Get Well Card. First of all thank you for the great card you sent. The wonderful mail room here managed to misdirect it so I did not receive it till Monday.

Also arriving in Monday's mail was a letter from Mom and Dad. The last line in Dad's letter was a P.S. that said "Mom wants to know how the surgery went?" Does that mean to spare him the bloody details? I assume the handwritten notes I mailed out to them and you crossed in the mail.

It is now 8:00 pm and I have to get cracking on this letter.

For the last four nights I have been holding down the TV room from around 6:00 on to be sure that I could watch the half hour of Jeopardy. I was doing well on the final question for the first three days of the week but did not get the answer tonight.

I have plenty to write about, and I am just starting to feel like a functioning human being. The surgeon was only able to do half of the operation. It took him over three hours to just clean my sinus passages. The deviated septum will be done in another three months or so.

I have been working hard on the issues. I spent eight hours last Friday, twelve on Saturday and another eight hours on Sunday at a retreat of sorts titled Residents Encounter Christ. It is sponsored by the Dioceses of the Roman Catholic Church. There were over fourteen volunteers and forty-four inmates that spent all the time together in the gym. We even ate out meals there. It was as close to being out of prison as one could get.

I will be writing more about this event soon but there was one couple that spent the weekend that celebrated their twenty-seventh wedding anniversary on Saturday. They spent the entire day with a bunch on inmates!

I spent most of the time with the musical leader singing myself hoarse and loving the fact that for the first time in over two years I could breathe through my nose! It certainly improved my tonality too.

I had written Mom and Dad and asked them about purchasing an electric razor (along with some new underwear) and also to buy the Yamaha keyboard I mentioned. This one comes with a five track sequencer which would enable me to play five different parts into the sequencer and replay them together. Dad also sent me a few books he thought I might like. So I am eagerly awaiting the three separate packages.

I live in such a loveless environment that when events occur that touch my emotional self, I am lifted up only to come crashing back down. Your humorous card is certainly a prime example of the emotional lift I am writing about.

Fifteen volunteers spending three days with us with plenty of time to just be able to relax and talk one on one is another example.

Certainly there is probably no worse time to be incarcerated than when having major surgery and no one around to give you any TLC! (Your card did do a lot to fill the void though.)

Damn I just opened up my fourth can of Dr. Pepper® today. So much for the one can a day. Now I will have to live with only one more can till Tuesday.

Why do I feel I have the ability to talk on the subject of relationships? First there is my six years of professional counseling, and then there is the ten plus years of being alone. It has giving me lots of time to contemplate the question of how do we get what we need from what we have and not throw away perfectly good resources in searching for things that we either do not really need, or could have had with a lot less collateral damage. The old Wizard of Oz moral, there is no place like home.

In your case why throw out years of marriage and create additional strife in your lives if (and I do realize it is a big if) there is some way to radically change the way your life now happens. On the one hand I feel some sense of closeness with your wife if indeed her excessive time at work is a result of her need for affirmation of her self worth and to possibly avoid dealing with some thorny emotional issues at home that if some effort was made to fight though the thorns, perhaps an entirely different paradigm.

Damn, time flies when you are having fun, it is 9:50 PM time to wrap this up.

The point is that besides taking my emotional self out of its protective cave, I wonder if my trials and tribulations can do even more for your life than helping you realize that even when you are in a funk, compared to my life your life is great.

My wish for both of us is that we can both seek a higher level of peace and happiness, and not years from now.

In my case, I am hoping to make better use of the blog to lay myself open and not only find a few true pen pals, but maybe even a soul mate.  ¶ 10:28 PM