Dear Folks:

Although I just wrote you last night I guess another letter won’t be wrong after I laid off for a while.  After recall we usually manage a volleyball game with teams from the other offices, then follow it up with a shower before supper.  Now that I have showered and ate, I feel pretty good and ready to relax or get in a bridge game tonight.  With the abundance of avocadoes on the nearby trees we usually have one for dinner and supper, although I can’t remember ever eating one in the states.  Well the school kids are starting school again and everyday the little Japs etc trapaise by on the road on the long walk home.  They look about the same anywhere I guess.  I saw a class of small children at the Catholic parochial school and what a variety of brands.  From the whitest to the blackest and shades in between.

Tomorrow is my day off and while I’m in town I think I’ll have the photographer work on me.  Perhaps I can make the pictures suffice for Christmas presents.  My friend in Washington is sending me a book—she always writes regularly and I consider her a very close friend.

I hope my allotments are arriving regularly and in the right amounts.  Being so far away from the War Department offices we have many cases of incorrect and delayed allotments and I wouldn’t want to have them get messed up.  Handling these things, together with other personnel work is the job that I am in, and I think it is one of the most desirable jobs in the regiment.

My Reader’s Digest came yesterday but it immediately starts the rounds in the billet and so far I’ve just read the jokes and shorts.

And of course the first of the month is that day that we are rewarded for efforts, payday, so I suppose the dice and cards will see plenty of action tonight although our billet seldom gets away from the bridge games long enough to try their luck.

I guess I’m like everyone else in enjoying the Free Press and especially the comments about the servicemen.  Now perhaps I can keep track of those monkeys that made high school and after, the clutter of mischief and fun that those years were.  I think I’d rather see Bill Emick more than any other one fellow.  I wonder when you were digging around among the stuff I left you, came across my old model planes.  You know I get a hankering to get out a bottle of glue and wood and start on another one.  I guess the gas model is pretty well beat up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I someday patched it up again, even if my glasses are an inch thick.

I heard a broadcast of Winston Churchill’s speech from Canada last night and also the Pope’s today.  It seems pretty certain that the culmination of the war is in the home stretch, and our turn to swing the final punch, but too much optimism is not good.

The mountains look beautiful in their purple robes as the sun goes down, and the ocean is deep blue and quiet, so I’ll get in this mood too and take it easy for the rest of the night.  I guess this (is) goodnight and the end of another column.

Love,