"The best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go astray." In 1785, when Scottish poet, Robert Burns penned the poem, "To A Mouse," from which this phrase originates, the closest thing in existence to a computer was an arithmetic machine capable of calculating square roots. When American author, John Steinbeck, borrowed from the phrase in 1937, for the title of his book, "Of Mice and Men," computing machines had progressed to the use of the binary system and valves, but micro-computers and the pointing devices we call mice were still many years away.

True to the phrase, our plans still don't always work out the way we think they will. Nancy planned to have a guest speaker for our program at the December meeting, but he was not in attendance. Undaunted, Nancy started an open discussion that was very informative. Several ICON members were able to get questions answered and David Oliver demonstrated how to change the home page in "Internet Explorer" to another one, and how to display the Internet favorites folder as your home page. Sarah prepared hot coffee and spiced cider for everyone attending the meeting and had some elves volunteer to help her clean up afterward. I went to help Marlene set up the party before ICON's equipment was packed and loaded in vehicles so several volunteer elves pitched in to accomplish that task as well.

Our holiday party at Old Country Buffet was a great success. I didn't hear any complaints about the food so I have to assume that everyone was able to find something that tasted good to them! With the help of more elves, everyone in attendance received a gift to take home. The gifts were provided by ICON via Mary Phillips' diligent efforts in purchasing rebated items from the weekly circulars of local electronics stores and by donations from other elves. We even had several elves volunteer to help me carry stuff into, and out of the library and the restaurant.

Sarah and I made plans to do almost everything ourselves, so those well laid plans went astray too… but in a good way. The volunteerism saved lots of time and relieved a lot of our burden moving armloads of equipment and supplies back and forth.

I hope that each and every one of you had a truly blessed Christmas, and that in some small way, ICON added to that blessing. I received the biggest Christmas blessing of all when so many ICON members pitched in to make one of our functions so successful!

My sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to the success of ICON's 2003 holiday celebration!

Happy Computing
Terry