When in the past did not being hungry keep me from buying half the store? Certainly not before I had the stomach operation. Now, even when I'm hungry, I have trouble settling on something to eat, something I'd be willing to get off my duff to go out and get. This has its upside but, in and of itself, given my past experience, it's weird. Is this how people who manage to keep themselves forever thin feel about food? Will it last? It's been six months since that operation (and boy have those months gone fast) and you'd think things would fall back into the same old rut. Right? They re-arranged things, they didn't make the stomach smaller or chop out any connecting parts. Unless they did and didn't feel a need to say. You don't ask, they don't tell?

You've been losing weight without too much effort since you retired almost two years before your fabled little operation. Was it all that difficult then?

Well, no, but this is altogether different. I had to attain a certain balance before the operation, a balance not particularly difficult to maintain, but after the operation it seems to be taking the bit and running by itself.

Don't look a gift horse....

Yesterday I wrote myself into a corner that needed to be fixed by deleting a bunch of stuff and punting, some of which I did, some of which I didn't. Editing, in other words. Effort on my part. I don't list the journal when I talk about filling my days with interesting stuff now that I've retired and that's a mistake. It dribbles out throughout the day, most of it in the morning when my head is relatively clear. I suspect (and suspect is the word) I do it because I like it and not because some weird neurotic mechanism has taken control. I write “some weird neurotic mechanism has taken control” more because I read about such things in the papers than I've noticed its festering presence, you understand (cough! cough!), but then again “taken control” doesn't have to be all that obvious, doesn't have to be done with a hammer from the way I see it done at, say, the national level. Uncle Sam on a couch. Twitter, do you Sam? Keep a blog?

Later. Five loads of laundry, that's enough for a day. Well, that's all I had. We're talking socks, t-shirts, underpants, jeans, three shirts, sheets and two towels now, how many more loads could one young man accumulate? Really? Oh. Still, clean sheets on the bed, everything else folded and put away in drawers except for the socks and they'll be paired and folded by the end of the afternoon.

A walk down the way to the local sandwich shop, a cup of coffee and a cookie sitting out at one of the tables, a picture of a tree limb sporting little red berries overhead; a bag of mixed nuts bought at the Seven-Eleven look alike on the way home. Not much of a walk, not much of a lunch, but they'll do. I tried talking myself into taking the bus downtown but without luck. Over to Berkeley, maybe? Not a chance. Home now in the early afternoon reasonably coherent thinking, well, how about looking at this CD printer again? See if I can get it to work? Back up and catalog last month's photographs? Continue with the program. I say that without a clue to what I'll do.

Later still. OK, nothing happening with the CD printer, but an hour or so working on another page of photographs for artandlife. They won't be posted anytime soon, but the page is done giving me an impetus to replace those that are weak (and more than a few are weak, it's just not always easy to tell which) and I'm happy with that, the day has gone well. Oh, and I upped the afternoon dose of the pain management pills. The sinus-head thing. They seem to work, these pain pills, but it makes you a bit nervous to be taking them, particularly as the symptoms they're designed to handle keep, well, getting incrementally worse.

Big increments?

Little increments over a long period now. Another subject to bring up with the doctor. The list gets longer.

Incrementally longer?

Incrementally longer.