AUSTIN, Texas, August 7, 2005 — The dog is bugging me to go out and I emerge from a dream to go to the back door with her. FFP is sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper, as usual this time of morning when he arises before I do.

"I already let her out," he says. He always feeds her and gives her the pill (half of one actually) for her liver when he gets up. Sometimes he lets her out. But often she wants to go out again.

I decide to go back to bed. The dream was interesting and while I don't want to go back into it I'm interested in the place it came from. There were all these beds in different rooms.

One was a folding couch or something and maybe it was where FFP and I slept but he'd moved it to another room. Then, as is so typical in my dreams, I was looking for people including FFP. When I found him I was going to tell him that we should go through the house, cleaning out rooms, including the ones we never went into and had forgotten existed. Hidden, forgotten rooms full of potentially valuable unsorted furniture and artifacts. These are often present in my dreams. I can't find FFP and I look for and find my cell phone so I can call him. I'm on an exercise bike pedaling away even though I'm wearing long cotton pants and I'm trying to remember his cell phone number. Of course, he never has it turned on anyway.

The dream place is less interesting when I go back to bed so I get up, get dressed, get coffee and go to my computer.

I waste the morning on CBS Sunday Morning and folding laundry and doing things on the computer, looking stuff up, reading some other journals, publishing my own journal. Somehow it is after eleven and I haven't eaten or worked out. FFP has headed to the club on his own. I should get there before noon! So I grab some of the newspapers I need to dispose of and head out.

My workout is lousy. I do fifty minutes on the bike. Yesterday, while on the bike, I read that they did this study and women who could exercise doing 8.2 METS (whatever that is) were less likely to die in the next some years. Okay, I don't remember how long. But, anyway, it didn't really say how long you were supposed to be able to produce 8.2 METS (again, what is a MET?) but the bike has some MET calculation so I switched to it and tried to maintain that level for a couple of minutes which was pretty easy to do although it would be darn hard to do for fifty minutes. I keep upping my resistance and I try to keep the RPM above sixty (I know, wimpy). I use resistance 10 and 11 during my workout now. I don't know how hight the thing goes, honestly. After fifty minutes my heart rate (normally a bit high) is 140-150.

Anyway, today, after doing the bike, I just do one little exercise for my triceps and bail. Probably because I know FFP is home cooking.

At home I find FFP with all the fixings for chicken tacos ready. I have a couple, drink a bottle of water, help FFP finish the melon mint cucumber soup and share a peach with him.

I have a couple of movies on VHS to review and write-ups on several flicks to do and we decamp to the big room to do it. The feature kind of drags. The short is short although a bit puzzling. I munch a few chips and some hot tofu dip while watching and also glance through some papers.

"I bet the young folks would get it." FFP observes.

We were thinking of going to hear a jazz chamber group tonight at Copa. Several other people were probably going with us. One couple has to watch a parent who had a TIA, another friend has allergies. I also thought of going to the Austin Journal Writers meetup. But it's after the time for that before I think of it again.

Everyone who was going to maybe go with us to hear music bails due to good excuses. So we have to decide whether to go. We decide to go it and shower up. We are there early, reading our books and some excellent program notes while the ten piece jazz chamber group sets up. Where else can you hear stuff like this for $5 and no minimums? Although we do have a couple of beers and some nachos and chips and salsa and queso.

We are not sorry. The group is sensational, the arrangements fantastic. A couple of the muscians are sight-reading the charts. Maybe this really is the live music capital of the world. Or not. But you'd go a long way to find a cool cave of a room with a group like this playing great music for five bucks a head. Must not be very good for the musicians, though. How can they ever make any money? We enjoyed ourselves.

At the very reasonable hour of nine we headed home. FFP watched that Comeback show while I half paid attention to it. Then we watched Six Feet Under on the DVR. I read a few sections of newspapers and we went to sleep.

I wasted time again today looking at my high school class WEB site. There really isn't much there. A list of people, pictures (from high school) of departed classmates, links to a couple of other classes, some comments from a get together they had in the last few years. I haven't thought much about my life before age 18 (or even 21) much in the last few decades. Fact is, I've forgotten a lot of it and that's probably fro the best. But I had this short-lived fascination with wondering about all these people. Like many of my temporary enthusiams, it will pass and become fodder for weird dreams or occasional thoughts while driving somewhere or upon seeing a familiar face. I forget that past as easily as anyone. I thrive in the present, I think, although I'm a planner. I focus on plans for various contingency and scheduling my social life and planning travels. I look forward. Looking back, I'm not always delighted with what I see.