Please, as you read this, keep in mind which name is listed first in the title. It's important as I'm sure you'll agree.

This year, for Christmas, I received some pretty cool gifts. For, example, I received a t-shirt and hat that I have long been hoping for. I also received a book on Mt. Bike maintenance which I obviously need. I also received a really cool 10 pack of beer from a little microbrew in Cooperstown NY. The 10 pack has five different flavors of beer and, so far, the two I've tasted have been very good. Just with that collection of gifts I think anyone would agree I had a pretty damn good Christmas. Amazingly I got even more stuff that I am not even going to list here.

However, Christmas in my family stretches on a bit. I really celebrate about five times. The first is with my immediate family - my daughters and wife Lisa. From Lisa I received a partially prepaid trip to Niagara Falls. For the past few years we've given each other a trip of some sort that just involved the two of us. This year all four of us will be going and a long weekend right on the falls in a cool sounding B&B. It should be great.

The second Christmas is with Lisa's parents and that's where I got the book, hat, and shirt. The third is on the phone with my older brother Ted. The fourth is on the phone with my Mom and it was from her that I received the beer, a mountain biking magazine and a bunch of other nice things. The fifth is with my Dad and Patty.

By the time the fifth celebration came around I had gifts that covered the present and the future. However, in a rare Christmas moment right out of Dickens I was visited by the past on Christmas number five. My Dad and Patty had purchased a scanner and scanned in every photo that they owned. This covered photos from before I was born, up through me turning about six and then picked up again with photos from when after my parents were divorced and my dad remarried Patty through to some photos taken after I had moved out and had joined the Army.

I have often complained that not many photos exist of me as a child and next to none exist of me as a baby. Ted, on the other hand, has often joked that he was found on the side of the road or adopted. It turns out we were both wrong.

After the images had been scanned Patty had a fully bound book made of photos from our early childhood. The book : "Bill and Ted" starring yours truly with Ted in a nice supporting role.

The book is really nice. It's a hard cover book with a photo of Ted and I standing in a field somewhere in England on the cover. I'm probably 3 in the photo and my head is gigantic. It's a great picture and the book is one of the most thoughtful gifts I've ever received.

Ted received the same book and we opened our gift at the same time while on the phone with each other. It was a lot of fun looking at some of the old pictures and laughing at ourselves.

The gift didn't stop with the book though. We were also both given a digital copy of every photo that was scanned. The resolution of the scans is pretty remarkable and, when all is said and done, is probably about 1500 photos. I'm not in all of them. Heck, I'm not in even 30% of them - but they are awesome nonetheless.

Now I feel inspired to do the same and to get our scanner out and to start scanning in all the photos I have in photo albums. As I go through and process all the scanned photos (they are scanned up to six at a time so I'm separating each out into its' own file) I will upload a few to share.

#MyLife