Back from breakfast, finding I'm having trouble selecting anything off the menu that appeals. I may just have to order a mixed fruit plate, assuming mixed fruit remains palatable, and focus on reading the papers. Too many eggs, even if you skip them most days, too many country fried potatoes, even if you get a half order and leave half of those on the plate. The coffee is palatable insofar as coffee is palatable in my current state.

This is me getting older, nothing else. Well, actually that stomach operation had something to do with it. I never complained about eating a pizza, for example, before having that one done. My waitress gave me a small bag of cookies as I was leaving, how could I not come back? Still, cookies. Not the best way to finish your day anymore with my appetite.

And that's coming along how?

I'm pretty much at the same weight I've been for the last few months, maybe a couple of pounds lighter than I was at my lowest. There's still a rubber tire around the middle, but it's one of those small get you to the gas station tires and nothing to worry about. I suspect I could lose another ten pounds, but my body index or whatever they call it is 21.7, right about in the middle of what they call normal and that's nothing to worry about. Or, for that matter, to write about.

We are getting into banalities here.

Oh, the head aches a bit, the nose is a bit stuffed up. The lungs seem fine, although I still have to inhale this Advair stuff twice a day to keep them on track. And the Flonase in the nose every morning. They send me a recap of my various prescription costs every quarter and I'm always a bit surprised at the amount until I read the average person my age is taking twice the number of medications I'm taking and spending some insane additional price. But we'll let this rest. I think about it, everybody thinks about it, but writing about it? Here?

I mentioned I had some custom cut to length frames that arrived yesterday. By frames I mean the metal (in this case metal as opposed to wood, I can cut my own wood) edge that holds the glass, mat and picture in place. Four strips, top and bottom, with the hardware required to snap them together and hang it up. I got these to see how this particular width would look. They're thinner than the frames that come with the kits I've been buying over the years, but you really need to look at a completed picture to know if it's any good. I'm up for putting one or two of them together today. I think.

There was a story this morning in the arts section of the New York Times that had an interesting quote from, not a play, but a live performance of some kind they were reviewing. Roughly, I leave the papers at the café when I leave and don't have them in front of me to check, but the scene is a single woman sitting on a chair on a darkened stage when a disembodied voice asks: “Why are you bored?” Her answer is “Because I make myself bored.” The rejoinder: “Why don't you change?” The answer: “Because it would take a lot of effort.”

Now that's not an exact quote, but you get the idea. How true, was my thought. I don't get bored. I never really have, even during times when my world had essentially fallen apart (no job, no money, no girlfriend, nothing on the horizon). I can always find something to snag my attention whether there's any money around or not. This journal, the photography. Earlier on such hobbies as model railroading and writing, reading and music.

My father was the same way, only more focused on the technical side. Solder irons and such when he was young. He was a ham radio operator from his high school years until he died, starting with building his own gear when he had no money and ending with a Collins Radio rig you could buy for about the price of a new higher end car. Maybe a genetic thing, but it's reliable and real enough. Youngsters maybe get bored - the hormones and stress and such - but I'm not a youngster anymore; naïve yes, but not bored.

So if I'm crabby here with the aching head and wobbly horizon, I'm still pretty much content. Not bored, but content. If this framing project takes forever, then so be it. It's still something that keeps me engaged. My guess is, if I ever do move into a condo around here, it needs to be a live work space, a converted warehouse, a place I can spread the stuff you see in the picture behind The Sole Proprietor's Journal headline below the picture up top around a larger, more usable, more efficient space. And I may, if the head doesn't get any worse.

If it does, then there's the chair in the sun down by the lake, snoozing an old guy's snooze for whatever time he has left. No complaints. I never really expected to get as old as I've gotten, given the history of my family's male line, and I'm both surprised and happy to still be about.

That seems a bit morbid.

I didn't mean it to be, but I get started and it comes out. With proper time spent on editing an entry like this, bringing out whatever is hidden inside, it would change, find its proper place. But this is off the top writing, stream of consciousness stuff. I apply the same lax standards to my pictures and find it suits.

I believe you were talking about rationalizations yesterday?

I have them for every circumstance, of every brand and kind.