The Visible Woman...January 22, 2001

Woke up many times during the night (indigestion) and seemed to go through the entire catalog of every dream I've ever dreamed. (Do we actually dream them all every night if only we knew?) One I recall was the 'large animals in the backyard' one. At least these animals were recognizable. They aren't always. The water buffaloes were a bit out of scale for the yard. (Not our real one, a smaller one.) The lions and tigers seemed, well, threatening. I wondered if I should let Chalow get so close to them.

Let's just say that the gender issue in writing threatened important issues so I had to let it go. The solution to my hating second person was to use third person, but never use a pronoun. You have to laugh. You do. Or one has to laugh. One does. He does. I also objected to formulas being written out and imbedded in text as opposed to indented and using mathematical formulas. The writer said he'd make it clearer 'by indenting it and using math symbols.' "How is that different than the way I had it?"

Maybe for my next career, I will be a technical writer. Nah...I couldn't put up with me.

At lunch I piled up an everything salad at Whole Foods. Lots of dressing, too. But I drank water with it!

Visited the parents for the evening. FFP was at a meeting. Mom suggested we have a breakfast dinner because Dad cooks breakfast things and he cooked. We taped FFP's Monday night programs for him and watched 'Antiques Roadshow.' Mom and I made Jack a birthday card. He'll be one next month. We printed some more cards from a disk that came with the printer. We tried to use the Card Creator in Microsoft Works. It caused errors in Win32.dll and something else and crashed when we tried to print.

We sent a gift certificate to my niece's husband on amazon.com. We sent an e-mail to my niece. Mom was amazed when I suggested later that maybe we should also forward it to her at work since I'd forgotten to send to both addresses. The fact that you can cut, paste, forward, etc. is amazing to her. As was the fact that we could take Jack's picture from the file the screen saver was using and paste it into a card. (I just used WORD and tried to visualize the folding of plain paper into a card. Mom was much better at this than I...she has good spatial sense from her crafts and sewing and weaving.)

Back home, I watched 'Jazz' and worked a crossword and read a few papers. I still have an awesome stack of ones I haven't gotten to.

It's amazing how little I get done these days. In the late seventies, in the old journals I have been reading, I worked, played soft ball and tennis in organized leagues, did some house cleaning and yard work, ran errands and kept up with the family checkbook and bills as well as keeping books for FFP's business. Now, I manage to go to work and that's about all I contribute. I move my piles of stuff around so the maids can clean a different area of the floor. And, um, well, I play with my computer stuff. Boy, I am sure useless now.