The Not-So-Deep South
December 2006 eh,
2007
Greetings
fans and fiends friends and of the Annual
Christmas Letter of the Miller-Younkin clan,
As has become a tradition around here, this is your
favorite canine writer of Christmas letters, Duchess, once again bringing you
up to date on this past year’s family highlights. But before we get into the usual trite and
trivial news about what everyone else was up to this past year, I will cut to
the chase (a favorite canine pastime if you weren’t aware) and use this very
epistle to make a most important announcement.
You can brag to your friends that you were among the privileged few to
hear it first. You may want to be
sitting down or have a few drinks before reading further. Okay, comfy, snockered,
whatever? (Insert drum roll here.)
I am running for President of the
I’ll give you a few moments to pause and allow this
momentous news to sink in.
Paws…paws…paws…sink…sink…sink…
Yes, indeed, yours truly, the Duchess of the
Confederacy, the canine par excellence, the Webmistress
wunderhunden has tossed her bone (so to speak) into
the race for the Out House—eh, White House.
But you are no doubt thinking, can a dog run for president? Look it up.
Nothing in the U.S. Constitution stipulates human, and when you consider
what dogs…eh, scum most politicians
are, you are no doubt already looking favorably on my candidacy since dogs are
indeed man’s best friend, whereas diamonds are a girl’s best friend but
diamonds cannot hold public office, although if they could they would no doubt
do a lot better job than most of that litter box filler from the Demopublican party.
As to my platform, everything that I do will be for
the sake of the children—and puppies—that goes without saying. Hmmm, I just said it, so if it goes without
saying why did I—never mind. As such my
campaign slogan is, “It takes a newspaper to raise a puppy.” First off I will improve the country by
throwing out all the undesirables and riff-raff—that is, cats, the United Nations
(lock, stock and barrel--talk about a cesspool of cess),
anyone with more than ten body piercings, cats, gangsta rap artists (why do they call them artists?), cats,
Congress (except Ron Paul), the present administration and now that I think about
it, members of any past administration, cats, Julia Roberts, Paris Hilton,
Michael Savage and Michael Moore for starters.
In order to improve education I will abolish all university education
departments, the Department of Education, the National Education Association
and public schools. I will abolish the
federal income tax except for IRS employees and Congress. I will also outlaw the politically correct
use of the terms diversity, gender, herstory, misguided
criminal, deferred success, undocumented worker, and climate change. Any federal agency created since 1912 will be
replaced by the SPCA. The federal government
will be moved to
Okay, time to move on to less interesting topics. Devon finished up her high school years on a
roll with robotics, Skills USA, and awards, recognitions and achievements too
numerous to mention. Well, I could have
listed them if I hadn’t taken up so much space on my campaign, but I
digress. In June she graduated not once
but twice, delivered the student speech at the
Derek is still a Hokie (and
I still have no idea what that is) and is going into his last semester at VA
Tech. Yeah! He now has his own website at derekmillerdesign.com where you can
view some of his theatre work and photography.
He continues to hone his Texas Hold’um and lighting
and stage design skills, and is still receiving letters of congratulations from
the VA Tech engineering department for being on the dean’s list even though he
hasn’t taken an engineering course in two years which in turn tells you
something about how much the engineering department has its act together. In March, Derek and Jean along with friends
Debra and Hilary Beck were off to Las Vegas to celebrate Derek’s 21st
birthday. How’s that for a celebration? (As usual pictures on website.) Besides working on several stage productions
at Tech, over the summer Derek worked the Spoletto
Festival in Charleston, SC (some sort of potato celebration as far as I can
make out) and then was off to Princeton to work lighting for the New Jersey Opera. Now back at school, course work is constantly
being interrupted as he is shuttled off to places like
Jean continues to mold little minds at the Second
Baptist Creative Learning Center and will probably continue to do so, at least
until the governor decides to destroy preschool learning by getting the State
Department of Education involved. She’s also
been very busy maintaining her sister Donna’s genealogy legacy although the
amount of material that Donna left behind probably precludes any one person
from ever getting it all organized.
In July, Devon, Jean and Jim left me home
alone—well, in the kennel to be more precise, they left the cats home alone—and
attended the Younkin family reunion in Somerset, PA, and then, after some
visits in Jim’s old homestead in Harrisburg, met Derek in Lancaster for the
World Boardgaming Championships which is starting to
look like a new family tradition.
At the end of July, Jim had an epiphany (thank you
Jim’s lapse in having me update the website (see
above) gave me time to finally get past chapter 6 of A Canine’s Guide to Website Design.
Now that I’m back to updating it, I’m bumping it up a notch although it
hasn’t been easy bringing the AWIT (Assistant Webmaster In Training) Pete up to
speed. Want a challenge? Try explaining Cascading Style Sheets to a cat!
As I'm running out of both dog treats and
space I guess it’s time to wish you and yours the very best Christmas ever and
a wonderful new year, and to once again leave you with that most important bit
of canine wisdom: 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
e-mail: devonrex@cavtel.net web site: www.dracorex.com (“Talk to the paw!”)