April 10, 1997
Dear Everyone:
I have seen
The Comet.
I have been meaning to go out and see The Comet since quite some
time before that
unfortunate group of people apparently allowed their fantasy life
get a wee bit out of control.
But I kept forgetting to go out and look at the night sky.
My evenings tend to be busy.
Then, last Wednesday morning, I heard someone on
the news mention that The Comet would be visible in the northwest sky
that night and immediately went into the kitchen and wrote “Comet NW” on
the weekly calendar. By the
time I got home that night, about 15 gazillion things had happened and
I’d completely forgotten about The Comet.
I looked at the weekly calendar, saw “Comet”,
and thought, “Clean the kitchen sink?
Shucks, I can barely find the time to empty the dishwasher.”
Then I saw the part about “...NW” and remembered, “Oh,
that Comet.”
So, after finishing the Weekly Letter, and before taking my bath,
I went out into the parking lot to see if I could spot The Comet.
It was right there, more north than west, looking
like a fuzzy bright spot.
But that could just be caused by clouds.
I checked out
Orion
and he wasn’t fuzzy, so I decided the fuzzy spot was The Comet.
An old pair of opera glasses confirmed that the fuzzy spot had a
triangular tail. So, I have
seen The Comet.
I have also been blaming The Comet for a lot more
than the loss of 39 cult members.
I’ve been blaming it for every persnickety thing the computers
have been doing for the past two weeks.
PC won’t run
Exchange? Must be
because of The Comet.
In other news...
We have solved the Mystery of the Missing Soap.
Back in January, when we working out in the
warehouse, where it can get a tad dusty and dirty, I decided I wanted to
use an
antibacterial soap. The
advantage to this is that it not only kills the germs when you wash your
hands, it also leaves a film on your skin that continues to kill germs
for several hours afterwards.
This can be important when you consider that my job calls for
touching just about everyone’s keyboards and mice at one time or
another. Not only did I want
to avoid catching the galloping crud from somewhere, I didn’t want to
pass it along to some other unfortunate soul.
So I put a pump bottle of antibacterial soap in
each of the Ladies Restrooms.
I realized that other people were availing themselves of this
soap from time to time; but frankly, I spend more money on
Peanut M&M’s
than I do on soap in “Livermore”.
(We have a plastic pitcher that I fill with candy about once or
twice a week. It lives on
the table next to the copy machine, a popular hangout.)
Then, suddenly one afternoon, the bottle of liquid
soap vanished. Now, I would
be the last person on earth to suspect a co-worker, but let’s face it:
This is a secured facility.
People can’t just walk in off the street.
It had to have been an “inside job”.
This, of course, cast a pall of suspicion over everyone.
Who could be so low as to steal from someone they work with?
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who would do that
is lower than slug slime.
But who would sink that low just to steal
soap?
I bought another two bottles of soap and, within a week or so,
one of these disappeared, too.
This was too much and I vowed to “donate” no more soap.
Then one of the warehousemen cut his hand.
You will recall that working in the warehouse can get pretty
dirty, so “Elaine” and I ordered him to go wash the cut before using a
bandage and, for good measure, “Elaine” fetched the antibacterial soap
from the Ladies Room. When
he returned the bottle to “Elaine”, he commented that there was one just
like it in the Mens Room.
The one place none of us Ladies would have thought
to look.
It turns out that the janitor, unable to get
refills for the soap dispensers from her supervisor, had simply been
robbing Peter to pay Paul, taking the “extra” soap from the Ladies Room
to supply the Mens Room. And
she never mentioned it to any of us because speaking English is
definitely not in the job
description. And none of the
men mentioned it because they barely noticed the change in type of soap
and/or container.
So now the CREMCO person responsible for the
“Livermore” facility is racking her brains trying to figure out how to
reimburse me for two bottles of soap and was last seen admonishing the
guy who runs the “rent-a-janitor” service to “get soap for these people.
And they want the antibacterial kind.”
Movies...
Thought I’d never get here, didn’t you?
Saw
The Saint
last weekend. It bears very
little resemblance to the books and short stories that
Leslie Charteris
wrote in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, but after all the
George Sanders
movies and the Roger
Moore
TV series, I expect Leslie has probably stopped spinning in his
grave by now.
Val Kilmer plays
Simon Templar
as a modern day thief and master of disguises.
However, no matter how good the disguise, the audience has no
difficulty spotting Simon in a second.
Elizabeth
Shue is cast as a scientist who can solve all the world’s energy
problems if Simon can keep her from getting killed by the Evil Russian
Tycoon. But her real job is
to get Kilmer’s shirt off which she manages to do with delightful
regularity.
Good for a matinee. Check your credulity at the
door.
Love, as always,
Pete
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