Perils of Paper

I love my newspapers. I love my books. I love magazines (most especially The New Yorker).

But they get out of control. They threaten. One wonders if there will soon be shoulder-width paths and they'll be collapsing on the bed and invading the ill-used oven. If we'll be found in a sure enough fire hazard.

Today I'm trying to control the papers. At least the ones right next to my chair (all at least two days old). Maybe I'll attack the last couple of days (minus a few sections I've tossed) on the table.

Maybe I'll get to these. They crept into this bin in the last cleanup because there was still something I wanted to read.

When I read the papers, I find books I want to read by reading reviews. Yesterday I bought this one and started reading it instead of finishing even the day's papers.

And...it supplanted the book about Edward Lear that I was reading bedside and am getting close to finishing.

Maybe if I get through the papers I can attack the piles of magazines.

It's not like I read every word. Since we get The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the local paper (The Austin American-Statesman), and, from time to time, various give away rags, there is repetition. Sometimes of the exact story when the local paper picks up and truncates the story from the NYT. I glance over the obituaries of the famous in the national papers and the locals (paid for relatives) in the local paper. Did I know them? How old? How did they die? I usually start the day with the Arts Section of the NYT. I try to work the Ken-Ken and crossword. I make a copy on M-W for my husband to try. I usually then read anything in that section that interests me. An art exhibit, film or theater review. A book review. (I really want to read that. Oh. No.) Later I may get to puzzles in the other papers. And the front page stories. I don't read sports. Directly to recycling, thank you. I am interested in tennis, but there is so little about tennis I don't bother to look. Except maybe during Grand Slam events.

Certain sections of the paper tend to suck me into long reads. Sunday NYT's Sunday Review can have one or two fascinating, not-to-be scanned stories. I can dispense with Style sections in a trice, however. I often find things that I want to find online and post on social media so others can see them and discuss them.

When I have these great ideas about cleaning out it usually ends like it did today: ink on my hands, a few sacks for recycling and, no, I'm not caught up. But I love the papers.

Welcome Back to the Stacks

It's December 1. I haven't posted on this blog since January 1. I was participating in Holidailies then and I'm doing it again this year. Who even writes blogs these days? Well, a number of people do, I suppose. So far, thirty-four have signed up for Holidailies. And we are loading a picture a day (with a brief bit of verbiage most days) on Austin, Texas Daily Photo and have been for over ten years. But the Visible Woman? She's been invisible.

I think about writing (either in a blog or a private journal or maybe working on the memoirs and novels in my head). But, when I'm not at my computer, I think: I'll just 'conquer this pile of newspapers' and then I'll go in there and write or even just write on my phone or iPad which are right beside me often. When I'm in my easy chair (as I too often am these days), a little table is to my right. (See above.) There is a coaster (barely visible) for my coffee or water. And, too often, there is that teetering pile of newspapers. I don't want to toss them into recycling until I've checked out the contents. Also, all too often, the first section I pick up has an especially intriguing article. That happened today. I allowed myself to look through the NY Times Arts Sections for today (there are two on Friday) and to try to work the Ken-Ken and crossword. (Couldn't quite finish the latter.) Then I determinably started through the pile beginning with yesterday's papers. This special section, a part of a series on end of life, caught me right away. I had to read it to the end. I had to find it online. Not just for the permalink for this entry but to view the pictures on the computer.

And the stack of newspapers is hardly diminished. And all the rest of today's Times, the local rag (The American-Statesman) and today's Wall Street Journal are piled on the dining room table where my husband has perhaps rifled through Op-Eds, obituaries and some sports.

But today I have decided to write something. A first Holidailies entry of the season. I intend to blog every day through January 1. But if you read the article above and ponder the story of the Japanese woman with her auto-biography typed up, ready to probably be incinerated when she dies, you may wonder why any of us write anything. And yet we persist. And, yes, I still intend to conquer that pile of papers (and another one set aside in a basket across the room) and a pile of magazines. Return and see how I do and thanks for reading.

The Chair: A Documentary

I had this idea a few years ago. It will remain one of my many unrealized notions. I have offered it to others and you, dear reader, are free to purloin it, too.

It would be a documentary film. It would be called "Chair." One would interview people of a certain age or those who are disabled and must spend time in a small space with things within reach.

The interviews would be cut up and interspersed with others as the participants explored similar things nearby. Imagine me, in the red chair to the left, and my husband (the long-suffering FFP) in the yellow chair at the right.

