Hiding from life by reading. This will not be a proof and print letter, and so I apologize from the start of this missive for the typos. I hope it will not be too bad but...

I am happy that you have found a way to still scan my letters and I will now have to give you something worth posting. It is not that I have lost the ability to communicate, it is just that hiding from life by reading books seems to be the way I am coping with the funk. I am in another of those low periods, and as such have not been keeping up with all the mundane tasks of keeping my various papers filed away in their proper places.

Two things I have been doing are reading the newspapers as they come in, and curling up with the books you have sent. I have already finished four of them: The Professional by Edwin Fadiman Jr.; Role of Honor (James Bond) by John Gardner; Deception Point by Dan Brown; In The Presence of Enemies by William J. Coughlin.

I have also been working through the daily NY Times crossword puzzles and am getting to the point where I can handle Monday through Thursday without too much difficulty.

Your letter arrived the same day as the PC magazine and they had a brief review of document handlers. I tore out the pages and put them with your letter for when I wrote back, and now where the hell is that letter? Well it will surface soon. I am a little behind in the weekly review of the papers and have about three weeks to go through.

How is the job search going? [Editor: Still unemployed, thanks for asking.] If you end up collecting any unemployment, I am pretty sure it increases the premiums that your former employer has to pay for that part of the program but I am not sure. Filing an age discrimination lawsuit would be an uphill battle to be sure. Why enrich the pockets of some greedy lawyer anyhow? That is assuming you got someone to take the case on a contingency basis.

Speaking of your former employer, I wonder how much money those full page ads in the NY Times cost? Did you catch the item about the mid-week day off over in India for those outsource companies due to some kind of border protest? That will teach the corporate big shots a lesson for all the outsourcing they have been doing.

On the bright side if you are still unemployed, what's not to love? Daytime bike rides and baseball playoffs. Where is the downside?

I am enclosing another page from the latest Hamilton catalog that lists the videos and DVD's they have. I do not know if you are interested in them at all but you cannot beat the price. I'm not sure how they have King Kong in color but perhaps that is part of the Ted Turner collection that he had computer colored.

I bought one of those monster Microsoft Access developers’ books and I have been working my way through it. Give me my old DOS-based database! Do you really need to be able to capture ten or more different events as each character is typed in? Key Down, Key Up, Key Press (Which has different information than the first two events, but is triggered at the same time.) Well I am reading some of it each night; I then will need to write up a proposal for the proposed database for the chapel.

I will send you an updated "books I have read" list soon. In the meantime: novels, non-fantasy, and mix up the genre and you are good to go. I will let you know once I get down to the last one or two books from this last shipment. I do not want to get such a big collection of books to read. As I think I mentioned before, ten or so books a month is probably the limit of what I can realistically read. I will add some more thoughts on this too.  ¶ 7:27 AM