Later. An hour, an hour and a half. More sleep. Up now, a little groggy, but that will pass. Give it another hour. See what it looks like.

An hour. OK, the head is coming together. Feel a bit tired, but otherwise like someone who's just awakened from a long sleep, the head taking its own time to reassemble itself, but clearly coming together reasonably quick. After breakfast, after reading the papers is my guess.

You've had breakfast and you've read the papers. It's two-thirty in the afternoon! What exactly is it that you did last night?

I watched a little television, played a little guitar, got to bed early, drank a glass or two of water and some orange juice to clear the palate. Whatever it is, it needs rest and recuperation to right itself. Not much to do other than to let the day lay itself out, see what it's about. Otherwise, looking outside, it's very nice (as it often is in the Bay Area in the fall, much like summer anywhere else) and I suspect I'll be up for taking advantage of it by the time night arrives.

I mentioned the computer is acting up. I have an old custom-brew computer box, a big one that sits under the table with a large power supply and I get it a motherboard upgrade (along with a new processor and memory) every couple of years to keep current. It has, at last count, something like five internal hard drives plus three really big drives outside, attached by firewire or Ethernet. Which shouldn't really mean all that much to anyone unless you happen to be into this stuff, but what I'm thinking here is maybe it's gone through too many iterations and needs to be replaced. All of it. One of the Dell workstations with more memory than god comes to mind.

But, of course, I shouldn't take that approach with the computers. That's the way I handle the cameras, can't handle every other similar piece of equipment in the same way and still retain a bank account. No thoughts of “upgrading” the car, for example. I'd just go out and get another Element that looked like the current Element, but with thirty thousand fewer miles. No reason for that. Not for say another hundred and seventy thousand miles. Not likely it will ever happen at five thousand miles a year, dear oh dear.

Maybe repeat my usual approach: buy another hard drive - they're really cheap - pop it into the current case and install a nice clean new operating system and the usual anti-virus stuff. Reinstall all the software, but just the software I actually use. I'm pretty sure its a virus or some malware variant that's hidden itself in my current system causing the problems. Problems that get incrementally worse each month, each passing week. Mumble.

I, a once highly respected computer expert, have managed to allow in one of the nasties and it's taken roost in the Microsoft loft, corrupting the operating system, the browser and Outlook. Mumble. But we'll get it turned around. Mumble. Probably some time after it takes its last breath. To be consistent.