Running

Well, I’ll be durned! It’s that time of the year again already, and Billie has sent out her annual Christmas letter. Every year, we try to pool our ignorance and dig out all the addresses we can remember (why does it get more difficult each time?) and every year we get Christmas cards and letters from people whose addresses somehow got left off the list.

As often as not, they’re people who could be mortally offended by the fact that they’ve been forgotten.

So if your name fell through the cracks, please forgive us! It was certainly not intended. Most likely Billie and I each thought the other was handling it, which means that you SHOULD have had TWO Christmas card from us. There, now, doesn’t that feel better?

On the other hand you may just be one of those people like me, who doesn’t even notice when they don’t receive a card from someone. In that case, you are beyond hope.

(The penultimate sentence above should have read “… doesn’t even notice when he or she doesn’t receive …”. I think I’m going to avoid the PC trap in future by using the neuter form, so that the sentence would read “… doesn’t even notice when it doesn’t receive …”. But that looks just as ugly, so I prefer to use the grammatically incorrect and possibly non-PC form “they“, even though I secretly believe that anyone who advocates Political Correctitude deserves to be referred to as “it”. But, of course, I’d never admit to that.)

Read on …

Dear Friends,

“They” say time speeds up as we age. If not for our digital assistant,

it might be impossible to recall the joys of this Mach 3 year, which

now races to its close.

Our electronic memory, though, reminds us that we spent January and

February on Roatan, where we relaxed, snorkeled in the sea, and

prepared Alan for a Honduran root canal. Just as the dentist injected

the anesthetic, Roatan’s famous electricity went out! The project was

happily aborted until we got back to Texas!

Spring and early summer took us to Mexico for health assessments; two

trips to California for seminars; a trip to the Smoky Mountains for

recreation; and a trip to Nashville’s “Fan Fair” and Trent’s first

“Ropin’ Pen” party. In July, Chris’s daughter Andie, Trent’s daughter

Montana, and her little sister entertained us for a week, following

which we enjoyed a month in the UK, France, and Spain - visiting

friends and family; exploring bits of Spain and France (including a

French country music festival. Yes! Texas and Nashville music in the

escargot land!) In August, a “TB scare” prodded us to our own research,

resulting in a retraction of the diagnosis and Alan’s avoiding

dangerous drugs. (Yes, Virginia, “false positives” do exist).

In September, to celebrate Alan’s 75th birthday, we visited Chris and

Kristie (who also celebrated birthdays that week) in Corpus Christi,

TX. A beach party in October lured us to Puerto Aventuras, Mexico,

where we had vacationed our first three Christmases together. A few

days later, Alan headed to Roatan to begin maintenance on our house

there, while Billie followed a week later (using the interim time to

visit family and gather repair items unavailable in Honduras). A

three-week working holiday left the house looking great! Next time,

though, we’ll plan to play!

Even if days and months seem to blur, this year has brought

re-evaluation of who we are, what’s important, and what we want to do

with our lives. To live with unforgiveness toward self or others, to

retire to a rocking chair, to declare we’re too old to learn and be

challenged – none of these suits us. Life is so precious, so short,

that we want to experience as much as we can. Though we’re not likely

to be accused of “acting our age,” we’re enjoying new adventures,

meeting new friends, and sharing a moment, a day, or a beer with the

sojourners along our paths.

We are thankful to have crossed paths and walked a few – or many –

steps with you. Thank you for the special warmth that thoughts of you

create in our hearts!

Remember those bumper stickers?

Well, I lost my blog — duh! Now I found it again.

What happened was this:

A few months ago we (Billie and I) became dissatisfied with our ISP. Sometimes the service was great and sometimes it sucked. (This, of course, is the U.S. ISP. The one in Roatan always sucks.)

So we decided it was time for a change.

If you’ve ever changed ISPs (and who hasn’t?) you’ll know that we now faced the agony of e-mail address changes. It would be nice if we could just tell everyone in our address book (via a blast e-mail) our new address, but spam filters would block the blast even if we could get it to go out!

By way of history, another reason for the change is that our ISP had changed its domain name twice in the previous year. So people who were writing to a year-old address were getting dumped and people who were writing to a six-month old address were also getting dumped. Meanwhile, we had three inboxes for each e-mail address, to correspond with the three different domain names!

So, in a stroke of brilliance, we decided to create our own domain name and forward from there. If you’re keeping up with this, you may remember the domain alandbill.com, as in alan@alandbill.com and billie@alandbill.com. Now we didn’t EVER need to change our e-mail address again, and we were freed from the tyranny of ISPs.

Alas, it didn’t work out that way.

From time to time e-mails would be bounced from our own domain without our knowledge. And sometimes messages would just disappear into that great bit-bucket in the sky. What had promised to be a solution became a bigger problem!

But to get back to the ISP story, we tried a different ISP. So we now also replicated our previous e-mail addresses on the new ISP. And probably told some people those addresses — are you confused yet?

But wait — it gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view!) When we found out that alandbill.com was losing e-mails, we decided to try something different — Gmail. And we also found that we could use our Thunderbird e-mail client to send and receive from Gmail.

So far, apart from sometimes selecting e-mails as spam which should not be, Gmail seems to have been 100% reliable . It even saved me yesterday when Thunderbird starting acting up, because I could use the Gmail webmail account.

What has all this got to do with the blog, you ask? I was coming to that …

When I set up the blog, I used a Gmail account and password. However, by the time I came to make a second entry (several hours later) I couldn’t remember how to get there! Today, it dawned on me that I can link to it from my Gmail account, if only I could remember which Gmail account it was!

The rest is history.

Except that I forgot to mention that after running two ISPs in parallel for a few months it became apparent that the new one is too slow for us and cannot give us more bandwidth. So we’re planning on dropping it and reverting to the old one. The good news is their bandwidth seems to have improved and is now streets ahead of their competitor.

I just hope they don’t change their domain name again.