My Annual Over-Achieving Family Newsletter

Every year, I get newsletters from friends and relatives that tend to brag about their perfect families, so here is mine. It’s too expensive to send each Herald reader a holiday card, so here’s my bragging letter to you.
My wife Katherine and I just finished our second year in our house in Reed’s Beach. We are growing accustomed to birders with telescopes setting up in our backyard, horse flies, green head flies, missing aircraft searches and the tide lapping at the house.
It was a pretty good year for us. Katherine graduated from mortician’s college and is working lots of odd hours but not bringing her work home with her.
Our twin sons, Doobie and Creedence, have flown the coop and are out on their own. They are working as roadies for a well-known rock band called the Kings of Leonard or something like that. The band had a hit record called “Used Sombrero,” or something to that extent.
The twins send us emails from all over the world. They didn’t need to pack any shirts. They wear the T-shirts the band sells after their concerts. They wash them before they re-sell them. The boys seem to be making quite a bit of money but have lost half their hearing from the loud music.
With the kids out of the house and Katherine working nights, I’ve turned the living room into a recording studio. I have my beloved drums set up in the living room.
When the wind blows from the east, I get phone calls from Delaware telling me to “turn it down.”
Our four dogs are now eight dogs since Farfel had puppies. We suspect they are half coyote because they put their heads back and howl when they see deer, sheep or roadrunners on TV.
We are not sure what breed to call the puppies since they are half poodle, perhaps Co-yoodles or Poodoytes. We can’t give them haircuts because they ate the clippers.
I got the old 1977 AMC Gremlin running that I was restoring. I traded it for a 1957 milk truck. It’s one of those old trucks you drive standing up, no seats. Katherine is painting the cows from the Far Side comic strip, the ones with glasses and ties, on the truck.
We skipped our annual summer vacation to the Mosquito Coast in Nicaragua. As you may remember, the locals threatened to kill us if we ever came back. Instead, we flew to Greenland for the Festival of Chills in Kangerlussuaq.
We didn’t come home with spider bites or dehydration like our trips to the Mosquito Coast but I did get nipped by a walrus. Who knew you can’t walk up and pet them? The sun never set the whole time we were in Greenland, so we didn’t sleep for a week.
We dog sledded, whale-watched and looked at icebergs and tried to order food but we don’t speak Greenlandic or Danish, so we ate some weird stuff. I think some chops I ate may have been reindeer.
I am continuing to teach meditation classes. I am officially a “guru.” That involved signing a pledge not to eat hamburgers, swear before 6 p.m. or watch Entertainment Tonight.
My book, “There’s a Restaurant on the Moon,” is almost finished. It looks at every popular conspiracy theory floating around out there on the Web. Did you know the CIA is keeping track of how much butter you buy at the food store?
After our satellite dish blew away last winter in the blizzard, I put up a big television antenna. I like not paying for the lousy stuff on TV. I am picking up stations from Maryland, Washington D.C., and the planet Jupiter.
Katherine’s Uncle Tonoose stayed with us for a couple of months. He is quite elderly and under the delusion he was on television in the 1960s. When we take him to the Acme, he tries to sign autographs, which no one wants.
Katherine planted a garden on the deck since nothing will grow in the sand here. She crossed a rose bush with a tomato plant. It produced some kind of red fruit that smells good but sure is hard to swallow.
The recession continues to worry us. Our house is worth less than we paid for it. Luckily, I keep digging up some sort of gold coins in the backyard from some sort of shipwreck. I don’t know how the coins got chocolate in the center but I supposed I will eventually be rich. Somehow, our sons seemed to know about the coins before we did.
We are preparing for the end of the world in 2012 predicted by the Incas and others. We plan to buy two brand new cars next summer, figuring we’ll only have to make a few payments before the apocalypse. If the earth is going to burn up, I’d like to be sitting in a new Nissan 380ZX when it happens.
We wish all of you a happy, well-adjusted, over-achieving year like our perfect family. Peace and good luck.