Day Books: Letter to Cousin Elita (10/08/95)

10/08/95 09:25 AM (Sun) Freeman Lake

Dear Cousin Airman 1st Class

(I like it ... you're stuck with it ... get used to it!)

Let's see, this is gonna be 9510a1c.doc 'cause this is, like, Oct'95 and your're an A1C. Clever?

I got your letter the other day ... undated, no return address ... <sigh!> ... I can see that this relationship is something that we're both going to have to work on. (And yes, I did end that sentence with a preposition!)

Things would be so different
If they were not as they are ...
If I were more demanding
Or she were less obedient ...

Hmmm ... I wonder where that came from? Anywho, as an archivist, I am (by definition) somewhat anal, and you've taken me quite by surprise. My mother dates everything she sends me, particularly photographs. Seeing as how you're in the military, I guess you don't keep or acquire much. I personally think that's a Good Thing. OTOH, I have all of the letters that mom, pop, and my sister have sent me since I lived in Rochester, NY back in the 1970s. They're all in zip-loc plastic bags (big, two gallon mothers) sorted by year. Well, the early years are also grouped by month with rubber bands, but that's a waste of resource because they only crumble after a few years anyway.

So, the folder for mail from you (I've gotten a LOT more organized over the decades) will be OK so long as I keep the envelopes with the letters. But you see, I've started keeping you letters flat because they're on 8½x11 paper, so I'm using paper clips to hold the envelopes to the pages, and I recently uncovered some typed manuscripts from 1973 that had gotten wet over the years, and the rust stains from the staples and paper clips have saturated pages that were not stapled or clipped, so I'm using plastic bags that I used to buy only for my magazines and oversized comix.

At the moment, I'm writing this as I sit at my Friendly Neighborhood Greasy Spoon. Every community has a kind of Dew Drop Inn that's the local watering hole. I'm sure there's one in Cheyenne Mountain where you go slumming to catch up on the local gossip from the townies, a place off-base where you can get a cough-a-cupee (cup-a-coffee?) that didn't come out of a filter that was O.D. green and a pot that was built to MilSpec by the lowest bidder. :-)

Hey, remember, cuz ... I write the software that helps turn your hardware from Art to Part. (part - n. - A thing that when you drop it on your foot, it hurts.) I'm too lazy to re-read my last letter to you, but I think I failed to give you a clear picture of what I do for a living.

In simple terms, my Main Product (as WiZ WORX) is a software tool kit. It's a library of subroutines that the customer uses to create a translator for CAD/CAM/CAE (Computer Aided Design/ Manufacturing/ Engineering) models of parts. They need to translate these parts because the system used to design them is usually not the same system that is used to manufacture them. I charge $5,000.00 for the source code, and $50.00 an hour to integrate it with their code to make a functional translator, or they can pay some in-house grunt $15.00 to $20.00 an hour to do it. (I was getting $26.00 an hour when I got laid off, and hadn't written a line of code for my employer in the five years that I was on their payroll - I paid my dues ten years ago!)

As I'm fond of repeating, "I'm the best there is at what I do." I just can't get people to pay me to do it anymore, so I'm learning a new skill set Even As We Speak ... I'm becoming a WebMaster, a profession that did not exist until about a year ago.

Very Soon Now, I will have the e-mail address webmaster@fps.org, and a business that offers "A resting place on the infobahn™" for Family Preservation Societies. The idea is that people will pay me to put their family history on the Internet and keep it there forever, for a fee -- we put the money in the bank and collect the interest every month/quarter/year as our operating fee -- it's a self-perpetuating source of income!!

So, what I sent you about the Harrods, Greenfields, etc., is what I'm using to advertize my wares ... give me that old shoe box full of family photos, I'll organize and scan them, you identify them and fill in the blanks, and I'll cross-link the names and pictures so that you can "crawl the web" that connects them.

The magic is that there is no Master Index that lists all of the components ... I have absolutely no idea of how many pictures there are of me or my mother or any of my relatives in any and all combinations. The only thing can do is make sure that each picture points to at least one other picture or file for each of the people in the picture. For example, I have several pictures of my cousin Warren S. Wilkins, Jr. - the millionaire with the house in Beverly Hills that looks down on Madonna's mansion on the other side of the canyon - and his family with Carter, Harrod, and Williams relatives (including myself) who have visited with them over the years. Each of those pictures needs to point to at least two other pictures showing each group of people in the picture either alone or with another family group member.

DON'T PANIC!! This will all become much clearer when you see the new Greenfield pages that I'm adding. I've got about 15 pictures to link together as my first cut at the Greenfield FPS Pages, with about seven individuals in the photos. I really have to thank you for your letter ... it is the "spur" I needed to get out of my funk and start working on these Web pages again. :-)

To get back to the Here & Now ... I just drove 25 miles and back to collect my mail for the week from my box in Concord, MA. The fall foliage is in Full Bloom, so I snapped some pictures. Here's a few Polaroids to hold you until I can get the 35mm film processed and transferred to Kodak PhotoCD. I'm using my laptop (Baby Huey, a Hewlett Packard 386/25 with a 6Mb of RAM and a 80Mb hard drive) to write this. I'll transfer the file to Brucilla when I get home and use the HP LaserJet (or the Canon color ink jet) to print a copy to mail to you.

