The Visible Woman...March 27, 2004

Saturday, March 27, 2004

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A Journal from Austin, Texas.
A Project of LBFFP Stealth Publishing.

health and mood

the electronic age

In a way, it is a surprise to me how 'connected' I've become even though I was in 'the business.'

I wouldn't have guessed we'd all get so connected and do so many things from a computer screen. That we'd have cell phones, and TVs and VCRs and movies arriving by mail picked on the computer. That we'd have our shopping showing up at our door after searching online.

Oh, I dreamed of having a computer all my own. But I never dreamed of the Internet. I remember the first calculator I ever bought. I remember the lust after a large and very expensive calculator an employer had that did hexadecimal math!

Now there are gadgets and more gadgets. Four channels of TV to watch while riding the exercise bicycle. Only I'm reading. I want a GPS device but don't know why. I take pictures and post them for the world to see in instants. Or upload them and print them in a photo lab. I write every day and publish it. And no one can stop me. (Well, that's too strong. But still.) I read the words of people from all over everyday in personal e-mail or on WEB sites.

There is so much media with digital cable, a hundred channel wasteland, with DVDs and books and magazines and movies. The world is bubbling with music. (I have an online service where I can play thousands of albums for a monthly fee and burn my own mixes for seventy-nine cents a pop. We have hundreds of CDs.)

Of course, one can only do one thing at once, hard as we try.

Yeah, it's an amazing world. But it's no wonder that I don't get the newspapers read. Instead, I'm reviewing my funeral playlist on Rhapsody, watching a Rube Goldberg Honda Accord ad somebody alerted me to on e-mail and typing this, sort of all at once. And thinking, "I should go to the club."

The French Horn player blows a spring tune...wisteria drips in background.

JUST TYPING

Once.
We wrote letters.
Or called long distance.
We had to find a pay phone.
If the car broke down.
If you traveled far away, you were out of touch.
Unless you made an expensive call.
Letters at Poste Restante.
Or American Express.
Now you drop an e-mail to Colorado, to California, to Cape Town. They are delivered in a few seconds.
Are we more in touch?
And information?
You type your ancestor's name.
And find a guy's picture who has been dead for almost a hundred years!

Food Diary.

breakfast

nothing

lunch

piece of fried catfish, salad with cheese, olives, dressing, tomatoes

snacks

a bunch of nachos

dinner

hamburger patty with slice of American cheese
salad with cheese, dressing, onions, tomato

Today I
- thought that I should probably buy some fruit and maybe some broccoli and stuff!

Time flies....

I got up around eight. I felt a little drug out. I made the bed, got coffee, wrote a litle (when I say that, I just mean the journal and emails...not that I really wrote). I had my coffee and called my dad to make sure he got home OK. I finished off yesterday's journal and, about 9:30, went to the club. I got back about 11:30. I thought about not doing the last bit of recumbent bike riding because I knew FFP was doing yard work already. (He got to the club before I did.) But I didn't skip it. I did skip the sit-ups I should have done. At home, I proposed we have lunch, let me stop sweating and I would pitch into yard work. He fries catfish, I drag out stuff for salad and chop some tomato and onion. We eat, reading the papers, and clean up. Then I get my stinky but no longer sweaty body into jeans, high socks, boots, bandana, long-sleeved worn out shirt over T-Shirt and old cap for yard work. (And still a red ant crawled up my leg and bit me on the knee. Thankfully, I didn't get into any fire ants.) Mostly I dug out grass where we are going to put gravel and a pot garden behind our newly enlarged bedroom. We discussed what we'd put there, what artifacts and pots could be moved from other spots. Around 2:30 we ran out of steam and went inside for water, coffee and showers. We like showering and getting dressed in our new area now, especially when we aren't too rushed.

We went shopping. Went to Gardens and bought a few plants. Enjoyed looking around and the expensive and precious stuff. We took the plants home and went to the Arboretum. We bought a bathroom scale and a small radio for the new bathroom and went through Restoration Hardware and did a bookstore wander. In the bookstore, I looked at an expensive computer book I'd like but I'm not going to buy because I don't have time to read it and at several Paris guide books, ditto.

We went home, ate and went to Zach to see "Ain't Nothin' But the Blues." Great songs, great singers, production still a little rough.

Home, we made nachos, FFP watched a tape of the Lady Longhorns losing and I read a little. We went to bed, read some more, watched a bit of some movie.

Reading.

Newspapers.

Article in The New Yorker about the February 2005 Christo project to place thousands of gates in Central Park.

The screenplay of The Quiz Show in an old issue of Scenario The Magazine of Screenwriting Art.

nothing

Thinking about Things.

Things which hang on the wall.
Let's not count posters in tubes and framed things stored in closets. Just paintings, photos, prints, lithographs, plaques, artifacts and certificates that are hung on the wall or leaned on a piece of furniture. There are sixty or more!

(3365)

Exercise

recumbent bike	46min
treadmill
ergonomic rower
water aerobics
chest, shoulder, triceps
leg, back, bicep	x
lower back
ab exercises
stretches
walking
tennis

legs, back and bicep is a more time-consuming set right now than chest, shoulders, triceps

A little groggy when I got up. Good physically and mentally, though, most of the day.

It's a Tangled
Web we weave...these
days of our lives.

One year ago
"Sorting through the safe is always interesting. There is always something in there I've kind of forgotten we had or where it was."

Two years ago
"FFP tells me that someone drove a car into the building we own. Apparently they didn't steal anything and pulled out and drove off. This is a new type of crime. Steal a car, drive it into a locked building. I guess they got scared before they could steal anything."

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