Yes, I read a lot of newspapers in my chair. I will leave the days' papers on the dining table to my right until the evening although I'll often bring them to my chair, get the lap board down there between the couch and chair and work a puzzle. The ones I haven't read pile up on the little rolling end table to my right. I also have my water or coffee there a lot of times. Or, in the evening, maybe a Manhattan mixed by FFP. As I read them I toss them on the couch. We don't have a lot of company so we use the couch arms and couch for piling things up to have them nearby. Our lap blankets are there in the winter. (They go inside the rolling end table in the warm weather.) When the pile of papers on the couch gets voluminous I take it to the bin we use to recycle paper. On the arm of the couch, I usually keep a paper notebook, various pens, an iPad. There is a Flash connector charger plugged in behind the couch and I can easily reach the plug. I usually put my iPhone here when I'm in the chair. Shoes come off when I go into the chair so there are sometimes one or two pairs on the floor. When this picture was taken, there were a book and a magazine on the couch arm. I think FFP offered these as ones I should read. We have a universal remote for the entertainment center across the room. It is usually by one of our chairs. I often keep a box of Kleenex between the couch and the chair as well as a trash can.

Imagine FFP in his chair. Quite a selection of books queued up or in progress. Magazines, too. He has a lamp, a lapboard, Kleenex, and will often have a cup of tea or coffee.

We really don't spend all our days ensconced in our chairs And the people in the movie who spend more time in their 'nests' will have even more things, won't they?. Prescription drugs, for example. A land line phone.

And it all tells a story, but, admittedly, not a very interesting one!

The Curse of the Newsprint

Next to my reading chair in the house we moved out of over five years ago. This has to be the biggest the pile ever got!

The Visible Woman...reeds.

I want to be well-read and informed. When I retired (11 years ago), I wanted to learn new things. I wanted to keep up with the news and learn about news I simply missed while worrying about work and school for over three decades.

We take three newspapers. We take several magazines including the word-rich weekly The New Yorker. We buy books. We give each other books.

I read rather slowly and when I'm interested in an article or book I like to savor it until the end. I discovered years ago that FFP reads about four times faster than I do. We were propped up in bed reading. I looked over at his book and started reading along only to see the page turn when I was halfway down the left-hand side.

We have shelves for books to pile up on. I don't care about most of the magazines and while The New Yorker issues multiply we can usually get rid of a lot of them, knowing that the articles are on the electronic edition.

But I have trouble controlling the newspapers. Even since I retired. (I was, in fact, retired when that picture was taken above. Note the paper sack filled with papers? I was preparing the discarded ones for recycling.)

Some sections I throw away straightaway without reading a word. Mostly sports. Business sections if they are a day or two old and a headline on the front doesn't grab me by the throat.

But certain sections can take me down the rabbit hole for hours. The Arts section of The New York Times. Not only will a couple of articles about plays, movies, dance and visual arts intrigue me, but there are puzzles. The puzzles are like candy or crack. I can't resist them.

One wonders why I don't just read or reference all this online. But there is nothing like holding the day's offering in your hands, all of it right there. And doing the puzzles on paper, doodling in the margins. I still get irritated at continued articles (especially to other sections!) but I love the format. I love the predictability of where the news and features are placed on certain days of the week. That there are food sections on Wednesday and Science in The New York Times on Tuesday and a crossword I like in The Wall Street Journal on Friday.

I bid you a good Monday morning now. I have a (relatively thin as is appropriate for Monday) stack of papers and my first cup of coffee to deal with. And I always wake up thinking "the Times puzzles will be a pleasant cakewalk and the crossword will have a theme, possibly a clever one ." (They become progressively and devilishly harder through Saturday.)

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

It is not that I never accomplish anything. Slowly, slowly I get things done.

When we aren't out of town I make a little progress managing our financial life every day. I'll pay a bill, record stuff on spreadsheets and Quickbooks, balance with the banks, verify credit card bills.

I move stuff around. I almost never leave a room without picking up shoes, a cup, a glass, something that belongs somewhere else.

And I clean. Why just the other day I cleaned off the stove top. We keep our main pots and pans there and we don't cook much. The lids get dusty or spotted with stuff from the one burner we use. I cleaned everything thoroughly including the stove top itself with the special cleaner. For a bonus I scrubbed out the microwave, cleaned the door and washed the gclass turn table. This took longer than it should.

