It’s after midnight. I thought I would sleep through the night because I’m taking some muscle relaxant for my sore back, but something woke me up and I got up and took a pee and then was wide awake so I came down to the kitchen and ate some sour milk product with blue berry and vanilla flavor and turned on the iBook.
Somewhere in the house, a tortoise sleeps.
My wife called me at work the other day. She said the tortoise was humping her Birkenstock. It was warm enough recently to put the tortoise outside so we did, for a few hours. Tomorrow it’s supposed to snow. Tomorrow or Monday.
They wanted me to come in and work this weekend but that would be impossible, I told them, with my sore back.
I hope I don’t get fired.
I don’t think I can remember ever being fired, except back when I was seventeen when I was released from my job as a boxboy at a supermarket after I declined to join the union because the dues would have, I thought at the time, taken too big a bite out of my wages.
Something like half, I think.
Now, I would tell my self then to go ahead and pay the dues.
Oh well.
Actually, I would tell myself to go ahead and quit of my own accord, because, sheesh. That was a really stupid job. And I would have enough stupid jobs in my life.
My jobs haven’t been all that bad, though, when I think about it. Retired guys bag groceries now, don’t they? That would be worse, i imagine, although I guess they like the extra income and having someone to talk to.
You bag your own groceries here in Austria.
When I visit the States, it feels invasive when someone bags my groceries for me. I always feel like, it’s okay, dude, I’ll get that.
I am typing this at my kitchen table.
We have WIFI now. Our neighbors are probably all going, Yay.
Gamma was just downstairs saying she can’t sleep. I let her sit for a couple minutes then ran her back upstairs and put something relaxing on the CD player. She’ll be back in a few more minutes.
I just lost about ten minutes of typing because the router shuts off the internet connection after five minutes of inactivity. You either have to remain active or go unplug it to make it start back up. That kind of defeats the purpose of a wireless network, if you have to keep going back to the device to manually unplug it.
Maybe I can build something that unplugs it and plugs it back in every five minutes.
I would make it look like a toy monkey. It would be mounted on the wall by where the router power plug is.
Otherwise the new wifi works fine except that we are going to have to upgrade our account. I get the feeling this is going to bump us into a different class, bandwidth wise.
Setting it up was a lot easier than I had feared. The trick is fearing it will be really horrible, then when what the box says will “Take at least 20 minutes” takes two hours it seems painless.
I selected the setup wizard for dummies. The idea there is, it scans everything and sets it all up for you, you just keep clicking on the “okay” button. or the “accept” button or whatever.
In the middle of that process, it logged onto the internet all by itself and asked me for a user name and password. That was kind of a surprise. I had to find the manual, print it out and discover a username and password.
That was the only real surprise. There was some configuration that was kind of a pain in the ass, but it was better than I had feared and as i said, it seems to work.
Ten after one in the morning. I hear lights clicking on and off upstairs, I guess Gamma is wandering about.
Beta is still not home from celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in Vienna. I just called her a few minutes ago. She was in good spirits. She tried to make a girlfriend talk to me on the phone. She wanted her to say, Buta wa buuu-buuu to nakimasu. I guess Beta is teaching her friends Japanese. She was wearing her Dropkick Murphy’s t-shirt, green striped socks and green Doc Martens when she left. And her fingernails were painted green. She painted them green this afternoon while I was kicking her ass at Sorry. That was after I had kicked Gamma’s ass at Sorry. And before I kicked Gamma’s ass again at Sorry, only Gamma said, before our rematch, that she was playing on behalf of Beta this time.
One fifteen now. Beta is still out.

I guess, I guess these retired guys who bag groceries tell themselves, the extra income is good and it’s a nice way to be among people and get a little conversation. I suppose it is. I suppose as a kid I would have been dismayed to learn that I would be doing what I am doing at my age now. In a way it is dismaying. In a way it is not. There are pros and cons to it. The life I lead, overall, is worth living.

There is new growth on the hydrangeas. Last night the cat jumped up onto the bed. I rolled over onto my stomach and he jumped onto my back and gave me a catupuncture treatment. Daffodils are blooming out front, and the plum tree is getting ready too. As soon as Monday’s snow is finished.

I could go on and on.