AUSTIN, Texas, August 26, 2005 — I have a lunch date with a friend. OK, with SuRu, as she is known here. (And in real life sometimes, too.)

But that's it. No evening thing. I have something every evening for the rest of August. Wow. Nothing too serious. Parties. Dinner at people's houses. A meeting with the CPA. A film meeting.

I wake up having dreamt of this huge business complex. The funny thing I remember was that there was this thing

on wheels traveling through the place that had a bunch of old-fashioned punch card equipment on it and a bunch of people on it, working away, with the machines humming and spitting punched cards.

We finally get up a few minutes after seven. Long time abed. I slept well. And I don't feel stiff which I sometimes do after being in bed that long.

I go to the computer and fool around with a few things. Installing a new version of Spyware. Finishing yesterday's journal. We make the bed. We agree that there isn't much we can do about lake P/B until the city tells us something. If they throw the divining rod back in our court, then we'll see.

I get off to the club and ride the recumbent bike while reading old papers. I should do more. I need to lift. But I have a lunch date at 11:30 and I'm curious to see whether the city will show up. Besides I lose track of time and I've been on the bike an hour.

So I leave. As I drive away in my car, sweat keeps dripping down my neck.

When I get home, FFP says that someone from the city stopped by and took a bunch of notes but he was gone when FFP went out to speak with him. I get in the shower. When I get out, FFP says two guys are out there poking around. We go out to talk to them. They are pretty nice guys. They are the 'leak detection team.' One who looks Hispanic is Abel. (He gave us his name, phone numbers, his supervisor's number.) A tall black guy is his assistant. (Abel is explaining things to him.) They are using a listening device to try to find the leak. They also stick a long rod into the ground. They start to find areas where, deep down, it's quite muddy. I have to leave, but they are still poking around.

I go have lunch with SuRu. We go to NXNW. We both get the trout which I don't like as much as some of their other dishes as it turns out. Live and learn. It is fried. It just doesn't have much flavor. I'm going back to the smoked pork loin or the salmon pizza next time. The place gets so crowded and loud we can barely hear each other. We leave and people are waiting for tables and, in the parking lot, jockeying to get the spaces we will vacate so we have to quickly exchange some things. I give her some bubble wrap and newspapers for her packing (she's moving) and she gives me the box for a gadget I loaned her and she returned and some old wine corks for me to save for my aunt's projects.

I go home. FFP says they marked where they thought the leak was and said someone would try to fix it in 'five days or so.' At lunch SuRu (who used to live in the neighborhood) reminded me that there was a leak in the street about a block away that bubbled up for weeks before they fixed it. We wonder if the water will carve out a cave under our driveway and make it collapse before they fix it.

I'm thinking WLK means 'water leak?' The paint on the grass shows where they think it is. The leaking main pipe. This may be close to the site of the geyser of the eighties but it's hard to remember.

I decide to finish watching films for AFF. This volunteer gig ends Monday night with a film team meeting. I must say that the accumulated effect of all these films on my psyche is one of melancholy and amazement. So many scenes of fights and gunplay, of people waking up, knocking on doors, driving cars and standing looking pensive. A lot of good moments and few coherent efforts throughout where acting, filming, story came together magically. Of course, that can be said of mainstream movies, too. It's only driven me to be suicidal a couple of times. It will be interesting to contrast that experience with seeing the selected entries in October. Later I realize I had a call inviting me to a meeting at the film office to review films. I didn't listen to my message in time. But I was doing my thing watching movies anyway.

We have sandwiches for dinner and watch a DVD of The Business of Fancydancing. I read a user comment on imdb where the person quoted the writer/director (Alexie Sherman) as saying he liked to leave lots of questions unanswered. It did that all right. The user also said that Alexie was irritated with movies about writers that didn't show any of the writing. The poet in this piece reads and recites a lot of his poems and they are quite good actually and really add to the movie. So I assume Alexie is a good poet! Maybe other writers of screenplays about poets or novelists or other types of writers don't exhibit the writing because it is writing they can't produce. When the thing is a work of fiction, I mean. If you are doing a film about Virgnia Woolf or Hemingway, you've got your material. We watched The Moderns again recently, one of my all time favorites. They poke fun at the writing of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein by making them talk like they wrote in places. But my very favorite thing about the movie is when they had these characters (Nick and Oiseau or Nick and one of the girls, I'm not sure) in a car and outside the back window was a modern art painting of a cityscape.

And that's all I did today. Watched a few films, had lunch, rode a bicycle to nowhere for an hour, watched guys look for a leak in my yard, had a sandwich. Oh and I drank a Guinness, too. I watched a bit of a 1938 movie on DVD (Grand Illusion) and decided to send it back. We went to sleep. That's a free Friday for you...very few accomplishments.