Today I almost cleaned the master bath. I did everything but use glass cleaner on the shower enclosure and rinse out the tub we never use. (Like the stove top it gets dusty!) This took longer than it should.

I move forward but my pace is just slow. Also I have to claim as accomplishments taking a walk or meeting up with friends.

I even seem to read more slowly than ever, not getting through the papers until late in the day and slowly plowing through my books.

Ah, well. Tomorrow I'm going to accomplish one cleaning task while FFP goes for a massage. And I'm going to 'waste' time reading or working puzzles or taking a walk or going to the gym. After all, I'm retired.

Get Control of the Papers

This picture was taken some time in the late '90's I think. Not sure. Found it in my dad's stuff. Perhaps my mother shot it with her camera. And, yes, I look like one of those 'paper and bones' ladies surrounded as I am by newspapers and magazines I'm trying to sort. Or read. Or something. I see a precipitous pile of magazines on a table in the room, too. This was our media room and the place we sat in chairs and watched TV for a while until we moved that activity mostly to the bedroom. We also entertained in this large room. You know, when it wasn't so messy!

I have a real love/hate thing with newspapers. I love getting my three papers every day really. (Except on Sundays. Then only two.) And, of course, we pick up those weekly give away Chronicles and get a West Austin News in the mail every week.

I hate the way they pile up, taunting me. If I try to trim the pile down, quickly tossing the sports pages, some business sections, ads, etc. then I end up with a smaller but, in a way denser, pile of arts sections, interesting front pages, metro sections (gotta read those obits). When we moved to the condo, I had to do a better job of controlling the accretion. I decided to use two bins I had. One would hold that day's papers (assuming they weren't stacked on the dining table or beside my chair). One would hold those sections I couldn't bring myself to discard and the ones I hadn't even sorted. When the latter got too unwieldy...I'd do something about it, by golly. I usually do. Although lately there have been some tough times and getting reading done didn't seem to be in the cards.

Plus when I settle in and read the papers it depresses me. The bad news, of course. But also the things I just don't know about that seem to be dispatches from another world. You would think, with all this newspaper reading that I would know a lot about world issues, local issues, politics, the arts. But really. No.

And yet I can't give up the papers. I do get lots of news on RSS feeds, through links on social media, from the TV and even sometimes on the radio. But. I need to be a person who gets the papers. I am a newspaper reader. I need to work the Monday New York Times crossword and feel that smug satisfaction of getting the puns or whatever. Yeah, yeah, Monday is easy. Sometimes I can work the Wednesday or Thursday one. Or the Sunday magazine. Without cheating too much.

It's been a rough day. FFP was sick this weekend but is getting better, I hope. (He's got the energy to take a load of papers down to recycling!) Actually getting sick after his surgeries and recoveries was an unnecessary blow I thought. And so it goes. I guess I'll go read some papers. And work that Monday crossword. I am so lame.

What Would You Pay For?

If you are reading this (all three or four of you), I know that you will give your mouse or tracking device a nudge or two and sit still long enough to look at the picture and read a sentence. Much has been made about the fate of paper and ink journalism of late and how, as they migrate content online, we are mostly not willing to do more than get access to the Internet and click. Apparently this is a result of many things, one of which may be that your fellow denizens of cyberspace are willing to slave away on blogs that are pretty good journalism in some cases...and let you in with not so much as a plea for donations.

Today's SundayStyles in The New York Times has an article about fallow blogs. It pretty concisely chronicles what happens to these vehicles...people start a different blog, move to other social media, feel misunderstood by readers who are friends, get tired of publicity or are disappointed that blogging for free doesn't lead to wealth and fame and an ink and paper contract.

Says here that the joke is that these blogs "have an audience of one." That amused me because I often feel that way but...it doesn't bother me a bit. Creating these things makes a nice record of this and that and I can refer to it later to bolster my terrible memory. (We saw Norman Lear on TV today and FFP was asking about when we saw him in person and I asked him a question. In three seconds a Google search directed at an old blog yielded an entry with a quote from the man's answer to my question that I'd forgotten.)

Anyway, back to paying for it. I never expect to make money with writing based on these blog entries (or based on anything really). (Yes, I know you are nodding. Or at least I'm nodding if me, myself, my audience is reading this later.) I never expect to sell my reflection photo series either. [Thanks to a Second Street shop called Miss Behave for this one.]

