I wuz listening to The Enchanted Forest of Japan with James Galway on his flute. Really relaxing stuff, perhaps a little too relaxing for me tonight.

Physical work is wonderful. You accomplish stuff that you can see, and that everyone else can see, sometimes. It just makes you feel good, stretch those old muscles, etc. There is a downside to this, though. Physical work makes you tired. Physical work makes your muscles sore, and your joints grind and your tendons jerky. You've never had jerky tendons? It's kinda like having a twitch in your eyelid, only it occurs in other places. Places where you have tendons. Or is it ligaments. Damn, I'm gonna have to look that up. OK. Here's how it is. Tendons attach bones to muscles; ligaments attach bones to bones, generally speaking, or at least attach a substance to a like substance. So there, you've learned something, and I've re-learned it.

O'yeah, I forgot to mention the skin part of physical labor. Two things stand out regarding skin:

• Work makes you sweat.
• You can poke holes in your skin with various substances.
• You can scratch the surface of your skin off.

And my head is sunburned, too. It was windy during my fishing, and after my hat blew off twice, I elected to leave it off and tucked it safely under my tackle box.

I no longer worry about things that might kill me in twenty years...

Dumb move for a baldheaded guy. Really dumb. I wore a broad-brimmed hat so's my ears wouldn't get sunburned. Hmmm. Dumb, like I said. A girl from the lab asked me if I was worried about skin cancer, and I told her that I no longer worry about things that might kill me in twenty years...

Anyways again... my legs are sore and rubbery. My back is very sore, but it's muscle soreness, not nerve impingement; no leg pain from that, anyway. Probably good for my back, working those old muscles. Hurts, anyway. I need to start doing those damned exercises, takes about five minutes a day. Prevents being completely down and in excruciating pain for a week or so... I've been there a couple of times, too, you betcha.

It has been, so far, a relatively quiet night. I think that's great, for a first night back. I'm not really sure that I could stand a hard one tonight. I slept from 13:30 until 17:30, so I should be in pretty good shape. But I ain't. Does anyone know why is is possible to build up a sleep deficit, but not a reserve? If I get eight hours, I'm good for the next sixteen. Seems like, then, if I got twelve (which I do sometimes) that simple math would lead me to think that I would be good for the next twenty-four. But it don't work that way. It just comes off of the deficit. Is there a lifetime deficit, or does it go by seasons or years or weeks or what? Am i possibly still making up for those three days in a row that I stayed up in 1969?

Is the indication that, on my weeks off, when I finally get back to sleeping eight hours, I have caught up? Is that a helluva convoluted sentence, or what? I can't keep track of the predicates and objects there, or even of the subject. There is, I'm sure, a better, more concise way of making my point, but probably not one that is nearly as much fun.

I spent fifteen wonderful minutes getting a backrub from Eileen and I just wish I could've come home and crashed at that point. But alas! I had to work another forty-five minutes!

Is this a sharp buncha people or what?

I am constantly amazed at the intelligence of the people that I get to work with. It is simply amazing! Every damned one of them can tell, almost instantaneously, a sunburned bald head from one that is not sunburned! Is this a sharp buncha people or what?

Home, ass is draggin'. Waiting for an appraiser to get here at 09:00, he better not be late or he'll find me asleepin'. Got a lot of mail, mostly junque stuff. I'm on too many mailing lists, I get about 200 pieces of mail a day.

All I wanna do is just go to sleep, dammit!

But some of it is good stuff, it's the winnowing out process that's so damned time-consuming. I'm using MS Outlook, and it's set up to direct mail this way and that, depending on where it's from. One of the lists that I'm on is the IE-HTML list. About 100 pieces a day. Out of that, there are about two that I'm really interested in. Occasionally, I just go in and indescriminately erase them all, usually when the number gets up around 1000. If I can pare them down on a daily basis, it's OK. But once I get behind...

OK, that's all I'm gonna write today.
Thanx for being here!