December 2021 Newsletter

The Old and the New

Out with the old and in with the new isn’t working so well for me this year. For example, at a time when some of my friends send virtual Christmas cards, this year I decided to send out real stamped cards. For me, the process involves looking back at the cards I received last year and circling the years when I received responses in the address book that I’ve kept for twenty years. I used to send as many as fifty, this year about half that for one reason or another.

As it happens, this year the day I did my Christmas cards, I woke up at 4 AM as my interminable Ya Gotta List rattled through my head. So, I ended up getting only two and a half hours of sleep, an insomnia record for me, and awoke in a terrible mood. But later, the process of looking at last year’s cards and newsletters, locating current addresses for a couple of my nieces and a nephew on Facebook, writing Hi along with a specific name and Love, Juliet and Jess inside the cards, addressing them, and putting on stamps and return address labels made me feel better. Plus, most of the cards I sent this year featured two dozen cats gathered around a piano. The joy of that card became my joy as well and healed my head.

From the topic of the old tradition of sending holiday cards, let’s move on to the new . . .

Not long ago I crashed my old computer by opening too many apps at once. And my daughter Jess decreed that its days were numbered because the hard drive was dying. (Ten years is old for computers.) So, I bought a new one. That meant that I needed to get used to a new computer, a new version of Microsoft Word, and a new version of Photoshop. (For instance, the new version of Word somehow put Calibri in my font box instead of the Times New Roman I’ve used in the past and I haven’t figured out how it did that.) Also, these things required new user names and new passwords. I don’t especially care for the passwords some alien AI app assigns because I just can’t remember those jumbles of letters and numbers. Instead, I like to devise my own with phrases I can recall and put together with a variety of upper and lower cases, numbers, and possibly a special character now and then.

All this stuff takes time and leads me to my last WiP Report of 2021. It looks like I won’t complete the current draft of Die by the Sword this year after all and move on to revising and editing. But when things settle down, I will.

Have a happy, healthy, and safe New Year, my friends, and I’ll get back to you in 2022. All the best, Juliet