But, for myself, I would pay to read stuff. I do, in fact, pay an annual fee for a ad-less, enhanced online dictionary. I would pay to read some of the blogs I like. I'm not much of an ad-clicker, but I'd pay a small fee to view some blogs. The problem with this model is figuring out when to charge and how to take the stress out and make people realize what they are getting. I think you'd need to give people unlimited re-views for a period of time (just like I can get in my newspaper or on my dictionary site) and, of course, the sites would have to have predictable, quality content like The Times but not like this blog (or maybe yours).

Meanwhile, I'll write my blogs and hope to remember my life. I regret not doing the exhaustive 'journal' of olden days either in public or in private. To think I once publicly announced all my meals and snacks. Wait. I'd pay for someone else to follow me around and create that! Or. Maybe not.

I'm easily entertained...

...but also easily bored.

In the presence of words (almost any book, magazine or newspaper will do but spare me the Sports section with no news of tennis and Romance novels) I am almost always be entertained. I may be distracted by something else and lose track of the reading, but I won't be bored. I read the program at concerts and events before they begin (assuming I haven't taken a magazine). I read ads. Pictures are nice, too.

Give me a keyboard and the right mood and I can type until the cows come home. My dad used to whistle for them to do that on the old 60-odd acre home place at about dusk. But I could type on until midnight. I may not say a thing but I will produce a stream of letters formed into English words but the sentences may make sense, alone or together. I will even invent initialisms like HQWF (How Quickly We Forget). Even though I hate them. Laugh out loud! Not going to abbreviate it.

I can people watch endlessly, browse the WEB and, even, read old online and handwritten journals by yours truly for hours on end.

Unless I get distracted.

I am easily bored in some ways. Playing tennis the other day with someone who never runs after an errant ball and who strolls into position to receive, back turned, holding up her hand and saying 'wait a minute' strains me. So I start observing things and entertaining myself. Noticing how the uniforms (all red outfits, all white visors) on some players down the way look, wondering what weeds have opportunistically poked through the cracks in the awful court we are using, considering the resemblance of the Lacrosse player practicing on the half court behind us to a send-up painting of a kid with a backwards cap on the cover of The New Yorker a few years back on the anniversary issue. (Supposed to be a Gen X version of Eustace Tilly he was.) And so it goes until I get a chance to touch ball to strings. Or to serve. I like serving because I get to hit more balls. Two aces Tuesday. I don't hit hard but I move it around. I've been writing a poem in my head about math, tennis and boredom. I work on it sometimes while I'm bored at tennis.

Fractal branches cast fractal shadows against the order of the lines.
Perpendicular lines and partial lines carving the court into rectangles.
Spaces of in and out and fault and ace. Rules about touching and missing.
Why twenty-seven feet? Or twenty-one? A three-foot net at the middle.
I see a pattern and yet not. Only one prime in sight. But I digress, interrupted
By caroms in three space, arcs predictable except for spin and striking
Nails in the tape to hold the lines to the clay surface. How far apart?
How distracted and yet focused the math makes the tennis and the ennui.

No, that isn't the poem. It's just random lines I constructed just now to illustrate.

I have been writing a short story in my head (although it might be a novel or a novella or a part of a novel) for a long while about a guy hitting tennis balls on the very court where I played Tuesday so I thought about that when things were going. too. slowly. I like how some online writers invented the technique of adding extra periods to slow you down as you read. The story has a bicycle rider and an SUV and so when I see a bike go by and then an SUV I visualize what the protagonist (a guy from Odessa, Texas, I'm not sure why) sees through the fence and wind screen.

Yeah, I'm easily bored and yet, sometimes, when I flip from running my iMac as an Apple to the window running XP under VMware and it has gone into a screen saver mode and is showing my own picture collection to me I just sit there, watching pictures I've already seen over and over for a few minutes. But in front of the TV with the satellite hookup and a DVR with captured episodes of this and that I can be so completely bored and unable to be engaged that I have to get up and get something to read.

I watch a lot of TV and movies at home. And sometimes they are pretty exciting and encompassing. But I get bored if I JUST watch them. And not just because of commercials which we usually skip anyway. I almost always read as well. Newspapers usually. So I'll be reading about Somalian pirates, Taliban areas of Pakistan, Obama's dog, Broadway revivals of "Hair" and "West Side Story", whatever, and sort of watching with one eye and listening. Makes sub-titled movies (which I love especially if they are French although German is sort of amusing, too) hard to follow. I also like to work puzzles while watching TV. I will learn a new word in a crossword (e.g.: marten; toque meaning a woman's hat instead of a chef's tall one) and not be able to contain myself until I look the word up in a real or online dictionary.

