AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 31, 2005 — Around noon, I faced the fact that one month of 2005 was gone. Sure, the lights and Santas have well faded in my mind. But a whole month! Wow.

Woke with a headache and realized while letting the dog out that while it was wet and cold it wasn't exactly raining.

I had my doubts about the tennis workout that I was subbing for actually happening but then I got a call that we were on, no doubt on the new magic-draining fake-clay courts with the low bounce.

So play we did. It was a fun workout...I enjoyed a lot of the drills. It was cold, though, and it was drizzling part of the time. I was damp and cold when I left the club without doing anything else in the way of exercise.

At home, I have cereal, proofread some stuff, helping FFP, finish journal. We decide, for lunch, to have take out from Parallel, this new place a couple of blocks away. We heat the pork, chard and portabellas in the mike and have a nice plate of food.

Dad comes by. He brings me some leftover lamb and potatoes from his friend's supper last night and I give him soom of the lemon-pepper sauteed catfish FFP has cooked up. We have a cup of coffee, talk and he goes off to buy vegies at Sun Harvest. It is the last day of the month! So I get busy and look through the credit card bills, the checkbook and our receipt folders and put together the January budget. We did well this month. February will be tougher, though, because we will eat out more and travel. Fortunately, we just have to stay within fairly generous limits. I well remember watching the checkbook balance, calculating whether and when we could pay each bill and when each paycheck would come in.

We have a meeting downtown. The weather is bitter. We park and go to the meeting. There is rather too much jabbering and hand-waving for me but it is all over in an hour and that's good. We snack on a few cheese cubes while it goes on. My head aches.

When we get home, I give into the headache and cure it with Advil, tea, a coke and some snacks. I read the papers. We watch a PBS program on Auschwitz. Rather I watched. FFP snoozed. I also watched some game shows and part of a documentary about gay orthodox Jews.Their gayness seems ordinary to me but their religion seems very exotic. I know so little about it.

My headache is gone. I finish the papers and sleep.