I usually collect my mail once a week (it's a 45 minute drive round-trip) and then go to one of three places with sufficient surface-comma-horizontal-comma-flat (i.e., a Big F-ing Table, or "BFT") to let me separate and sort the "junque" from the Good Stuff, and where they'll let me smoke while I consume mass quantities of caffeine. (Rule to live by ... "Any place that offers a bottomless cup of coffee is a Good Place; patronize it often, and savor the memories of it until you can find another one like it.")

I'm kind of hoping that I've found a place where I can settle down. Once, a long time ago, I had five different apartments within the span of 18 months. Yeah, I know that's only like six three-month assignments, but it's not the life I signed up for. One of them involve a few months cohabitation with a woman who has subsequently spent the last 15 years quite happily with the same female lover, but that's a story for another day. :-)

I like my little cottage on the lake, and being able to set up my telescope, leave it on the front patio for an hour while I run some errands in town, and not have to worry about it while I'm gone. The only problem is that it costs $800 a month, and I only make a $5,000.00 sale three or four times a year ... $9,600 a year for rent on a $15K-$20K income is not easy, so I have Massive Debt on my credit cards. <heavy sigh!>

Well, I've smoked enough cigarettes, drunk enough coffee, and the battery is getting Seriously Low, so I guess it's time to wrap this.

Now, in your next letter, I want your personal reaction to the Give Me Liberty story and the principal character, Martha Washington ... especially your reaction to the ending. I remember a spirited discussion on CompuServe's Comix Forum a few years ago while we were waiting for the last issue to be released, and our reactions to how it ended. Pretend like it's a book report, but for a college psych course, not a high school literature course.

Have a better one!

Dennette, Jr.

P.S. (05:07 10-Oct-95)

The sun will rise at 06:49 this morning in Eastern Massachusetts ... I was out on my dock about an hour ago, looking at the almost full moon hanging high in the southwestern sky. It's just two days past the Full Moon. It rained a lot last week, but the sky cleared and the sun came out on Sunday after I had written the above letter. This morning, the wind was calm and the lake was like a mirror, with a few wisps of mist only a half meter thick drifting to the south across the surface. On the other side, in the darkness, I could here the honking of geese as they awoke, regrouped, and prepared to take flight for the day as soon as sunlight hits the lake.

With the rising sun will come the wind, and the lake will become choppy with white-capped waves ... if the humidity and temperature are right, there will be a fog that quickly burns off. Some mornings are so foggy that just a few yards away it becomes a featureless white wall, and the tops of the nearest trees are lost in it. On mornings like that, I can't see the house from the end of the dock, but I can hear the fish splashing at my feet, and the engines of cars coming down the hill (and occasionally see their dim, distant headlights, if they have turned on their high-beams).

This is a special time for me, a magic time. When I went to the bathroom to do my ablutions for the morning prayer, I noticed that there was a lot of light coming in the window from the back yard. I looked outside and saw shadows, so I went to the bay window that faces the lake and saw the moonlight through the autumn leaves of the oak trees. There are only a few mornings each month when the full moon is high in the sky the hour before sunrise, and often the weather is cloudy, so I have to take my pleasures when they are available.

As I stood on the dock in a light jacket and watch cap, enjoying the silence and the smells, I thought about how it is nearly time to take the dock out of the water for the winter, and this would probably be the last time that I could enjoy a morning like this until next spring. The lake will freeze completely sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and should stay that way at least until my birthday in mid-February. I'll see the next Full Moon from the beach, bundled against the frost.

I have often stood on the ice in the middle of the lake under the full moon, surrounded by a carpet of new fallen snow, the only sound the shushing of the ice crystals being blown by the wind, making little dust-devils that sparkle in the moonlight. The ducks and geese are long gone, and won't be back for months ... the longest night of the winter, with the moon at it's highest transit of the year. Damn close to the coldest night of the year, too, and I'm wearing two layers of socks in my insulated boots, and a hooded sweatshirt under my $200 L.L. Bean hooded coat of space-age Gortex® and Thinsulate®. Maybe not the next full moon, but the one after that ... if the lake freezes early this year. (Certainly the one after Christmas.)

I've been up all night scanning Carter family snapshots and making Web pages for them. I came to the local Dunkin' Donuts for coffee & sinkers while I proof read the 17 new pages of material ... I have over 20 photos for which still have to make pages, and I want to finish them ASAP so that I can get on to other projects, like the Greenfield FPS photos and pages.

-=DAH=-

Last update: 23-Oct-95 by <dennette@wiz-worx.com>