The
Not-So-Deep South
December 2004
Merry
Christmas and a Happy New Year to Family and Friends of the Miller-Younkin
clan,
I, Duchess, FM (Family Mutt), take the Model 2002 Canine Keyboard (is
it time to upgrade yet Jim? or maybe just upgrading Jim would be better) in paw
to type this year’s family Christmas epistle.
But before getting into the boring human news, I would first like to
address an item of a somewhat unfortunate nature. Poll results have shown that readers of this annual epistle have,
by a substantial margin, voiced a preference for more news about the human
members of the family rather than me!
However, since these responses were biased, seeing how they were all
from humans, we have thrown them out.
Furthermore, since the non-human readers of this epistle, all you dogs
and (gasp, choke, dare I say it) cats out there, typically can’t read, it's
unclear what was the point of conducting a poll in the first place. End of problem.
This epistle may be a little late this year due to
the Rossini Syndrome. You remember
Rossini? No! He was the Italian
composer who wrote that great Bugs Bunny opera, The Rabbit of Seville (not to
be confused with What’s Opera Doc by Wagner) and the theme song to the Lone
Ranger (a great oldie TV show which never had any cats). But I dogress. Anyway, Rossini, the patron saint of procrastination, was such a
notorious wait-until-the-last-minute kind of guy that the opera producers were
finally forced to lock him in a tower with only a plate of spaghetti and not
let him out until he finished the contracted opera. (True story, really!) So
here I sit with my Model 2002 Canine Keyboard, the computer, and a bowl of dry
dog food, locked in the utility room—well, need I say more. The Rossini Syndrome is also known as the
Student Term Paper Due Syndrome.
All is well here except that the family is
undergoing Lord of the Rings Withdrawal Syndrome this holiday season as there
is no new Lord of the Rings movie for the first time in three years. Also I haven’t seen much of Derek
lately. Something about going off to
college to study theatre and engineering and being a Hokie, which I believe is
some kind of disease.
2004 opened with the usual
everyone-scattering-everywhere frenzy with Jean still teaching at the Second Baptist
Creative Learning Center and attempting to convince the parents of her students
that “it really is too early to worry about your kid getting into Notre
Dame—besides you’re not even Catholic!”
Devon was off to art class, Zen Judo, Cotillion, babysitting, and, time
permitting, school. It was the start of
robot build season for Derek, during which he proposed marriage (fortunately it
was in a school one-act play), followed immediately by spring play rehearsals for
The Little Shop of Horrors where Derek actually stage managed from inside the
man-eating alien plant while devouring several of the actors. He wasn’t even
home for his birthday as he was cloistered with other members of his math
modeling (?) team calculating the probability of hitting home runs in various
ball parks. The day after the play cast
party, Derek was struck down by that debilitating disease, senioritis, but
somehow managed to drag his disease-ridden carcass not only to the Elizabethan
Rout, where for the nth year in a row he was again the Well Watcher (the well
was rumored to be poisoned as usual), as well (different kind of well) as the
Senior Prom (where Jean managed to recoup all the prom expenses by dealing
Blackjack at the all night post Prom party) and to graduation.
Jim continues to be employed (notice
I didn’t say ‘work’) as a nukie (short for nuclear engineer), as well as
continuing to write the great American novel on interstellar warfare.
Somehow Derek managed to work campus
visits into the busy spring schedule, along with the Regional Robotics
Competition where this year’s special guest was the Black Plague, many of the
contestants literally throwing up, Derek excepted. On the other front, Devon again took home an award from the
Virginia Junior Academy of Science competition. Her experiment involved estimating the mass of extinct species
such as the Dodo and Pee Wee Herman.
(Whatever happened to Pee Wee?
My theory is he mutated into Sponge Bob Square Pants.) Devon also got her driver learner’s permit,
and continued to fine tune her martial arts and archery skills. That may help explain why we’ve had no
visits from you northern kin of late.
It was a relaxing summer for all but Derek who acted in the play The Annals of 1908, where his role was that of the man who invented World War I (I'm beginning to understand why we’ve had complaints in the past about these epistles being hard to follow) and worked construction (really!). Devon took driver's ed, worked at the Creative Learning Center as the Enforcer of Discipline (those martial arts skills can come in handy), tried to housebreak Jellybean’s replacements, Petronius and Pixel, and went to Busch Gardens with cousins Jennifer and Logan (hey, where was everyone else?) In August the family traveled to the World Boardgaming Championships in Hunt Valley, MD, during which Jean and Devon surprised cousin Josh at his surprise birthday party while Derek and Jim stayed behind to play wargames. Talk about warped priorities, not to mention strange sentence structure.
In August, after dropping Derek off
at college (wow, those 18 years went fast!) Devon, Jean, and Jim took off for a
well earned vacation in the Shenandoah (God’s country) along with Devon’s
friend Liza, during which they visited Devon’s Zen Judo master at James Madison
U, hiked Skyline Drive, drove up to Harrisburg to see cousin Diane and Jack and
their new country estate (talk about retiring in style), survived Hershey Park,
and attended the MD Renaissance (ha, bet you thought I couldn’t spell it) Faire
where we met up with Jennifer and Logan.
Once they freed Devon and Liza from the stocks for insulting the Queen
and her entire court, they beheaded home.
Just when we thought we were done
with robotics, Devon starts a robotics club at her school. Build season is less than 4 weeks away! Now that she’s in 10th grade,
Devon has graduated to working as a Cotillion helper (see Enforcer of
Discipline above) and is now swing dancing (wow, Cotillion was finally good for
something). Derek’s been busy at school
working in theatre where he was cast as the entire chorus in the play Antigone
(not the Greek version, the FDR Japanese internment camp version?!), playing
Texas Hold’um, doing pointless survey course projects in engineering, skipping
8 am chemistry classes, fine tuning his computer gaming skills, and keeping
abreast of the NFL.
In October Jim returned to his
hometown of Harrisburg for his 40th high school class reunion
(that's the real big 40 in one's life).
None of the other family members seemed anxious to accompany Jim on his
trip down memory lane, Jean and Devon suddenly remembering that they had
tickets to see The Producers, and Derek pleading that he had to stay at school
to watch the Tech football game that weekend (was there a VT game that
weekend?) One can only speculate if this reluctance to accompany Jim was
related in any way to the fact that the rest of the family had previously met
some of Jim's OLD classmates. Jim did
manage to stop at Jack and Diane's where he received a four hour lecture on the
state of educational software by grandson Justin.
On Friday Devon leaves with a school
group for the Big Apple, an early Christmas present. Jean and she have been doing a lot of practice shopping to
prepare for the trip.
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
may I leave you with this most profound and deepest of thoughts to ponder for
the Holidays: cats is a four-letter word, but dog
is only three.
Place paw prints and signatures here.
P.S. As a reminder to those of you who would
probably rather not be reminded, here are our vital sadistics, eh statistics:
Address: 204 Tamarack Road, Richmond, VA 23229 Phone:
804-741-9973
e-mail: devonrex@erols.com d-mail: duckcheese@puppy.paw
preferred dog treat: Fido-of-Paris Gourmet Biscuitee with
Chocolat Chips (imported)