804-741-9973
e-mail: devonrex@cavtel.net (New email address!) web site: www.dracorex.com