AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 17, 2005 — We will just have one car today. Of course, we don't really have any place to go. That's nice in a way. Isn't our life hard: existing for a day with one car? Ha.

I have to get up a little earlier than usual to pick up FFP when he takes his car to get the usual maintenance. We go straight to the gym after I pick him up. He is my excuse for doing forty minutes on the recumbent bike and nothing more. It's good to have excuses. If it weren't so cold (around thirty) I'd have showered off and stayed for water aerobics but that class doesn't make if it's below 38. If Dad would have come, I'd have done the class. If...

there was a class. We go home and I start fooling around on my computer, doing yesterday's journal, looking up stocks we may buy today.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is remarkable for its honest portrayal of being a teenager, more than anything. The remarkable circumstances and the honesty about those circumstances are also at work here. Reading about the Holocaust, seeing Hotel Rwanda I wonder how you can really judge one act of inhumanity against another, hold one genocide up as representative. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation is interesting in this regard. I believe the basis is that it is not retaliation and punishment but truth that allows you to move on. I'm particularly interested in South Africa because I feel that I'm good friends with several white English-speaking residents and I've at least met some people of other races although I don't pretend to understand thoroughly what it is and was like for any of them. When I visited Cape Town, it was remarkable to see a cell on Robben Island and contrast it with the presidential palace and realize the same man had occupied both.

Around nine o'clock I think: I should accomplish something today! Maybe another hour on the finaces, some creative work and some of the much-needed organization. Or study! Read! Get the newspaper pile under control. One problem I have is that I give everything equal weight. Priority setting is hard when nothing is really pressing.

I end up taking a leisurely shower and grooming myself. FFP asks about movies we might go see. I review both stuff playing at the movies and movies we have out from Netflix and send him an e-mail. We end up seeing none of these, not even the Netflix. He suggests something entirely different. Going to the LBJ Library to see a special exhibit about the Sixties. Our coming of age years as history. It is fun. They have a 1960's living room. You can't touch anything (pole lamp, console stereo with albums on one of those gold-painted racks beside it, old console TV, magazines around like Life and Mad). "I had that magazine and that album," I say. You can sit on the couch and watch commercials. They have the old TV rigged up to play a loop of old commercials. Lots of cigarette ads and breath mints and cars. We sit for a while. We also watch film of young comedians like Woody Allen and bits of old TV shows at another station. We wander off into some of the normal exhibits. Including a ten minute film summing up the '60's from a LBJ point of view.

When we got back, we had a message the car was ready and we fetched it. I stopped off at the drug store. I needed some hair gel and ended up buying some of those little sugar hearts they come out with at Valentine's. I spent part of the afternoon watching stuff off the DVR and eating candy and reading the newspapers I'm hopelessly behind on reading.

FFP's new monitor came and when he was at a stopping place we installed it and he liked it.

I didn't accomplish anything of note today. Of my resolutions, I guess taking pictures was the only one I really achieved and I wasn't that happy with the pictures! Ah, yes, time flees.

I just want to say that I'm pretty happy with the new format. I don't update so many links and have so many things I'm trying to write about. I just write what I feel like writing and then do other things. (Only sometimes, like today, I don't accomplish anything else either.) I've given a few more pixel spaces to the picture, figuring you guys (all four or five of you) can do the bandwidth. I write almost every day. In fact, every day...only I lost one day in the shuffle. Only having one comment thread in haloscan for the month is clearly enough. I see other journals where comments go into double digits for a day and I'm glad that there are only a few people following along here. My bandwidth isn't that good for interaction. I have trouble keeping up with other people's journals, just reading them, although I occasionally comment on other people's stuff. Even when they don't write every single day, though, most of the journalers out there are producing more than I can consume. However, it is amazing that people all over the world can read that my car is in the shop or that a guy in England fell out of bed, isn't it? I mean if they have the bandwidth. Some people's stories have a drama, a dramatic event or situation in their lives that takes over the journal. That hasn't happened here. In fact, when I struggled with my mother's dramatic illness, I just quit writing, mostly. I'm writing here to keep a record, to try to goad myself to action in certain ways and to practice my spelling. I guess. Anyway, the format will do for the moment. We will see what I think when the month is over.