I am perpetually behind on correspondence. Even e-mail, the simplest of communication methods, somehow can be hard to keep under control. So I finally hunkered down in the morning to take care of my outstanding greetings. To anybody who’s sent me a card in the last 2 months, this ought to square us away. I did discover in the process that the new computer does not produce very good photo prints from my printer, so I had to buy postcards instead.

My celebration for this, and the fact that I survived the walk to the post office was to stay indoors pretty much the rest of the day reading. Albert Hourani’s History of the Arab Peoples is a very informative book. It has, however, the liability of reading like it was drafted by committee. I finally gave in to drowsiness and watched a movie in the evening: The Illusionist. Not quite a classic, but enough to keep me awake until the hour was respectable enough to go to sleep.