Christmas card writing should be a simple task for a writer. It isn’t. As a matter of fact, the more I write professionally, the less I write personally, Just ask my mother. The volume of outgoing cards and letters from this house- hold has dropped dramatically in the past few years. In my last letter to Mom, I apologized, explaining that as much as I enjoy writing, some- times it gets tiresome. It’s sup- posed to be my profession. That ‘letter was about 250 words. She still hasn’t paid the bill I sent her. But the main problem with Christmas cards is my own doing. Years ago, I began to rank the cards I receive on a scale of one to ten. A card with a long, handwritten letter rates a ten, while a fair-sized note inside ranks eight. You get the idea. Those folks who simply scribble their name at the bottom and slap a stamp on the envelope are one’s. Banks and insurance com- panies can send ones, but people shouldn’t. Well, I’m supposed to be a writer — I can’t let my cards rank a crummy one. SoI have to write a decent letter. No photocopies of family newsletters, cither, those are ranked low at minus two, along with junk mail. With a large, well-spread family, even writing a seven to each of them takes a fair amount of time and energy. Christmas card writing wipes me out. And then, to really suck out any enjoyment left in the Christmas card game, I get an annual Christmas letter from snooty . Phillipa. It ranks about an eight in length, but the quality hovers around a minus three. Snooty Phillipa sends a card from a large, sophisticated city, where she and her arrogant hus- 8 = Terrace Review —— Wednesday, December 11, 1991 band Binky have lived for the past five years. She wasn’t always snooty. Fifteen years ago, . Phillipa was almost normal, although there always was 4 sharp edge of snoot to her per- sonality. You might say that her snoot potential was devcloping then. Now, Phillipa’s Christmas let- ters ooze with perky details of her wonderful life. "Our year has been simply exhilarating. The children are still enroled in an exclusive school. Henry will be skipping kindergarten, going directly into Grade Six, and Tiffany has won the Nobel Peace prize for her Grade Three work in science. "Binky is now president of the corporation. I’m on a leave of absence from my glamorous modelling career. Being slim, blond and rich takes up most of my time. How’s life in that dreary little northern B.C. town? Do you still have a weight prob- lem?" This is basically what Phillipa writes. Well, all right, maybe not those exact words, but you get the idea. It’s difficult to answer Phillipa’s Christmas letters. I want to write, "Glad to hear you’re all doing well. Congratulations to Binky. By the way, does he still have those huge, hairy nostrils, the ones that flare at the edges when he’s angry? . "You must be so proud of the children. I hope Henry’s gotten over that little gas problem he used to have, and that Margaret doesn’t drool anymore. Remem- ber, academics aren’t everything, Phillipa. A little spit and gas could definitely influence their success in life. "As for you, Phillipa, glad to hear you're still slim, blond and rich. Same old Phillipa. I'll never forget the time we went to that glitzy Christmas house-party. You drank foo much gin and ’ralphed’ all over the fireplace, but that expensive outfit still looked great, even when your perfect hair stuck to the hearth." But I won't write that. I'll send Phillipa a lovely card, maybe about a four on the scale. I mean, even the insurance company deserves that much. Shopping for a computer is about as simple as building a spaceship and flying to Mars, I foolishly assumed that purchasing a computer would be little differ- ent than buying an electric can opener or a toaster oven — after casually browsing through the store, oohing and aahing at all the pretty merchandise, you, the expert shopper, would quickly and efficiently find what you wanted and at the price you could afford. But by recent excursion into the — world of computers dumped that theory right down the toilet. Full of false confidence, I breezed through the doorway of the first computer store on my list. It took me all of five seconds to realize that the technological mon- ° sters staring back at me had about as much in common with can | openers and toaster ovens as I do with bedbugs and earthworms. But we expert shoppers never admit defeat. It’s one of those rules that is practically carved in stone; it also guarantees you will land in some very hot water soon- PET(S) OF THE WEEK. It's three-for-one week at th 3 e Terrace: Animal Shelter, with these pooches, age 10 months to three years, up for adoption. Shelter staff say they make good companions, and visitors Alec and Ryan seem to agree. ated a monstrous tidal wave. Another rule is that you must always pretend to have some rudi- mentary knowledge of the item in question, even if you know abso- lutely nothing about the product. Drifting slowly down the aisles, trying hard to appear knowledgeable and casual all at the same time, I tried to think of something intelligent to say to the wary sales clerk who was eyeing me suspiciously. Maybe he thought I was a shoplifter in the market for a free computer, although how I could ever wrestle one of those suckers out of the store and into my car unnoticed is totally beyond me. Until that moment, I never actually realized how big comput- ers are, The machine I use, which ‘T borrowed temporarily from a friend when my old word proces- sor committed suicide this past summer, is a tiny little compact model that could easily fit inside a briefcase. But these machines were obviously of a whole differ- ent breed. This presented a problem. I absolutely refuse to work on a neat The Thornhill Junior Secondary CounterAttack Club got er or later, I not only landed, I cre- the whole school out noon Monday to herald the beginning of the Christmas CounterAttack Campaign with a giant sign bearing the message "When drinking don’t drive." Over the Elementary School students, delivering 4,000 bags to the liquor store bearing their theme, distributing bags of pam- _ phlets to Thornhill bench residents, distributing sate driving Christmas cards through the Chevron station and selling non-alcoholic “mocktails" to fellow students at lunch, next two weeks the club will be talking to Thornhill desk; a happy desk is a cluttered desk is my motto, But if I were to set one of those huge beasties on my desk I'd have to move every- thing else onto the floor, and this does not strike me as particularly satisfying. It's hard to find some- thing good to say about clutter when have to step over it. The second store I visited had even more computers on display, most of which appeared to be hooked up, plugged in, tuned in, and turned on. Having been raised on a healthy diet of weird science fiction tales, standing in a roomful of blinking, beeping, bopping and zinging machines was an eerie experience. It reminded me of just about every nasty thing I had ever read about machines from outer- space, innerspace, and otherspace overpowering the earth, I was staring stupidly at a machine with enough bells, whis- tles and doodads attached to it to sink an entire battleship, when a sales clerk wandered over. With- out thinking, I asked what the big boxy thing sticking out the side of the big square thingy was. So much for my perfect shopper image. I soon found myself mired knee deep in some very tricky waters as the sales clerk briefly explained everything from win- dows, mouse, DOS, modems, bits and bytes to input, output, hard- ware, software, RAM and ROM. Then came more explanations about all the various programs needed to run the computers: word processing, spreadsheets, graphics, accounting, publishing, games, and on and on and on. It seemed as though these com- puters could do just about every- thing except wash the dishes and take the dog for a walk. Looking at all those monitors staring back at me like large, unblinking eyes, it was easy to imagine a cunning intelligence lurking deep within, patiently waiting. I finally fled the store when one of the beastly things winked at me. I only caught it out of the comer of my eye, but I swear it winked. Maybe after I return my friend’s computer I'l! drag my old typewriter out of mothballs, .