AUSTIN, Texas, August 5, 2005 — We were promised rain and the sky threatened as we drove to the Honda dealership at seven. We turned the Accord over to allegedly get its new computer and went to the club. Had a short workout (thirty minutes on bike and some situps and such) and we came home. The rain opened up on us on the way. As I shut the garage door it was going great guns.

I fooled around on my computer, publishing the journal and looking up some random stuff and working on my links collection. We have nothing else on the agenda, really, except getting the car back. FFP planned to go down to the Ballet

Austin office and I thought I might return a pile of films to AFF and get some more to review this weekend. I went in to shower for this and as I was standing in front of the mirror, rubbing gel into my hair, FFP made a call to the ballet and said he wasn't going down there but would take care of the issue on the phone since "it was raining and he only had more car which he wasn't used to driving." I mentioned in this space, at some point, I'm sure that when you are retired you can often just schedule around rain if you choose to do so. And so I delayed my trip downtown. Sure enough, as the rain subsided, the Honda place called and they had fixed the car and so we went to get it. FFP did get out but just went to the offices of The West Austin News and stopped back by Russell's (that itch he was wanting to scratch the other day) to get a sandwich that he split with me.

I spent a little time dashing off what were in my mind amusing and informative notes to friends and relatives via e-mail. It's nice to have time to do that sort of thing. I wandered outside at one point to retrieve our garbage and recycling containers and spied a red-headed woodpecker. It's nice to spy bits of nature unexpectedly around the old manor.

I decide to try to tidy up my office. The old folder of instructions and guarantees seems like an excellent place to start. I sort out some stuff for things we no longer own, find a tax receipt for a 2005 donation that somehow got mixed up in the stuff and decide to see if my dad wants the instructions for the gas grill he gave us but took to his house because we never used it. I also find some stuff about a garden tractor we bought with this house and later gave to a neighbor who, temporarily at least, resurrected and used it. I don't think he still has it, though. I also segregate instructions for some gadgets around the house like VCRs and stereo stuff and put it with the devices where there's a place. I need to do this kind of careful sorting all over the house but since confusion arrives faster than I can possibly sort it will never happen. One day I'll move and things will be discarded wholesale, I suppose. Until then one step forward two steps back.

Organization is so much more difficult than it looks, isn't it? Everything has a place but what is it? And when it is time to just let go of something?

To avoid thinking too much about all that I go down to AFF and turn in my films and get some different ones. There are still films in the bins. I'm tempted to take some docs but I don't. Help the narrative guys get through their piles. I talk to one of the other screeners. I explain that I just don't know that much about movies and it's hard to describe what's flawed even when I feel one is. "The better they are, the harder it is to describe the flaws," he asserts. That's true, I guess.

I go home. The sun is shining now. I go home and do some email. FFP gets done with a phone call and we go to Central Market. In the parking lot we wonder why it's so crowded at three o'clock. We see a friend or two. One is also retired. One works there and one is married to that one and is a chef.

We buy some fish to make fish tacos, fruit, cilantro, spring salad mix, sunflower sprouts, some kind of gourmet cheese that we taste at the cheese bar, sliced deli cheddar, several packages of chips, hot tofu dip, several jars of stuff like hot sauce, and wasabi sauce and such and some 'heat and eat' from the freshly-prepared foods: grilled vegies, eggplant stacks, tabouli and chilled cucumber/mint/melon soup. Except you don't heat the tabouli or soup but whatever. I also get FFP a big can of these crackers he likes. (While I finding those I consume enormous will power not getting some of the Carr's Ginger Lemon cookies I love. If I get them, I'll eat them all and quickly.) He gets some kind of supplement, too. It's not cheap but we can carry it all out in two bags.

When we get home and put everything away, I decide to eat a ripe peach and a small piece of gourmet cheese from the last trip to Central Market.

I check my e-mail and discover from one of the e-mails that there is a WEB site for my high school class. Now that is scary. Quite a while later I'm still fascinated about who's lost, who's found, who lives where and who's deceased. But finally I have to give it up. Several people I'm really interested in are lost and have been for a long time. And I really want to know more, of course. About the divorce of these two or how these people died. (I really only know the details of two of the deaths, I think. One died the summer after high school after collapsing on a run, I think, at the Air Force academy. One died after our twentieth sometime of complications of diabetes.) Of course, I have no business knowing any of this. Let people disperse and disappear, as the chaos takes them and as they desire. However, I do send an e-mail to one of the 'found' that I'd last sent a Christmas card to in Virgnia when I see she is in Hawaii according to the class. I think that I have only four classmates on my Christmas Card list at this point. That number has ebbed and flowed after the twentieth reunion. One died, but the others just moved and I lost track or else I decided the correspondence (OK, it was just a Christmas card) was one-sided. Having said that I don't think that, out of the hundreds we send, that we send a single Christmas card to someone from FFP's class. We send fewer to his relatives as well. He's more in the moment with friends, I cling to the past, I guess.

I notice that two of my classmates who went to college with me are 'missing.' This is because they both moved, I believe. Because they were married a long time and then divorced. I don't know where they are either, but I have a mutual college friend and I write an e-mail to her asking for their info. She sends it, but I don't send it to the class. They may want to remain lost. I send them an e-mail and let them know about the class plans and site.

I lose interest in high school for the moment (perhaps forever, who knows) when FFP is knocking around the kitchen, heating the grilled vegies and eggplant things. He has opened a bottle of Rioja. We eat the heated stuff and some tabouli. We didn't mean to be vegetarian tonight, but we are. Later FFP will snack on some crackers and jam and we will both sample the soup (outstanding!) and I'll have a handful of salt and vinegar potato chips.

We watched videos and read newspapers. We watched Art Pepper: Notes from a Jazz Survivor which is a fantastic documentary if only because of Art Pepper's music. We rewatched (it had been a long time, though) The Moderns. I love that movie. I reviewed one movie for AFF and it was sort of disturbing so that's what I went to sleep on. Not a good idea.