October 28, 1988
Dear Everyone:
!!!!! ASHLAND UPDATE !!!!!
The brochure has arrived and I worked out two possible schedules:
7/13/89 2:00 Cyrano de Bergerac
8:30 Henry IV, 2
7/14/89 2:00 All My Sons (Arthur Miller 1947)
7/15/89 2:00 Pericles
OR
8/3/89 2:00 Cyrano de Bergerac
8:30
Henry IV, 2
8/4/89 2:00 Silence (not the whole title, Russian Revolution)
8:30 Two Gentlemen of Verona
8/5/89 2:00 Pericles
8:30 Much Ado About Nothing
It’s a bit tricky because Cyrano is usually playing at the same time as Much Ado… and these are both favorites of ours. Of course, we COULD consider staying longer; but unless I hear a general cry of, “Yes, yes! we want to spend even more money”, I think we’ll go with this.
I forgot to bring the brochure with me this morning, but I’m pretty sure that the tickets for all 6 performances comes to $108 per person. Unfortunately, I now have a mortgage to support, so I can’t afford to buy all the tickets now and wait to be paid back next summer. I need the money up front. Please send your checks as soon as possible. The sooner I get the order in, the better our seats will be.
In fact, whoever gets their check to me the fastest gets to chose which week we will go – unless I decide otherwise.
Hotel/motel reservations will be arranged after the dates are set and I’ve conferred with Mother, Ashland book in hand. This book actually tells you how far away from the theaters each motel/hotel/B&B is. In fact, it has a lot of useful information that took the rest of us years to accumulate. Like which Chinese restaurants don’t use MSG.
In other news…
I have been concentrating on Destruction Review of records in boxes in the warehouse in “Livermore”. (Except yesterday when I was in a meeting all morning which carried over into lunch which is why I’m late with this Letter.)
I send out computer-generated lists of boxes which have passed their “review date”. When someone sends boxes to the warehouse, they’re supposed to include a date when they think the records will be old enough to be destroyed. Then they move on to another job and 10 years later someone is handed this list of boxes they’ve never seen and they’re supposed to decide if the records can go. There is a one-line description of the contents that usually says something like, “General A-K”, or “Red Books – Koniag” or “Mark’s desk”. Real useful stuff.
People are less than thrilled to get this little job. So they call me and ask how they can get out of it.
They can’t.
Once they send the printouts back to me, I check them and send them along to the "Tidddly" Department. If "Tidddly" thinks the records pertain to an audit, either current of forecasted, they’ll put a hold on the box.
For a while, "Tidddly" was placing holds on nearly everything. It was “suggested” to them that they were being a little too conservative, an admonition that they hotly denied until it was brought, gently but firmly, to their attention that they had just put a "tidddly" hold on a box of Christmas ornaments. After that, they backed down a little.
If "Tidddly" does in fact release a box for destruction, it goes to the "Winks" Department where it is perused with an eye to ongoing litigation. Assuming that the Company is not currently being sued by any Christmas trees, the box of ornaments was cleared by "Winks" and ultimately destroyed.
So you can see that I will be busy with all this for quite some time.
Nevertheless, I am still going to have to get back to shoe-horning RCCS into CRMIS.
Outside of the office…
I spent last weekend making a spider costume for “Jeannie” to wear to “Marshall’s” Halloween party this Saturday. The theme is: Come as your alter ego. We figured “Jeannie’s” alter ego is Little Miss Muffet, but it seemed easier to concentrate on just one aspect, hence the spider.
While I figured out a pattern, cut and constructed the basic garment, “Jeannie” worked on the antennae. At first she tried spray-painting Styrofoam balls on the ends of pipe cleaners. She learned 3 things:
1. A Styrofoam ball on the end of a pipe cleaner, when sprayed with black paint, goes over like a lead balloon.
2. It gets a little windy on my patio.
3. When you try to spray paint Styrofoam balls in the wind, you get a LOT of black paint on your hands.
We tried soap, Comet cleanser and fingernail polish remover before we found something that will take black spray paint off a court reporter’s hands: Avon’s Skin-so-Soft. This stuff is phenomenal. It drives away ants, keeps out mosquitoes and fleas, takes the adhesive from price tags off of objects, prevents soap scum from forming on the chrome trim of the shower and now it takes spray paint off your hands. No home or workshop should be without it.
I’m looking forward to a nice, quiet weekend. “Jeannie” will be in Fresno; and I’ve decided to catch up on my “deferred viewing” and do a little destruction review of my own records.
Everybody pray for rain and lots of snow in the mountains.
Love, as always,
Pete
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