There is infinite entertainment in this apartment and yet I get stir-crazy to leave it now and then. Then when I'm out I get eager to come back and settle down with my computer, newspapers, books.

I stay engaged with movies, in a dark theater, although I like to have some food and I hate the food except for the Alamo where drinking beer and eating fried things and actually watching the movie keeps me there. Unless my mind wanders.

This restlessness, dare I say bordering on attention-deficit, makes me anxious. So, I guess I go from being entertained by many things to boredom to anxiety, all in the space of minutes.

When I was in school or at work in meetings with presentations by others, I had to write something to stay focused. It might be about what was being presented. It might be a 'to do' list or a grocery list or a doodle. It might be an idea only peripherally about the content the lecturer was presenting. One such segue produced an idea which is one of the few ideas that both received a patent for some of us at the company and actually made a bit of money in the marketplace.

I see people who are really focused on something. Maybe it is a very BIG thing like running a company or non-profit or a tiny thing like a very focused hobby or sport. Nothing gets my attention like that. I'm used to starting on things and never following up. Blogging and posting pictures online is something I've been pretty faithful doing (if that's the proper word) but, let's be honest, the form is constantly changing. And it isn't a thing you finish. It's the equivalent of notebooks full of non sequitur musings created during lectures and other entertainments that did not fully engage my dilettante mind.

Lately I've been watching people who focus closely on something, shutting out distraction. They are creating businesses, fighting for causes, writing books and plays. That will never be me, I guess. And my accomplishments will always be brief breakthroughs: an idea, a sentence, a paragraph, the short essay, the clever bon mot. The other day on twitter I said:

viswoman found blogging reduced her writing to a few paragraphs. Twitter to 140 characters. New service: Heartbeat. Nine letters or less.

I thought I was so clever. Heartbeat. In some techie worlds it is a notice that some process or service is there, working, alive if you will. And the word has nine letters. And yet when I tried to label this post, selecting from labels used on some of the prior 638 posts, I ended up with more than two hundred characters which, apparently, is the blogger limit.

Why You Need Me

OK, maybe you think you don't need me. But you do, I promise. Otherwise who else would be:

• Not worrying about losing a job since I don't have one.
• Continuing to spend money eating out and drinking like there is no tomorrow. (I thought Obama said to do it, didn't he? Or was that Cheney telling me there was no tomorrow?)
• Taking pictures of reflections on bad hair days and digitally altering them to make them fraught with artistic flair and meaning.
• Not accumulating debt. Still not. No toxic loans. No anything loans.
• Driving an eight-year-old car. See one above.
• Moving downtown at 60 and trying to be an urbanite. (Why is suburbanite OK with Blogger spell check but urbanite not?)
• Questioning spelling.
  
• Blogging when she has nothing to say.
• Providing contrast to the size 0-4 bodies downtown.
• Still subscribing to magazines and newspapers.
• Making everyone else look productive.

Yeah, so, I haven't anything to say but I feel like blogging. I'm feeling celebratory that my computer works so much better after cleaning up the mess VMWare made of the Windows image.

Me and My Papers

Newspapers as we know them are dying. My friend over at Insomniactive has pulled a lot of info on this issue.

This has implications for all of us. Even those of you who, like the others on my hallway (see above) don't get newsprint versions, are relying on the reportage of newspapers even if you consume it online or secondhand. I guess. Unless you only read blogs for info. And just stupid ones like this instead of ones created by legitimate journalists who research things and know how to write. Not to denigrate reading blogs, but nothing beats guys and gals going out and getting stories for a living and bringing them back to us, coherent and thorough and allegedly without bias. (Although it helps to get several as we do, see above.) Reading blogs is a drill down into individual brains but newspaper reporters often bring us the more sweeping issues.

And yes, I know most of the content goes to the WEB for free, no trees involved.

The death of the clumps of paper with fresh news, pictures, charts and figures, delivered to our door is going to hurt me. Even though I'm drowning in papers and even though recycling is a pain and even though, yes, I can find it all on my computer I suppose.

