I’ve scanned a few more letters that had already been transcribed, and transcribed and scanned a few new ones. There’s one from her father. His letters are short and sweet and sporadic, but they always make me smile. I picture him as a frugal sort, because he always tears away the unused portion of the page. All his letters have a ragged bottom edge. Now that the younger kids are out of school, the letters from Esther’s sister Ruth have picked up in frequency. She was a bright, bubbly girl. I think her letters must give a realistic glimpse into what the Munro household was like.
The whole uploading process has been maddening, though, and has taken me most of the afternoon. My internet connection is topping out at a blazing 7 Kbs/sec, and dipping down below 2 Kbs/sec at times. I’m really fed up with the lack of connectivity in the hinterlands. It seems to me that giving rural folks reasonable access to Teh Internets–and by reasonable, I don’t mean anything extravagant–would be something the powers that be might want to work on, but apparently it has not been, and I suspect will not be, any sort of a priority. It’s difficult enough to make AT&T/SBC provide minimal quality for standard phone service. They can’t be arsed to do anything above and beyond that.
Other than that, it’s been nice and quiet this weekend. I managed to finish mowing the, ahem, “yard,” which was some sort of Herculean task. Between one thing and another, I hadn’t mowed in nearly a month, so the grass was thigh-high in some spots. I had to pop a wheelie with the mower for the first pass, then take a couple more passes. And that was on the highest setting. It looks just awful, too, like someone cut it with a butter knife, or maybe a pair of those blunt lefty scissors from kindergarten. Later in the week, I’ll have to go over it again, on a lower setting, to even it up. I’m sure it’s annoying the crap out of my neighbors. Heh. On second thought, maybe I’ll leave it looking scraggly.
red paper boat 