AUSTIN, Texas, Apr. 26, 2005 — The problem with old folks is, well, they are slow. True for me, to a degree. (And my friends, husband, maid, etc. who are all about my age.) But especially true for people like my dad, who is thirty-two years older than I am.

I'm not eager to get up this morning. Truthfully, I don't have anything I really, really have to do. My plan is to do a few chores around here, work out, go to Dad's around noon and do a few things there, come home and spend an evening doing something useful or entertaining.

When I finally do get up, I get into workout clothes. I get some coffee. I strip the bed and put on clean sheets. I wash the wine glasses from last night and empty the dishwasher of clean dishes.

I send out an e-mail on my club project. I get an e-mail asking me to substitute for a tennis workout. But it's 10:30-12:30 and I've already arranged my day to get finished with the club and showered by noon. So I say 'no.' I get off to the club, ride the stationary recumbent bike for a long time (fifty minutes plus a couple), do a few sets of weight things and go home and shower. My plan to get in shape is going so slowly. After over two years of retirement with physical health getting a high priority, you'd think I'd be really fit. But time slows us down. It's an uphill battle. While exercising I'm reading a January 2004 issue of The New Yorker. In it is an article about a complete reading over two nights of a novel (Paul Auster's Oracle Night) that I started but I'm not reading because I'm busy reading old newspapers and magazines. I find this amusing somehow. The world is hurtling on. I go slowly.

I get home, get a shower. Around noon I head to Dad's. He is dragging today. Says he isn't walking as much because his hip 'grabs' and his leg hurts. He isn't taking pain medication. Yesterday he says he walked with his walker almost everywhere. The neighbor has gotten his paper in and he's reading a joke book my friends bought him. I ask him about lunch. He says he had cereal and a Danish and cranberry juice and a banana for breakfast 'not very long ago.' I get the garbage out, clean some science experiments out of the frig, wash up dishes and his French press he uses for coffee. I call a doctor he was supposed to see today to follow up for a procedure we cancelled that was supposed to fix something that cleared up on its own. Just to be sure they know he isn't coming in and that the doctor knows it finally cleared up .

I get his mail. He has several get well cards which he enjoys.

Finally he says he wants an egg (over easy) with a few crackers for lunch. He gets up and into the wheelchair. He paddles off to the bathroom. I make the egg. I try to interest him in a salad as well or some apple. No dice. He comes back in there and wants me to get his old scales out of the garage so he can weigh himself.

"I don't care what you weigh. I want you to eat and walk." I say. I say this while bringing in the scales. He gets back in his easy chair, just taking a few steps from the wheelchair. He asks for cranberry juice and water so I get them. He says his friends might visit.

"Are they coming this afternoon?" I ask.

"They might. I hope so." He says. They will not come, it turns out. But he will call some people and get some calls and that will entertain him somehwat.

His recovery seems to be going so slowly. And I worry that he is less willing to walk today than yesterday. It hurts. Well, yeah, OK. But, like I said, at 88 things are slow, I suppose. Myself, I don't move that fast either. His blood pressure is all over the map.

He seems lonely. I suggest he get in his chair and go outside and sit on the porch. It's a nice day. "Watch people come home from work," I suggest.

"Maybe I'll go in there and brush my teeth in a minute," he says.

Whatever. I decide to go home.

The maid is working away at home. So I gather up the day's newspapers and retreat to my office. But I don't read the newspapers. Instead I work on my journal and fool around on the WEB.

As I mentioned recently in these pages, I've been checking out how people arrive in the bowels of the Visible Woman (hmm, strange metaphor), how they come in through searches rather than systematically checking out the day's entries. Really, the journal entries only make sense as journal entries. They aren't scholarly articles on what you searched for ("What time does Leopard go out to eat"). And the pictures don't necessarily track with all the words in the entry. You, innocently searching for images from a 1966 movie find, instead, a picture of a TV showing a scene from the movie Dogma of an overflowing toilet. [I can't even figure out how this happened.) This has given me lots of food for thought about search engines, the WEB, and the posting of journals. I think there should be a key word that alerts all the bots scouring the WEB for all the free content that they'll serve up with their little ads that what they are scouring is a random entry in a journal which may not give insight into the random words therein.

Google and other search engines have sent many people into deadends at my site for typing things such as "calorie for small salad with dressing" or "roasted carrot snacks" (perils of a food diary). Sometimes image searches on Google and Yahoo and such yield bizarre results. Like 'bike crashes' offering a picture from my site of a possibly homeless guy with a heavily-laden bike. He isn't crashing. But the page has some info on car crashes and a diatribe about safety because the guy has a helmet and a rearview mirror. Somebody searching for pictures for 'race number' ends up getting a couple of shots from the marathon in front of our house. I'm nonplussed by the person making a Google search for "aer lingus inflight magazine paintings martello" and ending up with one result. There are people who try to find searches that yield one and only one result. I forget what they call that. In any case, I have to feel that this person didn't come close to finding what they were looking for. It gives me this oddly guilty feeling of contributing to the random insane strangeness of the world where nothing really means that much.

I also get directed myself to places people have been directed. With the result that I find myself reading old journal entries and looking at the pictures and stuff therein. I realize I enjoy old 'features' like quotes and 'just typing'. I see things to like (and dislike) about old formats. And I find old typos.

These are all things that you can't do with a paper journal or with an electronic one that you keep to yourself without exposing it to the roaming bots. For better or worse.

I help FFP with a computer problem and have a snack. I'm about to settle in for the evening just answering a friend's e-mail when she calls and says she's in town, let's eat out. She comes over. FFP has nuked a frozen eggplant parmesan. He puts it in the frig and we all head to 34th Street. They have a new menu and a new chef. It looks good. However, the carpaccio comes served with tiny portions of the meat and fixings on rather thick crostini. All I taste is the crisp bread thing. The many cheese pizza has been touted by the waitress ("who would think to put bleu cheese on a pizza?") but it is bland. I make it tasty by drizzling the pepper oil from the bread on it which they fortunately didn't remove from the table. FFP has monkfish, the catch of the day. I taste it. It's good. SuRu has a steak and declares it tasty. We share a bottle of Pinot Noir.

At home, we watch a little TV off the DVR and I try to read the newspapers from the last couple of days. For some reason I'm tired. FFP, too. In the end we go to sleep with me watching an episode of Monk from bed.