AUSTIN, Texas, August 21, 2005 — I get up around five and let the dog out and get a drink of water and go back to bed. FFP has been up, but he comes back to bed. Around seven the dog wants out again. I do that but still get back in bed. Around eight, OK a little after, everyone gets up. We make the bed. I get into workout clothes, flip on CBS Sunday Morning briefly and then fall into the coffee-drinking, writing at my computer thing that seems to define a lot of my mornings. It is, after all, work, too. Sort of. It is not effortless even to do something meaningless. Many of us who have worked

for a living have proven that. While I'm writing yesterday's entry, I write something in one of my notebooks. It is because of giving a bit of thought to how the unfurling of events depends on each little event. I don't know why I wrote it in the notebook and not here so I'll do that now.

The past has set so many things in motion that they surround us like a net partly obscuring the infinite possibilities of the future.

I have this thought because I wrote yesterday about how a person quitting my company in 1990 changed things so much for me and others around me.

It is often confusing, by the way, writing from the perspective of yesterday after the fact. That's how I do my journal, however. I may jot down parts of it as the day unfolds but still I finish it when the day is done and in the can. Naturally, sometimes the abstract thinking is from the here and now of the time of writing. The meals, events and snatches of almost real conversation are from the day, though.

We don't really have anything to do today. Which means there is nothing on the calendar. FFP reads things that were happening in town from the newspaper while I get one of my several cups of coffee from the Capresso. I'm inclined to stay home and watch movies for AFF and TV and work on my silly projects. After a workout, of course.

I do get to the gym. By 1:30 I have had a fifty minute bicycle ride to nowhere, done some upper body weight work, gotten home and done a little more journal writing. On the bike and between sets I read papers, some from yesterday, some over a month old. I suppose I should abandon the archival pile and start afresh but if I did I would have missed knowing that a high-rise condo was being developed in Las Vegas named Ivana (yes, after the Trump ex), that there were people developing weight loss plans based on just eating at McDonald's, that McDonald's French Fries had significantly less salt than Burger King's (separate unrelated article), that some jobs were being outsourced to rural areas of this country to be done by cheaper labor with cheaper overhead and that people were trying to find islands or ocean platforms and start their own countries.

I end up eating 'lunch' late. I had a very ripe banana for breakfast. I eat what's left of a carcass of a rotisserie chicken that is leftover. I eat a piece of cheese, too, a few chips and green onions.

I'm sitting at my desk, still in sweaty workout clothes, when FFP suggests we get out and go somewhere. South Congress suggests itself to him. I shower up quickly and put on jeans, polo, hiking boots and off we go. No mission, just wanted to get out. There doesn't seem to be any special reason but the street is hopping. UT is not back in session yet. So, yeah, there doesn't seem to be a reason why. We get a parking place and wander the street. We go in Uncommon Objects and Blackmail and Vivid but don't buy anything. It amazes me how the stuff for sale in Uncommon, mostly stuff you'd think would languish for a buyer, does turn over often enough. I don't know if they just rearrange it or if they actually sell and replenish enough, but the stuff does change. They didn't provide a vivid window display this time, though, but I filled the camera with other shots to slow down the daily page load.

FFP tried on a cowboy hat. It was a perfect fit, but we thought not! (It looks suspiciously burnt orange the way it got lit, doesn't it?

The stores Blackmail and Vivid are arrestingly sparesly done up. Quite a contrast to Uncommon Objects and its rococo melanges of dusty stuff with lots of patina.

People are eating and drinking at Guero's, South Congress Cafe and Jo's but we aren't hungry really. We head home.

FFP wants a Guinness. Newly converted to this brew, he's having a hankering for one. (He used to not drink beer at all. This is a new development for his to have the odd beer.) He suggests we stop at Whole Foods Planet (my name for it although there are signs inside that says something like 'Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet' which is where I got it). I think it's a bad idea because it's an idea many Austin denizens are bound to have had at five on a Sunday. Still we pull in, go into the garage and after waiting a bit while other people waited for cars to pull out, we get a place.

The store is crowded and there are children darting here and there and people strolling wild-eyed so whowever is pushing the cart is always falling behind. We go to the beer area. They don't have the long necks with the charge in them to make the Guinness head but have cans with it so we get a four pack of those. We also pick up hamburger buns (I think FFP is going to make vegie burgers from some freezer patties some time this week but I don't ask), two bottles of a hot sauce FFP likes (Rosie's refrigerated green stuff), two prepared salmon burgers and some miso-glazed eggplant (the latter for dinner).

At home we eat dinner while watching that a Sixty Minutes bit about the sea-faring nomad islanders who escaped the tsunami because they sought higher ground (or if at sea went into deep water) because they saw the signs. These people have no word for hello, goodbye, want, what or when.

We watch the Six Feet Under extravaganza. I don't know how you feel about the ending but when it started down the path of (spoiler coming!) showing all these characters at death, far in the future, I wanted them to keep going, showing us the children dying in the next century. But, OK, they made their point. Everybody in the pool. Everybody gets to die. Alan Ball (no relation) says, by the way, that the ghosts of the dead people that are always showing up are merely the minds of the living. He thinks the dead are gone for good. Well, the show is gone but it will live again in rerun and on DVD.

We read (me, still trying to get through the Sunday papers) and half watch Deconstructing Harry again which is not a great Woody Allen but has some laughs and happened to be on cable. I should have finished up my AFF films but I'm almost finished and can easily finish tomorrow before the meeting. One more week of AFF film review and that's over. The U.S. Open tennis will be starting next weekend, of course, so I will be pulled in the direction of TV for that.

But now some sleep. Water aerobics and film team tomorrow. And many other things to do.