March 19, 1998
Dear Everyone:
Happy
St. Joseph’s Day!
Things are definitely starting to look up.
I finally got another one of the those mythical Monday’s Off this
week and so, spent my birthday sleeping late, catching up on deferred
viewing and generally being lazy.
Quite a departure from the last few weekends.
Up until this week, I’d been finding it harder and
harder to get my sorry self out of bed in the morning; and getting to
work a little bit later each day.
I was beginning to think I needed to reset my alarm to start the
day earlier. But after last
weekend, it was “sproing!” as soon as the alarm went off.
I realized that I was just so tired from working three full weeks
with very little break. All
that is behind us now.
And to make up for all those extra hours, I’m
taking a couple of “comp” days this Friday and the following Monday for
a nice four-day weekend. I’m
looking forward to sleeping in, watching movies, taking long walks
(weather permitting), reading the book Mother sent for my birthday, and
getting ready to watch the
Academy Awards.
And getting my
America Online working properly
again. Every time I start up
the program, up pops a warning window informing me that “imfart.aol” is
a duplicate. Then a second
window pops up to say that “IMFART.AOL” is missing.
I’m sure the system isn’t trying to be rude; but really.
Is it a duplicate or is it missing?
And what am I supposed to do about it?
I’m assuming that this file has something to do
with art work, of which AOL abounds, because after this, every time AOL
tries to open a window, I get a warning that “the image on the upcoming
window can’t be decompressed” and may not look the way it should.
Then you click on OK, and the same message pops up again...and
again...and again... Once
for every window that AOL has, as far as I can tell.
Sometimes I click on OK almost 30 times before I get past all the
warnings.
So far, I’ve determined that “imfart.aol” does
exist on my PC, so the file is probably damaged.
And I’ve gotten as far as a bulletin board on which other people
have reported the same annoying problem.
So there’s probably hope.
This coming (four-day!) weekend, I plan to try re-installing AOL
to see if that fixes things.
In other news...
Saw
The Man
in the Iron Mask last Saturday with “Jeannie”.
(I hadn’t seen “Jeannie” in so long, she had three weekly Letters
to catch up on.) Apparently,
when the French peasants
stormed the Bastille in July, 1779, they found,
among other things, a reference to a prisoner number such-and-such, who
is referred to simply as “the man in the iron mask”.
Alexandre Dumas took this as a springboard, and tossed in
d’Artagnan and
The Three (semi-retired) Musketeers, to create a novel
which has about as much grounding in fact as the recent musical
Anastasia.
No matter.
The movie stars
Leonardo DiCaprio in a dual role as the young
French king, Louis the Some-Number-or-Other-there-were-so-many-of-them,
and the aforementioned kid with his head stuck in a bucket.
DiCaprio is undoubtedly as cute as a bug’s ear.
And, if you’re too mature to be playing with bugs ears, there’s
always Gabriel Byrne,
Jeremy Irons,
John Malkovich and
Gérard Depardieu,
who, at his age, really should keep his clothes on.
Lots of swashbuckling and great clothes.
But a more experienced director
probably would have made better use of all that talent (and kept
Depardieu’s clothes on).
Nevertheless, a pleasant couple of hours.
Last week’s list of male-bashing items came care of
“Elaine”, who got them from someone else.
She was supposed to balance it this week with a list of dumb
blond jokes (she has a blond friend who collects DB Jokes); but she
forgot and went on vacation instead.
(Some people!)
So we will have to make due with once again
compiling a list of reasons that cucumbers are better than men.
Love, as always,
Pete
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