Up with the alarm, no problem, off to breakfast and back to finish yesterday's entry and think about getting another Protime blood test this morning at the hospital lab. They'd sold me on the idea, at my cardiologist's appointment, of getting a home system - prick your finger, wet a paper strip and run it through a small device - and I'd thought, well, I'd put off the Protime test until the thing arrives, see if the readings are close. That was well over two weeks ago, still no word on the machine, so it's back to the lab.

We'll get the test, go by the bank near the lab and then head over to the morning café to drop off a card for one of the ladies who's been feeding me breakfast every morning now for these last many years. She's going back to China with her two kids. Working two full time jobs, fifteen hours a day, has evidently forced her to flee and she's going back home after eight long years to recuperate. I'd not thought, given the press we get, people might go back to China to recuperate.

Fifteen physically demanding hours a day. Gives me pause in looking at my own life. I've been the only one I've ever really been responsible for, makes it so much easier when a rent check is about to bounce. No real guilt or fear when you don't have wife and kids.

A life where people feed you breakfast in the mornings while you sit back reading the papers.

And the rest of the day spent playing with photographs. You do pay in one way, but you get back in many another.

So many ways to rationalize.

Later. A bus and then a mile's walk to the lab, a stop by the bank, another bus and then another mile walk back to the apartment: good energy, no ocular symptoms, no dry mouth, plenty of endurance. After an abbreviated night's sleep. Go figure.

Anyway, another bus to the morning restaurant to have ice cream and coffee and to drop off the card for the lady who's leaving. Her last day today on the job: pay the check, leave her with the card. Good. Our tasks for day are completed.

Back at the apartment at noon. Some slight aches, but nothing more than sore muscles, hope that's the way it will work tomorrow at the parade. We'll see. Still overcast, but the temperature is good, no need for a winter jacket or sweater. Maybe the Ides of March will be a breaking point, nothing but good weather (and sailing) ahead.

Later still. I, after all, didn't get all that much sleep last night, so a nap. An hour's nap? Hard to say, but I lay down not long after noon, drifted off and awoke after two, the radio coming up into my consciousness as I awoke. Interesting feeling. Nothing like any of the ocular symptoms I've experienced in the past, but feeling oddly numb, the brain functioning, but otherwise numb to the world, as if my emotions were gone. Disconnected. Weird. Every bit as weird as any of the prior ocular symptoms I've experienced.

So, up out of bed. OK. Everything works. Took the blood pressure just to be sure I was really alive. Went into the kitchen and prepared some cereal. Futzed with the computer. Whatever it was soon evaporated. Something to chalk up under the “symptoms” column? Oh, yes. Although everything was working, I had the odd concern I was, well, dead. That's more than odd enough to make it a symptom.

Evening approaches, off to the St. Patrick's Day Parade tomorrow, be interesting to see if it goes as well as my running about did this morning.

Evening. I'm down to Saturday and Tuesday nights for foreign police procedurals I seem to be willing to watch at six, tonight what I expect is an otherwise popular Italian series that I've decided I can no longer watch.

You've mentioned this in the past.

Over and over and over again. I does finally get through to me that I'm, well, stuck. I'd say the evenings as a whole go rather well. So I don't like this program or that. So what? I skip about the dial, I futz with the guitar, I surf the web, I eat dinner (too much eating lately), I go to bed. And bitch about Italian-French-German-Swedish police procedurals. Just another definition of a brain gone loose in the head.