Sunday, December 21, 2014

Christmas 2014 - Let There be Cheese!


Just like the Ebola virus, which no one hopes they’ll get but seem sure to hear that it has somehow survived despite humankind’s best efforts to stamp it out and wipe every trace of it off the face of the Earth, I present to you the Greene Family Christmas Letter for 2014 . . . even if it’s a bit later than normal. 

In the spring, Sam went out for his junior high school’s golf team and made the cut.  Making that feat even more impressive, let me point out that the coach was the school’s computer teacher whose complete mentoring and guidance for young golfers could be summed up in his own words: “Keep your head down.”  It didn’t matter if Sam or one of the other team members was topping the ball, hitting a killer slice, or was possibly suffering from athlete’s foot, that was the coach’s answer.  Let’s not be too harsh in judging the cat: he was very busy driving the golf cart with his left knee while he poured a bag of Corn Nuts down his gullet with one hand and held a 128-oz soda “keg” in the other.  And, under this Arnold Palmer’s tutelage, Sam and his team were able to make it to regionals . . . by the grace of David Feherty’s golf god.  In the fall, Sam began high school, which meant that our carpool days were over for the moment – he and Jack ride to and from school each day, which has met, thus far, with no casualties to the car or miscellaneous road signs due to fighting over whose turn it was to scrape the frost off the windshield (have Erin tell you about driving to school with her sister – that poor stop sign). 

As Jack began his senior year of high school in late July, you would have thought he hadn’t a care in the world about where he was going to go to college . . . because he didn’t, much to his parents’ chagrin.  Subtle hints like “do you have an extra $40,000 lying around somewhere to pay for college” and “the S.A.T.s don’t stand for ‘scholarships are toast’” didn’t seem to do much to rally him to the cause.  Somehow, though, he woke up one morning and decided he better get his crap together (don’t jump to conclusions, though: he’s not exactly burning up the internet with applications and emails to every school possible), and one of the major things he realized he needed to obtain was his Eagle rank in Boy Scouts so he could beef up his academic resume.  So, in October of this year, he guilted a whole slew of people into helping him paint the fire lanes at the high school as his project, and soon thereafter he completed everything else required and passed his board of review.  We’re not sure when the ceremony will be held or what form it will take, but we’ll be sure to take lots of photos to prove he actually did it.  We’ll post them on Facebook – especially the one in which he’s being presented the Eagle so I can caption it, “And the old dude gives Jack the bird.” 


As for Erin and myself, we’re trying to find ways to make a little extra money so we’ve toyed with the idea of renting our house out to a meth or crack lab, but the CC&Rs in our neighborhood are pretty tight, and I’m not sure if we can find a loophole.  When we’re not donning our entrepreneurial thinking caps, Erin continues to seek out and cook meals that will elicit the maximum amount of bellyaching from our sons; I am constantly trying out new exercises that make me sweat profusely and completely fatigue me without changing my body composition and muscle-to-fat ratio – it’s a hobby.  We hope this note finds you well and healthy . . . and Ebola free!