December 14, 1973 (Letter from Leslie)

Greetings.  Am sitting in my room and dug up an old favorite to listen to:  Emerson, Lake, and Palmer -- the first album.  Love the keyboards.

Last Saturday Steppenwolf's 16 Greatest Hits came from RCA -- it is a good selection of songs with some really good dance songs.

Your journal must be becoming an immense size -- I, unfortunately, haven't been writing in mine at all, I get bogged down by the amount of things I want to say and say to myself-- I can't write all that, so I don't' and there are long periods of inaction.  Even so I've written more this year than the previous two years combined.

Last week was a real joy, but if all goes well, after this coming Monday I will be all finished.  On Monday of this week I had to hand in a flow chart that was a real pain to set up.  I enjoyed doing the final drawing, (used 4 colors -- red, blue, brown, black) though and got an OK on it.  If it was possible Burgess would probably put OK on my transcript as a mark for this course -- he's so vague and forgetful that's really annoying.  He always forgets to tell our class things that we would like to know, like when and what of the final.

Ahh -- just put on another old favorite -- side three of Live at Fillmore East.  Back to finals -- on Wednesday I had my final in Lib605 -- the Reference Process -- know some of the things I did wrong but no way I could get less than a B as I went into the final with an A.  Also going back to Monday.  I picked up the takehome part of my final for Information Processing.   Ugh pick one out of 4 to answer and I don't like any of them.  So on this Monday I will hand that part in, take the in class part and probably take Burgess' final and be all finished.

Even though I am going to be in Albany through spring '75 I still check out the job board to see if there's anything interesting.  Nicest job so far was for as asst ref librarian in Boston.  Also have thoughts of becoming a map librarian, but for that I need to greatly improve my German and it would be nice to be able to read French.  Knowing how ambitious I am, will just have to see how things progress.

For plant life, I now have 3 cacti in my room.  One is a golden barrel cactus -- and I have transplanted it into a green pot I threw in high school.  The other two area in a bean pot I found in the attic, also in the pot with them is the little cross-legged man which I also made in high school (my most productive years in sculpture, ceramics, and graphic arts).

Now playing is Hot Rats with Peaches en Regalia on top.  Mmmm.  Did I tell you that my car has improved gas wise?  There were some pieces missing in the carburator.  Now I get almost 18 mpg and hopefully will get a couple more when the timing is readjusted.  I bought a new valve cover gasket and have plans to put that on tomorrow and then maybe the oil consumption will slow down a bit.  Since I haven't heard anything I imagine your Beetle is running okay.

That's it for now -- take care of yourself.

P.S.  My phone number is 518-372-1764 if you need to get in touch with me in a hurry about your plans for this vacation.