AUSTIN, Texas, May 6, 2005 — After going throught the 'rage against nothing' yesterday, I felt exceptionally calm today. I knew I'd have to get an early start to get a workout before I had to go pick Dad up to go play games at the church. But I did get up at a reasonable time. I checked in with him, went to the club. I read the beginning of an article about James Wilcox in a copy of The New Yorker from over a decade ago. I'd never heard of this guy. He was, at the time, a critically successful but starving novelist. It's interesting when I read these old magazines. I mean when you read current stuff you wonder what will happen to people.

But with these old magazines, when you do wonder, you can go look into the future. Turns out that James went to academia and is the director for creative writing or something at LSU. He is still writing, though, and published something in 2003. It's either very sad or very hopeful that I can hang on to something I want to read for over ten years and then actually read it.

After my session in the gym (the bike ride, a few exercises with weights, some situps), I went home and showered and dressed and did a couple of things on the computer. I was running a minute or two late when I headed to Dad's but it didn't really matter. The old folks don't have a program. They just gather to eat snacks one of them has assembled and then organize in groups to play games. Dad had gotten a bath and even gotten his shoes on (albeit the velcro ones) and gotten his shirt tucked in (albeit into his elastic waist workout pants).

We went to the church. I wanted to sit and drink coffee and read but they said I had to play a Chicken Foot game with double twelve dominoes so the number of players would be better. They said they needed four for the game. We snacked on some pimento cheese sandwiches, chips and grapes. We left the cake and cookies to others.

We broke up a little early because of construction noise. I was amazingly calm, though, about being 'trapped' there, waiting for Dad to have fun, not even getting to read too much.

I took him home and did a little clean up and then shredded a few more things. I was glancing at the charges when my mother was dying and wondering about all the chest xrays and then remembered that they had a feeding tube in her nose a lot of times and she'd pull it out and then the xray was needed to see if it was placed correctly. Doctor's visited for five minutes, wrote a couple of notes, charged $150 and actually got nearly a hundred. Lots of medicine, medical practioners, therapy. The PTs and speech therapists were always eager to get her session in. It's easy to get cynical about it all. Dad's mail came and I retrieved it and went home.

At home I found two ladies in the the yard, planning an event in our yard next month. Where should we put the paintings? The catering table? Then I ask what if it rains. It's cancelled absolutely, they say.

We have nowhere to go this evening. Oh, the tennis folks I sub with had a party and there were other things we could have signed up for. But we needed a night off. I sat at the computer for a while. I bought a wedding gift online. I did some writing. I did an e-mail on my dad's health. FFP was very busy with one of his charity projects. He came in around four and said maybe we should get something from Central Market. I voluntered to go. I beat the large part of the crowd parking. I went to the bookstore and picked up some mystery novels for my dad and a book on tape for FFP's dad.

As I walked into Central Market, I saw a friend. I was walking through the cafe entrance. He had a large plastic cup of wine. I went to the ready to eat food and got a shrimp vericelli salad, a black bean salad, some sushi and rolls, some spring rolls. Then I went to the back and picked up some White Mountain yogurt and tofu dip, a package of vegetarian barbeque and came back through the beer, getting a six of Harp. I wandered over to package goods and was looking for my favorite cookies (Carr's Lemon Ginger Cremes) and before I found them my friend showed up again.

"I bought this cup of wine and now I set it down somewhere and lost it," he said. About then I saw a plastic cup stuck in an end cap display. I said nothing. But he saw it, too, and went over and fished it out. Sure enough, a large portion of red wine was still in it. He wandered off happily.

I found the cookies. I was using a hand basket so it was getting heavy now with the quart of yogurt and the beer. I decided to skip produce. We had our dinner and a few products you can't get at Randall's. I'd stock up on produce and other basics on a regular store stop. So, I spent less than fifty bucks. But not much less. It was a lot, I guess, but it was a delicious Asian dinner with Irish beer and a few provisions that will provide a bit more nourishment. While we watched TV later we had a snack of the tofu dip and some chips. I ate too many of the cookies. And I even had two beers. We watched the finale of Third Watch. We watched a Law and Order. We watched a KLRU thing about downtown that included the ballet. In fact, we only watched the ballet part because FFP didn't want to watch the rest, though I did. Then we watched part of a Northern Exposure I already watched but he hadn't. He fell asleep. We went to sleep. I had been reading the papers, mostly The Wall Street Journal. Because it was on top of my pile.

I continue to spend a couple of minutes a day looking at how people arrive at our WEB space. People often stumble by after searches for food. The top search term for April? Tater Tots. Fifty-seven hits. And next? Eggplant. Sixteen hits. How sad is that? It says something that I'm high on the results list for 'woman who eats everything' and 'misuse of acronyms.' But I only found this out because someone searched for those things in a search engine. Interesting.