AUSTIN, Texas, August 23, 2005 — It creates a lethargy when it is this hot.

RESIDENTS NEEDING TO BE OUTSIDE FOR AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF TIME SHOULD TAKE FREQUENT BREAKS...WEAR LIGHT-COLORED CLOTHING... USE HATS...PLAN ON GETTING WORK DONE IN THE COOLER PART OF THE DAY...AND DRINK PLENTY OF WATER. HEAT INDICES WILL REACH BETWEEN 100 AND 110 DEGREES OVER SOUTH CENTRAL TEXAS IN THE AFTERNOON. THE HEAT INDEX IS A MEASURE OF HOW HOT THE AIR FEELS ON EXPOSED SKIN IN SHADY AREAS. HEAT INDICES WILL FEEL 10 TO 15 DEGREES HOTTER IN FULL SUNLIGHT. CHILDREN, ELDERLY AND PEOPLE WITH CHRONIC AILMENTS ARE USUALLY THE FIRST TO SUFFER FROM THE HEAT. HEAT EXHAUSTION, CRAMPS, OR IN EXTREME CASES HEAT STROKE CAN RESULT FROM PROLONGED EXPOSURE TO THESE CONDITIONS.

I am outside playing tennis a little before nine. It feels awfully hot. I'm playing with the older set so it isn't too strenous but

I'm soon drenched in sweat. On the breaks I'm drinking cold water and sponging cold water on my face. I should go to the gym when we are done but after that I don't feel like it.

I should say something about the other people out there on the courts. The older ladies I was playing with are amazing. One can barely see due to macular degeneration but she has great instincts from years on the court and sometimes hits some great shots. I encourage her. I even hit it to her when sometimes the others don't because they want to rally a bit. When she hits it back it delights me. When she's my partner, I try to poach when she's serving and we do win a game. Everyone wins one game when playing with her. The other two ladies are older, too, but they see fine and their games are beautiful. No double faults, chasing down lots of balls, nice strokes. It's fun. I notice other people around the complex. Including women in those visors with extra large bills who look, when they crouch awaiting a serve, like anorexic ducks. Yeah, that's jealously talking. Oh, to be an anorexic duck! I hear the patter from a team workout on the courts above. On Thursday I've agreed to sub in just such a workout. That will be strenuous, guaranteed.

I go home and eat a chicken breast sandwich and strip off the soaked clothes and put on a robe. Want to stop sweating before I shower. I start doing this and that, making the bed, watching movies for AFF. Around one I realize that I have to shower before the maid comes and I am in her way. I get showered up and put on cotton shorts and a T-Shirt and it isn't long before she does come. I go upstairs and get out of her way and do this and that on our finances. I start working on the August budget and I call a credit card company to complain about a finance charge they made a couple of statements ago. "I can take that off for you." says the friendly service guy.

"Can you tell me why it got charged?" I ask

"I can't see any reason they would do that. Maybe the payment got lost in the mail but there's no late charge so that isn't it. There doesn't seem to be a reason."

"OK, thanks," says I.

It's interesting to see what you can save here and there paying attention. It's hard to find the time, though. It's like shopping for sales and using coupons and filing for rebates. It can be time-consuming. I did notice on one of my other cards that I got a $30 credit. I was making hotel reservations for the trip and I noticed an offer from hotels.com that would pay up to $30 of gasoline that you charged if you stayed two nights with hotels.com. I'd picked a hotel they had available for Baltimore already. So I printed out the offer and stuck it in my notebook. They only let you send in one receipt. At the gas prices on our trip it would be hard to have one receipt for $30 for our Accord given its gas tank. So I figured I'd send it the highest one we had. Somewhere in the middle of the U.S.A. one of my fellow travelers (in an SUV probably) left a receipt for over $30 at the pump. I sent that one. So yeah, I got $30 back. Big deal. Digging into one's finances is depressing. "Darn, we spend a lot of money on this house!" you think at one point. Then...darn we lost money on that investment! If you made money, it isn't a lot better. Because now you are thinking, "Do I have too much money in that investment?" What's best to do with it? Some people believe that when you get enough money you no longer worry about maintaining your property or your investments or what you spend. You just hire someone to look after it.

I don't think it's true, though. I think people who have hundreds of millions worry more. Especially if they have houses, cars, yachts, trusts, foundations, etc. No matter how many people you can hire to worry about your stuff, your investments, your charitible giving...it consumes your time and mental energy. It's better to have money and a lot of it while one is on this planet. I'm pretty sure anyway. I look back at the worries reflected in my old journals and see how easy it is to throw a little money at these problems. But when you have that money there are new ones. Even the process of giving away money is worrisome. Even Bill Gates has to worry if what he is giving is doing the most good. He can set up a huge foundation and have employees and such but, at the end of the day, he is taking responsibility for that money and that isn't trivial. The most fun you will have with your money is giving it away, but that process isn't problem-free either.

