Monday. Must have been tired last night because it was lights out by nine and to sleep not that long after, awakening at five, but then getting back to sleep to get up finally at seven and walk to breakfast.

A bus home - it arrived just as I was exiting the restaurant - on a clear, cold and sunny morning this last week of December. Interesting year, 2015, if by “interesting” you include it all: the good and the fearful, none of it in preparation (one hopes) for another even stranger year to follow. Or is it just that with age you notice the crap that flew right on by when you were younger without a history yet under your belt to make judgments? Those Cold War years were a chancy dance with the devil after all, but being young and inexperienced we/I just didn't notice?

You do go on.

Later. An hour's nap after what I'd been thinking was a good night's sleep. Hungry and so over to the burger drive-in to bring back another grilled chicken sandwich. Odd mix of thoughts about the sandwich. I was hungry, yes I could eat one (and did), but there were also worries over the aftereffects, how the stomach would feel after eating it.

Aftereffects?

Odd choice of terms, maybe. Feel fine now that I'm done eating, but although the stomach was saying it looked forward to eating one, it was also was communicating it would probably feel queasy afterward, a product of that hiatal hernia I had repaired some years ago, how that operation has totally changed the appetite and how I react to food.

The doctor who did the colonoscopy last week mentioned just before he put me under (I'd forgotten he was the one who'd scoped the esophagus before the operation) that the esophagus had been all twisted around where it entered the stomach, not something they mentioned back then or something I'd have necessarily thought about one way or another if they had.

Well, so what? Odd appetite. Keeps the weight off without effort. Overcast now, some chance of showers later and so I suspect I'm done going outdoors again. Which means I'll use something taken in the past for the picture up top. A couple of photographs of the apartment house construction site as I was heading out to get the sandwich.

Later still. A bath while listening to the radio in the bedroom through the open door, the tail end of a talk by a woman named Loretta Napoleoni on the Middle East that caused me to not only download the talk to listen to the parts I'd missed, but to order her book when I'd finished. I may or may not follow through and read the book, but I did listen to the program after downloading and will listen to it again later. I will. The more sources of information the better.

So when the President calls for your advice you'll be ready?

Now, now.

The upper palate/sinuses are acting up again and so a second dose of the pain meds. They sound more ominous in this addicted society of ours when you call them pain meds, but they're more like Advil and aspirin, but Advil and aspirin that actually work.

You're feeling a need to calm any concern people may experience?

We're not addicted or anything similarly sordid, it's just our teeth and sinuses occasionally hurt and these little pills do seem to help.

Evening. Stayed up long enough to check out Charlie Rose at eight to see who he was interviewing, a group of researchers talking about concussions, a subject I do find of interest, but not this evening. And so to bed for a brief session with the tablet before lights out at ten. Surprised me a bit I made it to ten.