September 27, 2000
Dear Everyone:
September 15, 1988.
That was the date of the first Weekly Letter.
Not that I dreamed that I’d be doing this every week (more or
less) for 12 years. Nor do I
see any signs of it stopping anytime soon.
The distribution list currently stands at around 15, give or take
a niece or nephew here or there.
The Letter has gone as far north as
Portland (as
far as I know; Mother sometimes makes copies and forwards them to I
don’t know who), as far south as
Venezuela; as far
east as Greece, as far
west as San
Francisco (check your atlas, San Francisco is more west than
Portland).
On the other hand, I spend less on postage now than
I ever had, thanks to the miracle of
email, something
unheard-of in 1988. And even
now, email is being supplanted, at least in part, by
Instant
Messaging. (“Why should
I wait for you to get around to opening your email?
I want you to see and respond to this instantly.”)
At work, “Wilbur”, my fellow Systems Support
Specialist, dug around on the
Internet and somehow
found a little executable that uses
Windows NT “net
send” commands to send a short message to anyone else on the network.
A few of us have it on our PC’s so now we’re sending little
Instant Messages to each other.
Everything from “Want to have lunch?” to “There’s smoke coming
out of my PC. Come at once!”
Also at work…
We are still swimming in
tea, thanks to
“Marshall’s” generous Christmas gift to me from last year:
Two quarter-pound packages of tea, delivered each month for six
months, from
Peet’s Tea Menu. In
addition to being a clever idea, it’s a play on words since it’s my tea
(“Pete’s Tea”). There are at
least one or two other people in the office who also enjoy an occasional
cup of tea.
Each morning, I fill my Mrs. Tea with a selection
and leave out a note explaining that “Today’s Tea is…
(fill in the blank for that day)”.
Mrs. Tea takes about eight minutes to brew a pot of tea.
Then we “decant” the hot tea from the Mrs. Tea pot to the lovely
green teapot that "Frankie" sent me for my birthday.
We use this pot because it has a better lid than the Mrs. Tea
pot. That lid sort of got
dropped on the floor and had to be replaced with a substitute, which
works during the brewing process, but doesn’t quite fit the teapot once
the brewing is over. It
works for us.
We’ve managed to get through a number of varieties
of tea, but there are still eight left to consume:
Russian
Caravan
Irish
Breakfast (we drank all the
English
Breakfast)
Pumphrey’s Blend
Jasmine Fancy (no plain tea allowed at Peet’s)
Darjeeling
Fancy
Assam Golden Tip, and
Hubei
Silver Tip.
We like the Irish Breakfast for mornings, a good
eye-opener. Pumphrey’s Blend
is a complex blend of five separate black teas, very light and
refreshing in flavor. (It is
also, I’ve discovered, quite an effective
diuretic.
Don’t drink just before going into a long meeting.)
Jasmine tastes like flowers, naturally.
Darjeeling and Assam are also nice.
We’re not too happy with the Russian Caravan.
It’s not actually Russian, that’s just what they decided to name
it, and it has a very smoky flavor, something you don’t quite expect in
a tea. And we can’t even
figure out how to pronounce Hubei Silver Tip.
Nevertheless, I’m sure we have enough tea to last
us through to the end of the year.
Last weekend, “Jeannie” and I got our hair cut, so
there was no time for any movies.
Instead, after finishing at the hairdresser’s, I went up to
“Jeannie’s” place and helped her wait for the delivery of her new
combination washer/dryer.
She had finally decided to replace the non-working one in her townhouse
with more or less the same style of stacked machines.
It was a lot less expensive than having the plumbing adjusted to
allow the washer to be placed in the garage.
Nevertheless, she did have to clean out the garage
since that was how the machine would have to come into the house.
Unlike the
Phone Booth, the washer/dryer was narrow enough to fit through the
garage door. But, since she
had half-cleaned the garage in preparation for the Phone Booth, she was
able to finish the job fairly easily.
I must say, I’ve never seen that garage so clean since she moved
in. There’s almost enough
room for the car.
And I’m happy to report that “Jeannie’s” home no
longer reeks of skunk.
Both upstairs and downstairs are quite habitable again.
And I doubt that Big White Kitty (aka “Stinky”) has been that
white in years. That’s
because of all the shampoos he endured.
As for everyone who informed me that
tomato juice is
considered the sovereign cure for skunking, “Jeannie” assures me that
the very first thing she did was try to drown the cat in
V8 Juice.
Love, as always,
Pete
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