Jeff's Christmas letter, OR a blow-by-blow account of 2010 in the Starck household

I should be writing out my Christmas cards right now.

Scratch that, I should have written them a week ago.

But Christmas approaches and, though the mail carriers may not be held back by sleet, rain, snow and wind, I am more easily deterred.

Instead of placing my trust in the United States Postal Service, which can't even seem to deliver its own paychecks these days (the deficit this year alone is $4.2 billion), I've taken to the digital realm to disseminate the first annual (and, if you're lucky, last) Christmas newsletter exploring the joys and travails in the Starck household during 2010.


Nobody wants to be that guest who arrives at the party as the others guests are already leaving, but I'm still proud of the fact that, in 2010, I finally joined the digital age.

Readers of this blog (all three of you) might know that I'm referencing the stunning debut of this here corner of cyberspace in late August.
Still in a period of infancy (and lunacy), in just a short time, Starck Reality has notched double-digit readership numbers, the kind of exposure CNN news anchors would die for.

The prospect of baring my soul in some impersonal, bits-and-bytes based world has always been tempting, but it took a summer day and the national pastime to spur me to action.
And, four posts later, here we are.

So what if blogs are so 2005, right? Everybody and their grandmothers have them by now. In a world of Facebook and Twitter, blogs are the MySpace of the social media atmosphere. Blogs are the Pluto of planets, the Billy of the Baldwin Brothers.

The debut of this portal into my brain just means that I'm right on time in adopting technology, if you measure in Starck-years.


Growing up, when new technology debuted, offering covetous features like color on the television screen, or a static-free signal to boot, my family usually took a pass. Too fancy for our liking, I suppose.

Now, I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure that our family's first VCR could already be found in the Smithsonian by the time my parents finally bought one.

I like to think that the inauguration of a blog about five years after it is all the rage just seems to uphold a family tradition.


One area in which I was on the cutting edge in 2010, literally, was surgery.

Nothing instills the true value of life like the threat of losing your own, and my third visit to the operating table in six years was memorable and exciting in its own right.

It remains remarkable, though, because my physician did not leave to buy a house, or pack for vacation, delaying the surgical procedure in a way all-too-familiar.


Speaking of the value of life: let us pause to remember another low point of 2010, an event that struck us like the blow from a 2x4 upside the head. 2010 will always to me be the year the family lost its matriarch, Grandma Starck, and there is nothing funny, or sarcastic about that.


As fun and exciting, and sad, as all these events have been, the year might be best summed up in the word "travel."

From jetting off to New York City to Berlin, to Chicago and Boston, and St. Louis a few times, I've put a lot of miles between myself and the earth.

Unfortunately, all of these trips pre-dated the recent re-branding effort by the TSA, which apparently changed its name to Touched in Special Areas, so I haven't had a chance to tell a TSA creep to stay out of my junk drawers.

With business trips planned again in early 2011, soon enough I'll get to enjoy a level of humiliation and invasion of privacy that some folks pay good money to experience.

You can read all about it in next year's newsletter.

Until then, Merry Christmas and have a blessed New Year.