Help! My to-do list is a mile or two long. For each task I cross off, two more appear in its place! Why, you ask? Peter (my son) is getting married on Saturday. We are all so pleased. His Melanie is terrific and has him well in control (!) Except for valiantly trying to reduce that list, I have been reading only junk. i.e. mysteries. Not the ones that require a brain, like Dorothy Sayers. Those that require not too much by way of active brain cells (good thing: I have 1 1/2 left), but allow me to escape for an hour or ten minutes. Mysteries by authors like Madalyn Alt (I could use a witch to calm things down around here) and Victoria Laurie (likewise a psychic to tell me whether I will still be sane and breathing on Sunday morning). I am ignoring all the “serious” titles in my stack like Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading. I love books about books and have recently discovered and started devouring Manguel. Then there are the waiting titles that demonstrate my unease in my ability to do just about anything (although this may pass after the wedding):Windows Vista; The Internet; Creating Web Pages; Blogging; and Office 2003 for Dummies, and, in a similar vein, The Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel. What can I say? They (whoever “they” are and why “they” know everything is beyond my comprehension) say everyone has a novel in them, so why shouldn’t I try? As for the rest: I was born in the age of b/w TV, cassette recorders, manual typewriters, and having to go to a theater to see a movie. It’s a whole new world, and I’m having fun even though I stumble a bit.
Constance L. Lieber 
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