July 5, 1991
Dear Everyone:
I've been on vacation.
Actually, I was only gone three
days, plus one holiday. But you'd
think I'd been gone a month, judging from my In-Box.
And that's just the physical one.
My electronic mail In-Box ran for
five screens.
I have a LONG list of things to do today, so
naturally, I ignored it all in favor of playing Ring-Around-the-Rosie
with PC’s for a couple of hours this morning.
You see, with Thursday a holiday,
most people worked Monday to Wednesday and took Friday off for a long
weekend. I elected to do it the
other way around: Take 5 days
off, come back for 1 day, then take 2 days off again.
With nearly everyone else in the department out
today, I was free to copy some PC diskettes that I've been needing to
get done for quite some time. I
could use “Melanie’s” PC to copy 5.25“ disks because hers is the only
one with two such disk drives. And
“Carla's” PC could be formatting disks for me while mine was copying to
the 3.5" disks. If I'd done it
all on my PC, it would have taken much more than 2 hours, particularly
since my B:/ drive seems to be having some personality problems.
Naturally the 3 days that I spent at home would
turned out to be the hottest 3 days so far this year.
All the more shocking since only
two weeks ago, we were still wearing coats to work because it was so
cold. After running the
air-conditioning all day for 5 days, I'm not looking forward to getting
next month's energy bill.
The heat wave didn't stop “Jeannie” and me from
standing in line to see the new
Terminator movie.
And once the movie started, you
could easily forget about the heat and even the fact that the theaters
air-conditioning wasn't quite up to the challenge of 105° in the shade.
This is one movie that goes a
mile a minute from start to finish.
You don't even try to figure out how they did the
special effects. You just accept
them. They’re flawless, which
they should be for the price. The
movie is rumored to have caused $97 million.
The accountants won't confirm
this, of course, because that would interfere with their creative
bookkeeping.
And not all of that money went to pay for special
effects. In addition to his
salary, over $10 million was paid for
Arnold
Schwarzenegger's private jet. Why
did he need a private jet?
Consider: While
Sununu makes a
fool of himself using government transportation to travel on private
business, Schwarzenegger, staunch Republican that he is, gets Tri-Star
to pay for him to flit about the country promoting the president's
physical fitness program. But
then, Sununu doesn't have to go home and sleep with a Kennedy.
Speaking of the president's fitness program, is
this the same fitness program that John F. Kennedy was pushing 30 years
ago? And if it is, are we any
better now that we were then? A
question we may not want to ask ourselves, although
I've been riding up to 30
miles per day on my exercise bike since I was on vacation and didn't
have a good excuse not to.
And also, because I couldn't condone sitting around for five days watching movies on the VCR unless I was “using” the time well. By my definition, time spent burning calories, regardless of what else you might be doing, is time well spent. After 5 days of the 3 R's (reading, riding, resting), I'm feeling fit, relaxed and ready for the weekend.
Love, as always,
Pete
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