So it's overcast, they're wondering if the Blue Angels will be able to perform in San Francisco later (they need a clear couple of thousand feet below the clouds), there's rain on the way come about Tuesday and I have a Dylan concert later this evening. My, my. Life in the long boats out here off the coast of Ireland preparing for a visit with my Icelandic comrades. Pucker up, pucker up.

Slow down.

Indeed.

So as I wrote that my screen froze up requiring a hard boot, so I checked to see if updated video drivers for my graphics card had been posted. My, my. They had, dated a week ago Friday. So I downloaded all eighty-two megs of them and did an install. Will this correct my freezing screen? They mentioned the new drivers now added support for Open GL, something PhotoShop has been bugging me about with a pop up screen saying my funky graphics card doesn't support Open GL and it's been disabled for my session. No, I have no idea what Open GL is either and I have no thought to look it up, but when your computer freezes at odd and not particularly predictable moments and PhotoShop is complaining about lack of support, you suspect your video card of all kinds of transgressions. So we'll see. I mentioned earlier I'd updated the BIOS on the motherboard for the same reason. Your computer freezes at odd moments and you set forth looking for device drivers and whether or not a fan has failed and your card is running too hot. Or the CPU has melted. Pain in the butt, don't you think?

I feel pretty good. It's cool outside and now inside, the sky overcast (as I mentioned), but the head seems clear and the lungs not so congested. I do have an annual physical this Thursday (I'd thought it was last week for some reason) where I can finally go over some of this stuff face to face and that's probably good, we're making progress. I got on the scale this morning and found I'm another four pounds lighter than the last time I mentioned it. That's a little faster than it's been in the past.

I haven't been pushing it in the sense of not eating when I'm hungry. I've gone through all kinds of changes in understanding what it means to be hungry after that stomach operation. It's been six months and it's been thirty-five pounds. The rules have changed since the operation and what was for well over a year a one or two pound a month loss has become more like four or five. It has to stop at some point when the calorie intake matches the calories burned, right? But four pounds in four weeks (I think it's four and not really three) seems a bit quick. I roughly say two thousand calories a day at my weight (the web says twenty-one seventy), now at one hundred and seventy pounds, a weight at which those old Halston jackets I have hanging in the closet, have had hanging in the closet for the last thirty years, now fit. Just a hair's tug across the chest, of course, but my chest is about as thin as it's going to get, so I say they fit. Right? I'll take pictures. You'll see.

You're talking about weight and diets. Deadly, deadly.

I'm wondering where my head is at while this is happening. I'm retired, it's been over two years, I am by definition facing new and interesting horizons quite different from those I've experienced in the past. I can fuck around doing silly things with photographs if I want. I can write on here like a maniac. I could travel, but I don't. Or won't. But I might. All this is going on and it's a big change: like being a teenager on summer vacation, but with clearer vision, experience and more money in a summer with no discernable end. Interesting to watch, weight loss or not, up here in an apartment overlooking a lake at the end of the rainbow.

You do go on.

You see why I like Minerva's Sunday horoscopes though? She's been saying something's coming in 2010 for an entire year. That's an attitude I encourage. Skip any thoughts an end is neigh. Right?

She says that every year. Just check her in some of your New Year's Day entries going back. “Good things are coming! All will be revealed!”

And you think I'd pay attention if she said anything else?