December 12, 1994
Dear Everyone:
Got my Christmas lights up on my patio fence the weekend after
Thanksgiving. Nothing fancy, just
a string of colored lights on top of the fence.
I have them plugged into a timer
so they go on around 5:30 (long before I'm home from work) and off about
10:00 (by which time I'm hopefully in bed).
Not like my neighbors at the end of the building, who have turned their
balcony, and three windows, into a phantasmagoria of Christmas colors;
single colored lights, multi-colored lights, lights that turn on and off
in sequence, then go in reverse. These
people are serious about Christmas lights.
They even have a wreath,
suspended from the railing, that plays carols at you when you walk by.
Definitely into the holiday
spirit.
Personally, I don't go in for blinking lights.
The ones that just go on and off
together look too much like they should be spelling out "Eat At Joe’s".
And the ones that go in sequence
remind me of ant trails and make me wonder when was the last time I
sprayed for bugs.
In other news…
Now that winter is upon us, and I have to wear a coat to and from work,
I am reminded of how much I hate my car's safety belt.
These things are a pain any day
of the week, but adding a coat to the proceedings just makes things
worse. They are such a hassle to
use that they had to pass a law to get people to buckle up.
Basically, they’re uncomfortable.
Let's face it: Automobile safety
belts are designed by and
for tall, flat-chested men. They
are not designed to be worn
by short people; and they are most
emphatically not designed to
be worn by women.
I don't know why they're sometimes called "shoulder harnesses" when they
don't go across your shoulder. They
go across your throat. If I'm
ever really in an accident, I stand a better chance of dying by
decapitation than anything else. And
as for the "flat-chested" part, all I can say is, if I'm ever really in
an accident, it could give a whole new meaning to the expression
"auto-mastectomy".
Next on
Oprah!
The men who designed car safety
belts…and the women who hate them.
And while we're on the subject of men and cars, why do men back their
cars into parking spaces? You
almost never see a woman doing that. Nevertheless,
I'll come zinging around the corner in the BART parking garage and there
is a whole long line of cars, waiting while some character painstakingly
backs his car into a space.
Why do they do that?
I've been told it's to "make a quick getaway" at the end of the day.
Now, does this make sense?
Just how long does it take to
back out of a parking space
compared to how long it takes to back
in to one?
I timed it the other night and
I'd say it takes all of about 10 seconds to get out of a parking space.
Granted, it was late in the
evening and there weren't any other cars around at the time.
Nevertheless, "making a quick
getaway" can't save you more than, maybe, five seconds.
So what do they do with those precious five seconds that they saved in
the evening by making everyone wait while they backed in in the morning?
Extra "quality time" with the
kids? Five more seconds of ESPN?
Or is it just one of those
testosterone things that men really have no control over?
Coming soon on
Oprah!
Silly things men do with their
cars…and the women who snicker at them.
The
Versatile
Conversion is coming along smoothly with only one short halt.
We had to make some adjustments
in some retention schedules to avoid boxes being rejected as having
invalid records series. So all
“Hobby” boxes were "stopped on the ground" until the series were copied.
That was completed yesterday.
So far, we have three Records
Centers in with only two, albeit the two largest, to go.
Love, as always,
Pete
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