The form isn't the same. Sitting over a meal with FFP (we almost always read at meals when it's just the two of us), or on the exercise bike, I turn the pages guided by the headlines. I pause at photos or maps. I even look at ads. The structure is predictable and comforting. Inside the front page section of The New York Times there is a summary of news (recently expanded to two pages for the age of ADD). There are also ads for luxury jewelry and watches and knick-knacks. Yes, still. On Tuesday there is Science Times. On Wednesday, Dining In Out. The Austin-American Statesman has XLent on Thursday. I skip Sports Sections, mostly, unless there is really big tennis news. I occasionally flip the Statesman Sports over to see if there is a Fry's ad. I look at Fry's ads in that paper and J&R and others in The Times mostly to see what gadgets are out there, what they are going for. I am tempted by the crosswords. So the leisure sections get pulled out. I like to read about plays, movies, books, dance, opera, etc, too. When I'm looking at a new section of newspaper I know it's fresh content. Well, sort of. If you read three newspapers then you may see the same story. It may even be exactly the same story.

FFP goes directly to the editorial and letters pages, I think. I don't usually read these. I would rather get opinion on blogs. We both peruse obituaries. The local ones to see if someone we know died. But all obits to see the fallen, how old they were and what got them. (In The New York Times obits the cause of death is usally paragraph two. After para one which tells you why the dead is newsworthy.) The obits in the local rag are mostly paid ads. Relatives pay hundreds or thousands to run some stuff for a few days. There are also short blurbs from funeral homes that are a 'public service' and, of course, news stories on the deaths of the locally famous or infamous.

There are so many predictable, wonderful things in my papers. Oh, they change things sometimes. I remember when the Times never used color. (I also remember when authors' names in The New Yorker were at the end of articles and they sometimes continued articles over multiple issues.)

Well, I have been trying to write this for two days. While newspapers piled up. And, shudder, we bought three books at Book People today and there two others I've been intending to start and...oh well. Enough of writing about newspapers. I'm going to go read.

Designer Me

I never really got the concept of designer jeans. Oh, I guess I understood that you could add some stitching, a certain fit (although Levis offers fits galore), some rhinetones, some creative fading and even some wear you wouldn't have to put on them yourself. I guess I'd rather design my life myself. I wear Men's 34x30 Levis in 550 or 560 fits. The former only fit when I weigh less than 165. They come in a white-washed blue, regular washed blue and black over dye. The latter are best for travel, showing little grime and topped with a nice collared shirt and blazer, able to sneak where their more denim-looking breathen will not.

This is a shop window reflection from the very high-end Julian Gold store on West Sixth. I've never been inside except when it was a very cool travel store called TravelFest in which we invested. (We lost our money. We weren't bailed out. But I digress.)

We are all designing our lives. We decide whether to go to the gym or walk the lake. (Or, you know, just sit here blogging.) We decide whether to put up with congestion or take an OTC drug. We decide, in fact, when to see doctors for tests and treatments. We decide what to wear, first by buying stuff and then by selecting. We decide on our haircut (maybe our hair color). Glasses? What style? Or...contacts. We pick a car, a place to live. We study for a certain career, take a job or not. We pick our hobbies. Tennis? Who will we play with? How competitive will we be? Will we take lessons? Bridge? Casual or serious duplicate for points? We decide what to eat and when. Coffee or no? (This morning our coffee machine, the expensive Jura E8 was acting up. I knew we had this problem before and couldn't remember how to fix it. We called the 800 concierge number and we were up and running in a minute.) Yeah, we decide what appliances to own. Coffee at home or out. (We could go downstairs in the morning now and get coffee at the shop in the building or one just across the street. I was about to do that when we got our machine working.)

We decide when we go out and when we stay home. We decide when to travel. (Maybe our employer decides, but still we make lots of decisions along the way.) Lots of people chose to be in Washington, standing in the cold watching that concert on the Lincoln Memorial. OMG, who was NOT there? Me. I was home watching it after the fact off the DVR. "Who is that?" Rewind. "Oh, Pete Seeger's grandson."

When we are at our computers, we decide what mail to answer. We decide what blogs to read, what news to watch. Today I decided to download some backup and sync software because I read about it in The New York Times because I decided to read the NYT last night instead of reading a book. We have the Times because we decided to subscribe years ago and are powerless to stop. It's an addiction.

What will I choose today and what differences will it make as I bump against all the other choosers (or is that deciders as GWB said?) and their choices?

Life is fascinating after the first couple of cups of coffee, huh?

Disoriented

I took this picture in a portrait mode, trimmed it and just didn't hit 'rotate 90 degrees clockwise.' [Ed. Note: Have you ever noticed that FFP always orients the camera so that photos have to be rotated counter-clockwise? LB: Yes, Yin and Yang and all that. If a photo is taken portrait-style on one of our cameras, there is a marker about who took it. Assuming, you know, we didn't hand the camera to someone else.]

