I Received A Spooky Letter Today Sent To Me 5 Years Ago

I received a letter today that was written by my son 5 years ago when he was still in high school. Apparently, a part of some sort of a strange English class assignment that he had was to write a letter that would be mailed exactly 5 years later to see how things would change after such a relatively long time.

I had to call my son in California and he only vaguely remembered that English class assignment 5 years ago. Things did change in 5 years. The postage for a first class letter back then was 39 cents. It is 45 cents now, but my son’s teacher must have asked the kids to put 2 stamps on the latter 5 years ago because she was anticipating the postage increase. And of course, our children don’t live with us anymore. Banzai!!!

How did things change in your business and your life during the last 5 years? It so happens that 2007 was a very good year for my business, after 2008 my business dropped by more than 20% and although last year was not bad, I still made about 10% less than 5 years ago. But I did not lose my house, my job and everything I owned like so many people did thanks to the massive fraud perpetrated on the 99 percent of people who do real work for a living by the 1 percenters on Wall Street. None of them is in jail now and it does not seem likely that they ever will be.

5 years ago most of us weighed less, very few of us weighed more. We had three dogs in our house here 5 years ago, two of them went since to the great dog park in the sky, but fortunately we still have two dogs here because our German shepherd/something else mix Lena, who is 16, is still hanging on and my son appointed me as a guardian of his dog Lucy, a gentle pitbull with a scary face, for an undetermined period.

5 years ago, candidate Obama was barely known at all, and he was so fresh, so different and so believable! I totally bought his promises lies and voted for him in Virginia primaries six month later!

During the last 5 years I junked several computers and printers and one copier. We had our house painted 5 years ago. The pier in the woods behind our house that leads to a branch of Elisabeth River was still standing and we were able to go fishing and crabbing there 5 years ago, but a hurricane destroyed it and my homeowners association decided not to have it rebuilt because it would be too expensive.

I had no blog 5 years ago because I only came up with the magnificent idea of Mad Patent Translator’s Blog^TM about 18 months ago.

But other than that and the fact that we are all 5 years closer to the grave, not that much changed during those 5 years. I am still married to the same women as I was 5 years ago and 28 years ago. I know, I can barely believe it myself.

5 years from now, I will probably still be here if I am lucky, translating my patents and trying to find the right ratio of personal to professional in my posts, which was about 99 : 1 in this post.