AUSTIN, Texas, Mar. 8, 2005 — I was up early enough to get to the club, have at least a brief workout and get back, get dressed, go get my dad. I even put on my workout clothes and cross trainers. But I was just going to work on the journal a little, enjoy typing, read and look up some stuff. Yeah. I need to pick up Dad and leave his place around 10 or 10:15. But when it's 8:30 I realize this means that I need to leave here by 9:45 at the latest and that means if I get to the club in ten minutes I will have to leave by a half past or twenty after and it seems too rushed. Or else I'm lazy.

I actually do some situps and stretches and then shower up and get ready and go get my dad.

Dad's ENT appointment is in that St. David's Plaza place and we have to struggle to find a parking place in the garage. And there is a strange set of paperwork asking questions about mother, father, brothers, sisters. I get that done and we see the doctor who is only running a few minutes late. He finds nothing to worry about and cleans his ears as a bonus play. We erupt from the dank garage (after having to walk down the stairs because the parking garage elevators seem not to be working) into this beautiful spring day, feeling good because we know Dad doesn't have to see a doctor here for a year, hopefully.

We go back to the house. Dad's maid from the service is there and so I go get a pizza from Papa John's and my sister, Dad and I eat it and then play some games, sitting in the plant-cluttered glassed-in porch smelling the dirt and must. He has this assortment of shabby little tables and desks and shelves for the plants. He's wintering some of mine. He has several enormous, amazing ferns. I'm thinking if something happens and I have to sell this house I'm going to have to spruce up this area. The tarp he uses to keep cold wind from leaking around the door to the patio, for example, gives a bit of a Sanford and Son aspect to the place.

I finally win at one of these games. They are mostly luck, I'm afraid.

When the maid is gone I take my sister to Terra Toys. We look at everything, run a quarter through a Rube Goldberg gumball machine, buy some books for my great nephews.

Back at my dad's I excuse myself to go to the mailing place and send off the stuff for the family address book project and to mail a box of stuff to my sister. One more cubic foot of stuff dealt with, even if it will lurk at my sister's house. Maybe I won't be the one disposing of it there.

I goof off until time to go to Moonshine and meet our young friends. There is a new addition and he seems like a nice young kid. Works for IBM. Our young singer friend talked about his gigs, proudly showed us around the place (and got free apps) since he's friends with some of the people here. A band played loudly in the tented courtyard.

Yesterday my sister casually said when Dad and I got back from the doctor's office that my niece's father-in-law had died. Heart attack or something. He was apparently older than my sister and her husband but it was still kind of a shock. It will be hard on the little boys, too, who loved that grandpa and saw a lot of him, I think. Hearing that, maybe that's why I dreamed of Jeffy, the baby, only he was as big as a ten- or twelve-year-old and was leading everyone on a merry chase only everyone said he was three which he will be next month. Or maybe it was just because the couple we went out with last night has an eleven-year-old boy.