Yup. It's kind of fun to wait until the end of February when there's not much doing to open the last of my Christmas cards and read the letters. Some folks complain about this type of letters, but I enjoy the ones I get very much because they are so informative, and they are certainly better than nothing.


This is Ismay Trading Post, owned and operated by my Uncle Robert:

Here's what I found out today:
One of the neighbors fixed my uncle's kitchen drain problem at the trading post. Based upon what I saw when I was there in June, I was sure Robert was on the slippery slope headed toward having no plumbing at all, and doubted his ability to fix it himself as he'd planned. This neighbor is a good friend to my uncle, and it sounds like he's doing all the grocery shopping for him so Robert doesn't have to drive the slow 30 miles to town. When Mr. Troutbend dies, I'm going to move down there and hang out with them.

The "Phil Needs" guy I wrote about back in 2009, who supposedly has some kind of exotic dementia is now doing consulting work reviewing plans for NASA, still working as a guide at the Denver Museum of Science, and grocery shopping. Back then, his wife had set up a website to coordinate volunteers to de-hoard their house and urgently get it ready to sell, as well as taking him shopping for groceries because she doesn't 'do' shopping. It sounds like a trick to get their friends to do all their work for free, and they can well afford to pay for it to be done. And they still live in that same house.

"Digital Media Management" is something a person can get a MS degree in at the University of Texas in Austin. Sounds good to me since computer science as a major has fallen out of favor.

My shirt-tail relations in California have been having a lot of success with their snow cone truck business and it has grown quite a bit. One of their venues last year was the fireworks at the Rose Bowl. It is an elderly mother and her middle-aged son, and I had thought the guy was kind of a slacker, so this is a pleasant surprise. I've never met these people, but correspond regularly with her sister, who is in a nursing home. She's the one who calls me on my birthday every year. We visited her in person a couple of years ago on our way to a cruise departing from San Pedro.

The secretary at one of real estate partnerships I'm in retired a couple of years ago and is loving her new life. She took a Bob Ross type painting lesson, and plans to take another. She's single and I know she feared retirement, but is truly enjoying it. I'd never heard of 'burning the nerves' to try to alleviate chronic back pain, but apparently it didn't help.

I was disappointed that my mother's high school friend didn't write a longer note. I saw her briefly this past summer on my way to someone's house after a funeral - I couldn't remember where they lived. She drew me a map and the verbal description went something like: 'this here is where that old train car was, but it's gone, and here is the MacAllister house but they sold it to some nice people, and you duck down this alley, and there you are.' I was more confused after the directions because I didn't know where the MacAllisters had lived, but I didn't tell her, figuring that was the best she could do. It helped some, because I found out the old train car I'd been looking for wasn't there.