From: Scott McJannet
To: family@mcjannet.com
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2000 3:55 PM
Subject: News from the North-Shoreline McJannets

(it's plural if you count the dog!)

Feels like a game of duck duck goose, but that's okay.

Unfortunately, the reason you haven't heard from me is due to the phenomenal dullness of my life. The most exciting thing that's happened in the last week or two was my cleaning the ashes out of the fireplace downstairs (it was overflowing with broken ceiling tile bits from finishing the basement room a year and a half ago. I thought I could burn them, thereby saving valuable trash-can space, but it turns out that acoustic ceiling tiles are made of the same stuff they use on the space shuttle to protect it from the heat of reentry. They just sit there in the fire, laughing at you, yelling out, "you call this hot? Piffle! A cloudy day puts out more heat than this poor excuse for a fire! C'mon! Bring it on!" I'm thinking of finishing a closet with ceiling tiles on all six surfaces to store any valuables in in case of a house fire).

On the plus side, the mind-numbing boredom which is hanging out with Scott is effectively masked by an insanely busy work and life schedule. This is my last week:

" Hey, sorry 'bout that. It's just been a crazy busy work week or two here, combined with a crazy-busy home life. SSF on Friday, took my first skating lesson Saturday morning, drove to Kent to drop of a bottle 'o vino for Dad, visited A~ in Olympia most of Saturday, single-handedly polished off virtually an entire bottle of Chardonnay, drove back for CC, grabbed five hours sleep, another CC shift Sunday morning, went to work, caught a little sleep, went back to work on Monday, and this week's been just as insane. Worked late Monday, long day yesterday, dinner and PC work with T~, tutoring the poor underprivileged munchkins and hockey tonight, SSF tomorrow night, rebuild T~'s PC (yesterday was not very successful. SIGH) Friday night, skate Sat morning, lay carpet @ gpa saturday afternoon, dinner @ Rocky's saturday night, drop off T~'s PC, back to the CC, get five hours of sleep, back to the CC for a sub shift on Sunday morning, then down to Kent for family game day for my G'ma's birthday...."

SSF is ye old Seattle Shakespeare Festival. Now playing Hamlet, if anyone wants to drop on down on a Thursday or Friday night (@ Seattle Center, starts @ 7:30pm), let me know and I'll comp you in. Hamlet is supposedly VERY cute, girls, and the play is paced at warp-speed to avoid the boredom factor of listening to an indecisive Dane whine for three hours.

Ice skating remains very fun, but if you'd asked me six months ago to predict a GRAND TOTAL amount of time I'd spend ice skating in my life, I might have said "six hours". And now it seems like I'm spending my entire life falling down onto the bruising ice. And I am here to tell you, water SEEMS awful nice when you're just drinking it on a hot day. But when you fall down on it in frozen form, it more than gets its revenge for the slaughter of glassful after glassful of its kin. Man was not made to live on ice, standing only on thin blades.

My house remains... empty. A couch here. Boxsprings lying on the floor there. Nothing on the walls anywhere (except for Alicia's painting!). My big house purchase this quarter has been (brace yourself!) second sets of sheets for the beds!

Tutoring rocks. I run a chess club for the kids (don't even get me started on the benefits of kids playing chess and the studies documenting their improvements in grades and on and on and on) and tutor on Wednesdays. It's wonderful, because all their questions are grade school questions. You ALWAYS know the answer. You're omniscient from their perspective. It's really quite gratifying.

Crisis clinic (CC above) rocks. My weekly dose of "there, but for the grace of God, go I..." Stories of Seattle's perpetually mentally ill to abstract and regale my friends with.

Mr. Fish still leads a full and personally fulfilling life of chasing balls.

The pool table doesn't get near enough use. Stop by, for pity's sake, play a few racks!

Honestly. Nothing to write home about. Or to all your homes about. Dull as sin. And all the juicy stuff, well, you know I'd tell YOU, but knowing the parents are on the maillist as well urges me to caution.

Immer sein,
-Scott