It's disorienting not to rotate a photo before presenting it, isn't it?

I have a 'day off' today. Which means there is nothing on the calendar. FFP has a cold or allergies so he might not feel like a walk or a movie which sound like good ideas to me. I can go to the gym, read the papers, drink coffee (wait, already been doing the last two). There are a few chores I probably should do. (FFP already started doing some laundry. He also removed the recycling from the condo yesterday and did some dishes.)

Not having anything scheduled is delicious and yet disorienting. Too many choices!

I guess that's why working is sometimes the best thing for the attention-deficit wracked mind. When I worked, I would often have a confusing set of goals and ideas rattling around in my head. Things I needed to do for work and for my own life would seem like a wave about the swamp me. I often felt, when my rear end hit my chair and I logged on to work mail and incident reports for my products, an incredible easing of my mind. There was my 'to do' list: answer these mails, work on these problems and questions and then pull up the real 'to do' list and work on designs and code and reviews I'd noted there. There were meetings scheduled to get through or embrace (in the case of the rare ones that moved things forward). People came in and asked for assistance or pointed out some flaw in my thinking. It was structured and it was a relief.

I can achieve this same scattered peace in retirement by forcing myself to go through a routine of some chore. Clean the bathroom. Go through the various accounts and verify balances and update my bookkeeping and spreadsheet system. But nothing really comes close to the feeling of having a job and getting the butt in the chair to start a day. Especially a Monday when I took Sunday off. Because Sundays, especially Sunday nights, were sometimes agonizing. Even if I worked on work or other things I needed to do but especially if I relaxed and read the Sunday papers and watched TV, I felt like a jockey on a horse at a race in one of those narrow cages waiting for the gate to open and the race to be on.

All my time now is in Sunday night mode, waiting for the starting gun. I have appointments, sure, but nothing like putting in a work day. And like those waning hours of the weekend I find myself bouncing from activity to activity. Like today, which happens to be Sunday.

I got up a little before eight. I think I would have slept longer, but I wanted to call my dad and see if he'd located a ride to church. Because while I wouldn't go with him I would have gone to take him if he wanted. I was getting the best sleep of the night right then. But I felt OK after getting up. FFP had fired up the coffee machine, gotten the papers in (they are right in the hallway here, that's so cool) and was telling me about an article in the Statesman about arts organizations I should read. I made my call to Dad. (He found someone who lives near by to give him a ride and says this morning that he plans to live to be 102 which is an adjustment from the 112 he asserted the other morning). I pushed a picture to Austin, Texas Daily Photo. I edited a picture for this blog and started thinking about what to write. I read the article FFP suggested and on a trip to the kitchen for more coffee I thought of eating a banana. There were two apples in the fruit bowl. I decided to make tuna salad and started boiling eggs, chopped the apples opened some tuna, found mayo and relish. The eggs are in the final (sit for fifteen minutes after water boils) phase of my egg boiling technique. The rest is mixed and in the frig, ready for the eggs to be chopped and added and the result refrigerated again to chill.

Well, I wandered off to finish the tuna salad. I rued the fact that I didn't have an onion so I could pep it up with a little finely chopped onion. I did eat a banana (my breakfast). It's chilling in the frig for later snacking. I looked at some newspaper articles, poked around the puzzle page in The New York Times Magazine. (The 'standard' crossword looks hard today.) I read something about the CIA.

And so it goes. Left to my own devices, I'm a little erratic and random and, at best, productive but slightly disoriented.

Unfinished Business

I don't know where my time goes. Yes, blogging. But yesterday, save a brief entry in Austin Daily Photo, I didn't blog. (You missed me, right?) I also didn't type in a private journal or write on old-fashioned paper. So, where did the time go?

I didn't clean the kitchen. Several times I set a deadline to get in there and get after it. Oh, we cleaned up after our meals and such, washed dishes. But it's been a while since I cleaned off the counters thoroughly, dusted the bottles of booze on the counter, etc.

We got up a little late, but I think we were out of the bed and had it made by 8 o'clock. We watched CBS Sunday Morning. Drank coffee. Talked about taking a walk. Which we never really did. Rather we walked to Whole Foods and ate at the fish bar (I had trout with kale and some grain dish and a Ginger Beer). We bought a few things of prepared food. FFP took the groceries home and I took some pictures in the neighborhood for Austin Daily Photo. (When I say we didn't 'take a walk' I mean we didn't go far enough for exercise. The round trip to Whole Foods, even with my detour, isn't much more than a mile.)

