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Dear Family,

Today is the first Sunday of 2004, and I hope all of you are only a few days removed from your own New Year’s Resolutions (NYR) list. This post is to fulfill one of my NYRs.

In truth, Jackee made this NYR for me… and a similar one for the rest of you. She has asked that we post to the Irielife BLOG every week a minimum of a single sentence about our week. The maximum post is up to you.

So, I would like to share a few impressions of the Holiday just past, and extend to each of you my warmest wishes for a great new year.

One of the highlights of Christmas this year was to have many of you spend time with us. Your mom and I both realize how blessed we are to have so many of you nearby. I think we had a total of 5 or 6 family dinners, and about as many fires in the fireplace… with time to visit, relax and play some of the new games that are a favorite Christmas gift in our family. So let me try to quantify how MUCH I appreciated your presence (…) this Holiday.

I am going to try to describe this appreciation in the spirit of Lord Kelvin, the famous British engineer who is reputed to have said (turn on British accent here) “Unless you can measure a phenomena and express it in numbers, your knowledge is of meagre and unsatisfactory kind”

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Thus, in non-quantitative terms, I appreciated your nearby attendance, videos and phone calls each night because, well, without it, I probably would have had hot dogs instead of the 4 or 5-course family dinners. You know that mom’s legendary antipathy towards cooking is only slightly less than her antipathy towards snakes. And, you also know that when your mom does decide to cook, she is extraordinarily good at it.

As a foundation for my quantitative index, I refer you to set theory. The Venn diagram of her cooking antipathy is open, and includes the members (cooking, rats, snakes). As this is a lexicographic ordering, it does not yet convey the full measure of a term I need to convey my Holiday appreciation. Therefore, I need you to think about this using quantitative-ordering, which measures by relative position on the number line. This line abstraction extends from negative infinity (“really bad”) on the left, through zero, to positive infinity on the right. Positional values are indicated relative to zero, or other well-known points, by less-than () symbols. Example: 3 ACR
then your mother will cook

Thanks to the sum of your LPM, I gained 5 pounds, for which I, again, express my gratitude.

Love,

Dad