January 9, 1997
Dear Everyone:
This being the start of a new year, I’ve begun a
new file pocket for these letters.
This makes the sixth file since I started in 1988.
It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this for over eight years,
mostly because it’s hard to believe I have that much self-discipline.
There are about 10 inches worth of files under the
Queen
Anne dresser in the second bedroom.
One of these days I’ll get a box for them.
Of course, they’re not all
my letters. Many are
from “Frankie”, including the hand-written ones from
El Salvador.
And many are from “Alice” and “Kelly”.
And then there are the occasional contributions from various
other family members and friends, such as “Richard’s” annual Christmas
letter-and-poem. All in all,
we’re a pretty literate group.
I’m still “homeless” at the office.
Add to that the fact that it takes all day for the temperature to
climb from 52o to 64o
(inside), and I have some
incentive to try working at home for a while.
However, working at home is not all tea and crumpets.
(Leftover pizza is more like it.)
First of all, it’s
boring.
There’s no one to talk to.
One has to fight the sudden impulse to jump up and start cleaning
out the refrigerator or redecorating one of the bathrooms.
Furthermore, one has to be
very firm in saying, “No, you can’t ‘take a break’ and watch
Equalizer
for an hour; you have work to do.”
And there is plenty of work.
I’m still working the bugs out of getting
Microsoft Access
to run the box storage billing for us.
And I need to spend whole
days on learning
Versatile for
Windows and writing a User Guide for it.
On the plus side, I can listen to
Beethoven on the
computer while I’m working and I can’t do that in “Livermore”.
So the plan, for now, is:
Get up and dressed just like I’m going to work as usual.
Drive to “Livermore” at the usual time.
Check my mail, e-mail, voice mail, etc.
Handle any problems that have arisen.
Make sure everything’s going OK in the warehouse.
Then, if there are no emergencies, pick up my
newspaper
(I have a weekday subscription delivered to “Livermore”) and drive home.
Spend the rest of the day working at home.
Subject to change without notice, of course.
“Jeannie” and I went to see
The
Crucible last weekend (my turn to pay for the movie and
popcorn). This, of course,
is not a movie, it’s a
film. It’s based on
Arthur Miller’s play,
although they made a few cinematic changes.
Still, it’s very dramatic.
Daniel Day-Lewis has his eye on
another Oscar. A very fine
cast, if you can stand
Winona Ryder.
It’s very loosely based on the
witchcraft
trials of Salem,
Massachusetts, 1692.
Several young girls start acting strangely and, right away, everyone’s
pointing at each other, shouting “witch!”.
It was a combination of superstition, hysteria,
guilt-by-association, and local politics and, in the end, it cost 18
people their lives. Miller’s
genius was in taking the original transcripts and turning them into a
play during the height of the
McCarthy era as
if to say, “Been there, done that, doing it again, aren’t we?”
As such, it’s the just sort of play that should be
“remade” at regular intervals.
In this case, they’ve done it very well.
Love, as always
Pete
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