This day should by all rights be the first day of a two week vacation, better yet, the first day of a long term retirement. I feel like puttering around with the photography and the web pages and the writing, but I need two or three weeks to ease in, three or four weeks to get the head aligned, five or six weeks with an extra hour's sleep, a year or two of long walks along the border between mind and mortality. As do we all. As do we all.

It is now eight in the evening and the last load of wash is in the drier. I've been going through my negatives and taping dates scribbled on notebook paper to the binders after a fruitless hour searching for my 2001 Carnaval photographs. Even I finally understood it was time to build at least a simple index. Some photographers build a small computer database to track their photographs. There was a three month period when I bought a slide labeling program and special laser printable labels and affixed one with a short description and a copyright to each slide. The labels are probably packed somewhere in my storage container. Jesus, label each slide. What was I thinking? There are whole years I couldn't even scribble date and subject at the top of the plastic sheets. I do that now, but I'm older and lighter with more time on my hands.

There was a period when it was popular to put a search engine to your journal. Maybe I should fashion a database to search out pictures by subject. I haven't really thought about that. Could be fun. Except for entering data. Yes, entering data. Put it on my list of things to do. The long list. I don't need one to search out pithy comments. All my comments are pithy. All of them, however, seem to have the same subject.