I started writing these newsletters in 1992 for the kids when they went to camp.

Originally I had intended to simply write a letter every day, but quickly found that there was never anything to talk about. "I went to work, came home, ate dinner, watched TV and went to bed" does not make a fascinating letter for a kid at camp.

So I quickly went to the newsletter format and tried to make up local news stories. Mostly they were sheer nonsense and parodies of current events but sometimes actual true stories worked their way in.

I had pretty primitive equipment at first so the layout and pictures were crude and particularly, the printers were limited to old dot matrix. Pictures were minimalist at best.

For a while I worked with video editing software in a Macintosh environment so it became easy to grab some frames from action movies to give me more interesting pictures to parody and to use frames from old family videos. Then that job went away and my picture options became limited again.

In 1996 I got a scanner so I could scan in family snapshots as well, but then there was a series of equipment failures.

Just before the Olympics, the color printer stopped printing yellow (so the gymnastics pictures are really BLUE) then, I left the Macintosh environment and went to a PC environment, losing access to all my original work.

What I was able to transfer to PC went in the Great 1997 Hard Drive Crash, followed by the Great Real Estate Debacle, so it's been slow getting the publishing offices back together.

Since the newsletters were only intended to entertain my daughters at camp, I was not rigorous about keeping copies, and they never brought any of them home. Hence, most of the best copies are lost. The only pages I kept were test prints, often with errors or print flaws, while the more perfect copies were mailed off to camp. So there are gaps in the saga and less than optimal pictures in what is left.

Now that the kids are no longer campers it would have seemed that the need was over. But I have been asked by more than one daughter to revive the practice and create more Bliss News just for the fun of it and to keep the girls in touch now that they are off building their lives. From this point on, though, I'll post eveything on the internet with hopes no more will be lost. to a certain extend I'll be able to recapture some of the old papers by scanning in the paper copies or even retyping them, but this will take time.

Bill Bliss