Monday. Feel better now that I'm back from breakfast and yesterday's entry has been posted but, after a long night's sleep, I awoke with the tickle in the chest that's been toying with me this entire last week, erupting, the nose running like a river and worrying we're well on the way to getting the flu. Or a cold. Or something....

What the hell, getting up to drive, rather than walk, to have the oatmeal, toast, fruit cup and coffee for breakfast, all the while running through a mile of paper napkins to take care of the runny nose before returning home. The time over breakfast seemed to help and at the moment I'm feeling, at least in comparison, better.

What is it that old folks are supposed to talk about when they get together? The aches and pains and problems of the minute, the hour and the day?

I've said that I have no idea whatsoever if this journal is a good idea or not. Sometimes I think, “Jesus, anyone reading this has got to think me an idiot”. I can't even blame it on alcohol anymore. Then again, what the hell? Why not?

But I digress. Blame it on whatever it was I awoke with this morning.

Later. Well, better. Yes. The chest isn't as congested, the sinuses aren't doing anything they haven't been doing in the past and the “tiredness” of yesterday isn't in evidence. But we're keeping an eye on it, we are.

Took a bath, remembering an old cartoon television warning they'd run when I was a kid, Noir-looking germs swimming away from a young kid and drowning in the bathtub. It seems to have done some good. Hungry now, but I'm still doing the “what do I want to eat” routine. Continues to surprise me that messing with the stomach, in my case fixing a hiatal hernia, would change your taste in food to such a degree.

Later still. A walk over to the lake to look for nest building cormorants, test the air, see if things were coming together. Maybe a dozen cormorants, but none of them seemed to be into nest building, more just splashing their wings in the water and sunning themselves at the pergola. Still, couldn't leave without taking a picture.

While standing at the lake shore, a pair of Mallards flew up and landed, waddling toward me. I'm assuming they thought I might be there to feed them. So a couple of pictures. I've often seen what I've thought were feathers clogging a duck’s nostrils in the past, but I'm not sure what these may be. Pin feathers? From preening? Do I even know what a pin feather looks like? Still, there they were and there I was with a long lens on the camera.

Evening. A two hour nap in the late afternoon and all the morning crap seems to be history (please). Still an odd combination of symptoms and timing, not one I suspect I'll figure out.

Watched Father Brown at seven and then five minutes of the Inspector Lewis that followed, the Father Brown as dumb as ever.

Yet you watched.

We were celebrating our return to clear headed (almost there) reality. Now to clean up the garbled journal start I put together earlier this morning, starting with the first paragraph.