Even though I've been AWOL lately...I just want to wish all my friends here at BTS the bestest holiday season...EVER!!!!! I'm so thankful for this forum and I know that I couldn't have made it through the past year or so without you all!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!

-- Anonymous, December 23, 2004

Answers

Right on. And Merry Christmas to you too!!! Don't we have the best participants on this forum? I think so. Polly, how many years has this one been going now? And the CS forum before this one, too!

Happy 'Nother Year!!!

-- Anonymous, December 23, 2004

Merry Christmas and Joyous Yule! :-D

Hmmm, I think this site started something like April Fools Day of 2000. I remember Jim making some joke about that day . . . ;-)

-- Anonymous, December 23, 2004

I think it was Fool's Day of 2001 that this forum began; but I was on Countryside from mid '99 on. Yes, this is a wonderful group of folks. I think if I hadn't found y'all first (CS was the first forum I ever went to), I probably would have given up on forums. You folks give me hope.

-- Anonymous, December 24, 2004

Oh, and - HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!

-- Anonymous, December 24, 2004

Merry merry everyone! I'm going to post our christmas letter, which is written every year by bren, who writes very amusing letters. ___________________________________________________

December 2004

Dear Friends, Relatives, Neighbors and Strangers-Who-Happen-to-Find- This-Letter,

You probably noticed that I’ve gotten smarter. This year I didn’t even put the day I’m writing this letter because you already know it didn’t get out before Christmas. I could go on about how busy we are and how the scientists have manipulated time to make it move faster and how global warming has made my computer work slower but the truth really is, I just started late as usual. I’m slow to warm up to the holiday season and until there is snow on the ground it doesn’t feel like the holidays. Guess what? Here in the frozen artic of the nation, we have hardly any snow. In fact if you look outside, you’d swear the trees just have a dandruff problem with a bit of white dust under them.

You may have noticed something else since I’m sure you are all very observant folks. We have moved again. Yes, I know many of you have been at the same address for many many many years. In fact, you appear to be allergic to real estate agents and we’ve been worried about you. We, on the other hand, are very friendly with our real estate chap. He even comes over for tea at times and ridded our new house of pesky squirrels who had decided this was their home. We deeply apologize for messing up your address book but you must learn to write our address in pencil or better yet use one of those new fangled electronic handheld address gadgets and just re-scramble the electrons to fit our new address of **** **th Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55407. Of course, with a new address comes a new phone number ((612) ***-****).

Yes, we know you think of us as a bit unstable especially with our business being called Madwoman Foods. We know that you all shook your heads when we moved from the glorious warmth of Southern California to the frigid northland of Minnesota where one spends six months of the year walking like a penguin for fear of falling on the ice and the other six months waving one’s arms around swatting mosquitoes. Yes, we know to those of you who may live what you think is a sane life, we may appear a bit overburdened with crazy ideas and impulsive actions. We know you are shaking your head as you remember our move from the suburbs of Minnesota to the rural countryside of Wisconsin. Yes, we know you had difficulty picturing us milking goats, strolling with cows, chasing pigs, plucking chickens, and shoveling well-you-know-what-I-mean stuff. Yes, we know the song from the TV show “Green Acres” popped into your head each time you thought of our farming adventure. Yes, we know you had to rip out our address from your antiquated address book (you really should get one of these electronic gadgets... even we ex-farmers have one) when we moved back to the Minnesota suburbs into our log home on a small lake. You felt we had found paradise so you felt safe writing our address down in ink but we fooled you. Only three short years later here we are in our greatest adventure yet. We are living in the inner city!! Yep, right smack in Minneapolis just blocks away from a coffee shop and only a short twenty minute walk to our building where we bake our soon-to-be-famous tea cakes and frozen pizzas, and only a short bus ride away from the great new Twin Cities Light Rail where you can go downtown in a flash or to the airport or to the absolutely- decadent Mall of America for only $1.25 a trip.

We discovered something wonderful in the city. It’s called community. In the suburbs, when we waved at our neighbors they ignored us. We drove to work. We drove back home to our suburban home. We shopped at our nicely, neatly stocked shops, and walked down our sterile streets. Here in the inner city, we walk to the coffee shop and chat about politics (we won’t go into politics in this letter because it’s supposed to be a happy letter), we walk the dog tripping over cracks in the sidewalk and chat with the neighbors. We even had one neighbor make us these great tshirts with the logo of soon-to-be-famous Madwoman Foods on the front. We’re sure they’ll be collectors’ items in the future.

Of course, nothing comes easy and moving day was a bit stressful. Lotus, now a ripe old age of twenty one, decided to move in with her boyfriend, Matthew. So, one less person to move you think. Well, she didn’t move herself with us but alot of her stuff is still in our possession in our nicely packed storage room in the basement. Bren, having a very small two-seater hybrid car, did little moving in her car. She was able to move herself, her backpack containing her work papers and Mac, and a few bags of groceries. On moving day, Bren’s job was to station herself at the new house which is a hundred year old multi-story home perched on the corner with a backyard that can be mowed with our electric lawn mower and a short extension cord. She diligently patrolled the street laying out boxes and pieces of wood to prevent others from parking along the curb by the house. She became a master of the anti-parking patrol awaiting the moving vans. (Yes, vans as in more than one. In the city there isn’t room for big long moving truck. It is easier to park two smaller box trucks.) EM and Ali masterfully directed the movers at the old house as our furniture and boxes of way-too-much-stuff was squeezed into the trucks.

