Doing My Bit to Conserve Paper: Christmas is rapidly approaching, and once again it looks like we're going to be slackers on the Christmas card thing. If it was just a matter of sending out cards, we could probably hack it -- but I have enough far-away, out-of-touch friends and family members that I feel a need to write a Christmas letter, and because I'm a writer I feel a need to write a creative and memorable Christmas letter, and so it gets put off and put off and put off until it's March. We actually have some big news to share this year -- my son graduated high school and started college, and those are both fantastic and celebration-worthy accomplishments. We had a great party for his graduation, and a nice family vacation at the Trapp Family Lodge in Vermont, a place I've been wanting to get into with a timeshare trade for years. There was also some not-so-fun news, like my son's hospitalization in March for a ruptured ulcer. There's the stuff of a pretty rockin' end-of-year letter, to be sure, but first I have four or five manuscripts to edit, articles to write, winter clothes to take out of storage, shopping to finish up, college grades to obsessively refresh a website until they turn up ... Maybe I can just send cards with a link to this post?