When we got back, I got stuck into updating financial spreadsheets and Quick Books, doing end-of-month for the business, checking accounts and credit cards, paying some stuff, recording muni bonds we bought. Simple as our life is, this kind of stuff takes some time and then, the next day, there is more to do.

Finally, I took a break with the New York Times magazine crossword which I found unsatisfying for some reason. I read some other parts of the newspaper. I decided at one point that I'd clean the kitchen in one hour. Instead, when the time was up, I went to the gym across the hall. I just rode the recumbent bike until I was all sweaty. I took a shower. FFP and I ate dinner, each separately making a salad and eating some other stuff. I had a little wine from the bottle we'd opened the night before. I went through all the Sunday papers and read some sections from other days that I hadn't read. We watched a movie on DVD about a crackhead teacher and coach and a little girl who befriended each other. ("Half Nelson.") We rent this stuff from NetFlix and I dont' know when it got in our queue or why. We happened on "Slingblade" on IFC and watched the end of that. We can watch that movie over and over for some reason. Then we just watched IFC and they showed another movie called "Love and Sex" and then some doc about nudity and other censored acts and references in movies. I just left it on this channel while I read until it was late. I didn't get any of my books read, just papers. And the papers are so depressing. So I do this every night and go to bed depressed.

This morning I have to take my dad to the eye doctor. It is the most bizarre parking thing. They have about six or seven handicapped places for this medical office complex next to a hospital. If you don't get one, you have to park in the hospital lot, taking your chances for a place remotely close to the office where you are going. He could take himself (although they may dilate his eyes, so you know, better not to drive I guess), but he could end up walking a block or two with his walker and that isn't good. Whatever. I'll drive out there and take him. I'll take some reading material for the waiting part.

So, when I wonder where this day went and why I didn't get things done, I'll know. I blogged about getting nothing done. Then I did an errand for my dad. Heck, though, maybe I'll clean the kitchen today. You never know.

Parts is Parts

Wires, phones, cords, adaptors, gadgets. I toss them or give them away and still they multiply. I took this picture a long time ago. This lot is most likely mostly out of here, no longer in my way, as the picture was taken years ago. But there is another couple of cubic feet in the storage room that I've assembled to get rid of. We've been having brief drenching rains so curbside mall is out. I was thinking maybe Freecycle or take the lot to the thrift store to see what they could make of it. Or have the computer guru drop it off at Goodwill. The trash seems irresponsible so I don't usually throw too much of this junk in the trash. (Never say never.)

I'm at great peril of being boring and repeating myself today for various reasons. I was awakened by a mighty clap of thunder and have been watching it rain (and some pea-sized hail) since. I appear to be destined for sitting in my chair with a cup of coffee and The New York Times crossword until time for a brunch we agreed to go to today for some cause.

As long as I'm rambling...we watched (on DVD) a movie called "Blame it On Fidel" last night which I liked very much. Even though I had to read the subtitles and couldn't read at the same time. [Ed: You allege knowledge of French. LB: Yes, and how clever of you to know the film is (mostly) in French as it is set in Paris with references to Spain, Cuba and Chile, and yes I recognize the occasional word but really, yeah, subtitles must be read sadly.]

Enough rambling. I'm going for another cup of coffee and the newspapers. If I doze, don't sue me.

Time to Read

Except for nodding off before bed and the (I confess) occasional bathroom read, I haven't been keeping up with reading. Partly this is due to the fact that I am missing in action in the gym. On the recumbent bike I usually catch up with the three newspapers we get every day (only the Wall Street Journal doesn't come on Sunday). Yesterday I did make it to the gym, but I read an article in The New Yorker that a friend recommended over dinner the other night. I thought he was talking about an earlier piece and then I thought that the piece was more serious than it actually was. Well, if you can say that a piece is humorous or 'occasional' if the author is not Woody Allen and the grim reaper is the subject. Anyway, I loved the article and I think I need to write about death again in the Journal of Unintended Consequences. But I won't be getting to that just now because I have to spend most of the day at the hospital with my dad and while I could take my laptop and hook up to their wireless and write something to entertain my four readers it seems like a lot of trouble and I think that I will, instead, catch up on my reading. So I have a backpack to take along with some of those pesky unread papers and a couple of books I need to finish.