As I go through checkbooks and credit card bills, though, it makes me realize how different our lives are now. And how we spend amounts of money on things like cable TV, domain names, Internet service, computers, printer ink and, yes, donations, that we never dreamed we'd be doing. I definitely get the urge to simplify it all, too. But nothing much comes of it. Did I mention that yesterday we got someone to come and see about the broken TV? Yeah, FFP called a place that had worked on our ancient Sony TV. Ray's Electronics. See, the company that 'outfitted' our 'media room' (sometimes referred to as THE room in these pages) and sold us a bunch of the stuff in there (and replacements in the subsequent ten years), High Fidelity, went out of business. Anyway, so Ray (the actual Ray who is now probably over eighty) and this younger (but not that young) nerdy guy came over and wrestled the 35-inch TV around so its back was facing out and took the back off and took all these circuit boards out and took them away to try to fix it. Ray gave little lessons along the way. How electronics were dust magnets and how when the guy disconnected this thing that attaches to the picture tube there is a charge that remains there that could knock him across the room. I wonder if these guys are working on plasma and LCD TVs? I'm sure they are packed with circuit boards, too. They talk about how they resolder the shoddy manufacturing solder all the time.

Point is, if you own stuff then things get broken, worn out, lost, need insuring, get in the way when their time is past and must be hauled away. The more stuff, the more repair, replacement, insurance, discarding you must do. Now I'm not saying that you folks who are on your way up the acquisitive chain (I've reached a stasis myself if I'm not actually on the declining slope) should curb your enthusiam for flat screen TVs, IPods, DVDs, computers, game machines, cars, houses, boats, clothes, jewelry, art, knick-knacks and all that. No. You must fuel this econonmic bubble or that. Fuel away. I'm just saying that there's a reason there's a Container Store (to hold the stuff) and that repairmen and haulers and organization specialists and closet and cabinet customizesr and all that come behind this acquisitive rush.

Enough of that digression, though.

I made it through several more review films for AFF today. Watching a lot of low budget films and going over finances is a great prescription for getting depressed. If we wanted to test a feel good drug, we could show a bunch of these films to people then make them track their spending for a couple of months to get them down. I don't know why that's true with the films. I think because, when watching them for review you see, on average, much worse efforts than those that make it to distribution in theaters and on DVD. So you see all these sort of dashed hopes and (in your opinion) wasted effort with a few tiny gems in between.

We watched a couple of episodes of House tonight. OK. Can't decide how I feel about this show. Then we watched two DVDs. We didn't make it through Mulletville. The most interesting thing to us was that Cynthia Geary was in it. Somoeone recommended this film to FFP in some context. So he put it on the Netflix queue. Then we watched Smoke Signals. We liked this OK. Cynthia Geary was in it, too. What are the odds? Well, who knows, maybe someone went through her films in the process of putting stuff in the queue. Neither of us remembers. So much competes for our attention these days. Once you have a Netflix queue it takes a life of its own and random stuff shows up. Oddly enough, Elaine Miles was in it, too. (She was Marilyn Whirlwind in Northern Exposure.) Although I guess it's not that odd since it is a movie about Indians. Still. I looked up the next film due to show up and I see that it is The Business of Fancydancing. Both actresses are in that piece, too. Definitely a pattern. Someone should write a screenplay about an Indian (as in native American) actor or actress who gets a few roles as a character actor and then goes on the skids. Probably someone already did this. Many Americans are attracted to Native American culture even those sliding helplessly away into our modern urban life that is overly influenced by Christian religions from another part of the world. This is either due to an attraction to the 'other' or due to the fact that many of us have traces of this gene pool. (I read the other day about a woman who hired a genealogist to verify a native American ancestor. She'd been hanging around pow-wows as a visitor for years.)

But I digress.

I once again ate a horrible diet today. Besides the chicken breast sandwich and a piece of cheese and onions, I ate a plate of nachos, a cereal bar, a banana, drank part of a Guinness and had a bite of FFP's queso. I just couldn't bring myself to bother to eat something healthy like a salad or a drink of V8 or something.

Days like this with no obligations save playing a casual bit of tennis with women in their seventies, are an invitation to weird reflections and sloth. I didn't even wear shoes all day after my shower. However, since I reviewed some films and accomplished a little something on the finances I didn't feel bad about it all. I go to sleep a little fuzzy from the bad diet and a little beer or perhaps from just too much media.