February 25, 1993
Dear Everyone:
Spring has sprung. Maybe not
where you are, but around here the greenies and growies are budding and
blossoming their ducky little hearts out.
“Jeannie’s” daffodils and tulips are poking their little heads
up and one crocus is already in full croak.
It must be because of all that
lovely rain we've been getting. Even
the "golden" hills are green, subject to change without notice, of
course. And the governor has
officially declared the drought officially over.
Until next time, of course.
And, in true bureaucratic form, instead of disbanding the office of the
Drought Information Center, he simply renamed it the Water Conservation
Center. Why get rid of all those
people that you got on to the public payroll just because their jobs
don't exist anymore, right?
It's just like the "temporary" added .5% sales tax that would last "just
until the damage from the earthquake is repaired".
That would be the
Loma
Prieta Quake of October, 1989.
It has been noted around here, more than once, that
Iraq, which we "bombed
back into the Stone Age", repaired its infrastructure, not to
mention its bridges, in far less time than it's taken a fraction of the
state of California to get off its rusty-dusty and get to work.
Not that I'm asking to go to
Iraq, you understand; the weather here is much better.
Last week, I added some vacation days to the President’s Day Holiday and
took the whole week off. Saw four
movies, mostly with “Jeannie”: Matinee,
Sommersby,
The Temp
and Groundhog Day.
Sommersby
was the best, of course. Great
acting, great costumes and set decoration, silly ending.
Groundhog Day
was the most fun. A sort of
gently comic Twilight-Zone-for-the-90s with
Bill Murray as a
self-absorbed city slicker stuck in a small New England town, doomed to
keep reliving the same day until He Learns His Lesson.
Matinee,
oddly enough, is the most poignant, set in a small Florida town during
the Cuban
missile crisis. In the middle
of the nonsense of the opening of a "cosmic thriller" movie (of the
giant insect variety), it captures the flavor of a what we fondly regard
as a simpler time. A
pre-cholesterol time when teachers sternly advised their pupils to "eat
red meat at least three times
a day" and nobody had ever heard of a compact car.
The Temp
is ludicrous, of course, it's only redeeming aspect being the fact that
it was filmed in
Portland where, you understand, it rains only
at night. It stars
Timothy Hutton
and I thought, well maybe he's decided to forgo his usual angst-ridden
miserable characters and just have fun with a silly little thriller for
once. But then, the movie opens
and he sitting in his psychiatrist's office, saying "I think I'm feeling
better now" and it just goes downhill from there.
Save your money on this one.
Other than that, I spent my vacation days sleeping late, lying around
the apartment, watching TV and reading until the work ethic would get to
be too much and then I washed the kitchen floor "good for another two
years now!" Or claim leaves on my silk fichus trees.
This is my idea of a vacation. Not
one where you go somewhere and feel compelled to cram as much of "a good
time" as possible into every waking moment, in order to get your money's
worth. But one where you just do
whatever you feel like doing whenever you feel like doing it.
Or not.
Love, as always,
Pete
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