Being a great planner, Bren had color coded each floor and numbered each room. Each box had a corresponding label applied to it in matching color and number all done with perfection on the magnificent three-color thermal transfer label printer used to make the soon-to- be-famous labels for the Madwoman Foods tea cakes and frozen pizza. Bren stood confidently at her post as the moving vans parked in the preciously guarded parking spaces along the curb. EM and Ali in the meantime decided to run a few errands on their leisurely trip to the new house having complete confidence in Bren’s ability to manage the situation. Being safe, they turned off their cell phones when refueling so an unwanted ring would not explode their car. Of course, they forgot to turn them back on. Meanwhile, the movers began unloading the boxes and trotted up to each carefully marked room. Oh, I forgot to mention that there were two guys on the third floor finishing installing the wood floor that was supposed to be done a week earlier and there were three electricians attempting to upgrade the house to grounded electrical outlets and discovering interesting things like old gas lines where the gas lights used to be. Bren, being an experienced project manager, handled the operation of all three activities (wood floor installation, electrician questions, and movers) with great skill until the furniture started to come out of the truck. Now, the common stuff like bedroom furniture was easy and she was able to direct the five movers to the proper rooms with no problem. Then, furniture came out of the truck that she had no clue where to put like an antique chamber pot table, an old sewing machine, and some pieces of furniture she couldn’t remember ever seeing before in her life. Of course, EM and Ali had not arrived yet since they were enjoying a nice latte and probably reading a book or two in their total privacy of not-being-interrupted-by-the-desperate phone calls from Bren. Furniture began piling up on the city sidewalk as Bren was beginning to think the movers had pick up someone else’s stuff because she was sure she had never seen that cabinet before. Then, as if things were not getting bad enough as people walking their dogs had to climb around what appeared to be a sidewalk sale, the movers extracted from the truck the dreaded sleeper couch that weighed a ton. Back at the old house, EM, Ali, and Bren measured this couch ten times and knew it would not fit through the hundred-year-old skinny doors of our new but-well-seasoned house. Just as Bren’s experienced-project-manager look turned to pure panic, EM and Ali arrived. They straightened out the sidewalk storeroom first then told the movers about the small door and big couch problem. These magnificent men skipped up to the third floor and took a look. With a twinkle in their eyes, they hopped down to the street, hoisted the couch up the stairs and miraculously shrunk the couch using quantum physics. That is the only thing that can explain how they fit a 39-inch wide piece of furniture through a 34-inch door. Needless to say, anyone looking for local movers in the Twin Cities, should call Ruth Movers because they know quantum physics.

After a long day, the furniture was all in place, the dogs could skip down the empty sidewalk with their owners in tow, and everyone was happy except maybe the guy putting the trim on the wood floor who cut his finger in the miter saw and sort of bled all over the floor as we frantically tried to remember which of the boxes marked “blue floor, room 3” contained the Band-Aids and tourniquet.

We are all settled now. Besides her music, Lotus is happily working at Whole Foods in St Paul and also at Madwoman Foods. First as a parent you have to go through the scariest moment of your life when your kids start to drive a car. Just as you are feeling more comfortable that they really do know how to drive, you have to face the worry that they are not at home because they don’t live in your home anymore and it is late and you know they went out and it is icy on the roads and did they get home okay or better yet, they start work at 7 am as Lotus often does and the roads are icy and the radio is reporting two hundred and fifty-seven accidents and ......

Ali is working at Madwoman Foods too and working on her studies. She continues to write and enjoys being closer to her friends here in Minneapolis. For the first time in her life, she got to hand out Halloween candy this year. The kids kept coming and coming and coming and coming as she and her friends shoveled out candy until their arms were tired. Bren dressed up as Gumby and sat on the front steps for awhile but the kids didn’t know who Gumby was. Seems Gumby isn’t a well know character with the younger generations today. She really needs to upgrade her Halloween attire to maybe something like that square pants spongy dude.

EM is busy creating recipes and products for the soon-to-be-famous Madwoman Foods. At times in her baking smock and gorgeous hair net, she sort of fits the Madwoman title quite well. Bren is busy creating and printing labels and traveling to the far corners of the country, Rhode Island, to learn the secrets of label printing. She also continues working as a contract project manager honing her moving plans although she is not looking forward to needing such intricate planning skills in the future. How could there be a better place to live where you can walk to get a cup of java, skip up to the light rail, and jog up to make soon-to-be-famous tea cakes and pizzas? I know, you are almost convinced that you can actually use ink to write in our address this time but it is always a bit risky. Go ahead, experience the thrill and get out that permanent black marker and write away.... well, maybe a washable marker would be better.

As always, we hope you are enjoying your journey in life, celebrating the holidays with good health and good friends, and keeping peace in your hearts so it will spread around the world.

Merry Holidays & Happy Adventures to All !! Bren, EM, Ali, and Lotus

(Also, Sputnik our pug and Opie our red cat. It’s like living in a Milo & Otis movie.)

-- Anonymous, December 24, 2004

Oh EM, that was too funny!

Merry Christmas everyone!!! Lots of love being sent from here.

-- Anonymous, December 25, 2004

EM, I hope your friends appreciate what a treasure you are!! What a delightful letter.

Hope you all had a good Christmas too!

-- Anonymous, December 28, 2004