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Prison Pete

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Monday, April 18, 2005
  Learning to touch type (again).
Well, it is 2:50 PM Monday afternoon. Mail call is eminent (yeah, love the spell checker). I have been sitting at the table along the outer wall since 12:30 PM. I have actually been typing the entire time.

I have typed two legal letters, and three changes of address letters and a list of my current magazine subscriptions. Yeah, I am spending the 37¢ times three, $1.11 to save you some time. It feels so good to take responsibility for myself.

I am teaching myself to touch type again, this time with the QWERTY layout. I am using the same method that I used when I learned to touch type with the Dvorak layout. I have attached a typed layout like the one following to the typewriter and am beginning to get the hang of it.

DVORAK

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 [ ]
' , . P Y F G C R L / =
A O E U I D H T N S -
; Q J K X B M W V Z

QWERTY

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =
Q W E R T Y U I O P ¼ [
A S D F G H J K L : "
Z X C V B N M , . ?

I have noticed that my mind tries to override and resort to the Dvorak layout. There is a noticeable difference in the amount of traveling my fingers must do with QWERTY. I feel like I am attending a Catholic Mass. Stand, sit, kneel, stand, kneel, sit, kneel. My fingers must go up, down, home row, left hand, right hand, etc., etc, etc.

With Dvorak, all the most commonly used letters including all of the vowels are on the home row; with QWERTY, all of the LEAST commonly used letters are on the home row, and the only vowel on the QWERTY home row is "A" (it is in the same position in QWERTY and Dvorak; the only other letter in the same position is "M").

I hope that sending blog posts and maybe making the letters a little shorter is working for you. I do not want you to feel slighted or think that I am using you to get stuff on the blog. I just think it might save you time in the long run.

As time goes on, (hopefully no more than a year!) and with your suggestions along the way, the posted stuff will require minimal effort on your part. You could still take parts of my letters, like the bit about touch-typing, and make a post out of that if you want. Let me know any ideas or suggestions that you have that will make your life easier.

It is so strange to have so much free time. At the feds, by this time I would already be locked in a cell. Here we had the count at 11:15 AM, which takes about five minutes while we sit on our bunk, and now I do not have to be back on the bunk till 5:25 PM.

I did not go to lunch today (turkey stew?) and instead had a can of tuna with lemon and fresh onions. I used two slices of American cheese. It is the kind of cheese where each slice is individually wrapped. I divide each slice in quarters and put it on a saltine, add a spoonful of tuna, and lunch is served.

I am probably skipping dinner, which is meatballs, also. I really want to drop a few pounds and I need to get my cholesterol down. Plus the tuna fish is more than enough to carry me to 6:00 PM and then I can have some peanut butter sandwiches. Eating "dinner" at 4:00 PM is just too early.

Well, I am going to take a little break now and pack up the typewriter for a bit. I wonder what mail call will hold. It is now 3:25 PM.

Actually now it is 3:40 PM because I printed out a draft and made the necessary corrections up to this point.

Okay, I am now typing without the memory.

I received your letter today along with a little message from the mailroom. I have requested the full copy of the directive so I can find what "except as provided below" might mean, although I doubt it will mean anything good. I do not know if the directives are on the web or not but I will let you what I come up with in reading the directive.

The rest of your envelope was all blogs with no note or letter from you. The date on the postmark was illegible. So if a letter was in it, it needs to be resent.

This might be just another reason to have blog writers send me the pages themselves, five at a time if they are willing to correspond directly.

I was down to two or three day backlog on the New York Times and then I received Wednesday through Saturday in today's mail.

I am off to take a shower and then snuggle in for the night.
 
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