Today I listened to a legal education seminar about drugs. It turns out that drugs can be bad for you. I've never taken a controlled substance, or even smoked a cigarette. But the State of California wants my continuing legal education to include seminars about how drugs are bad.
It's not a bad thing, really. Lawyers run above the national average for drug abuse and also for depression. Maybe I should have been a park ranger.
I browsed today through one of those old books I have a knack at finding at library book sales and good will. They always cost a dollar or less, and they are always about outdoors places. They are always at least twenty years old, so they seem a bit vintage. Today was "The Petrified Forest". I've never visited there, although I love petrified wood. For now, I have my used book. It turns out that this now-desert area looked a bit like the Everglades, only with bigger critters. They're all extinct now. Cigarettes are bad.
A kind Craig's List soul offered to sell me a 30 gallon tank very inexpensively tonight. She's even going to deliver it to our home Saturday afternoon. I'll use this as the foundation for a guppy empire.
I must clean and begin to donate away the tanks collected thus far, or I will begin to get inquiries about whether I intend to turn our garage into a glass factory.
I stopped by Gepetto's Shoe Repair to pick up my dress shoes. I arrived just before the store's 7 p.m. closing. Two children sat in the two shoeshine booths, watching the Simpsons on a corner television.
The plot involved Marge having written a steamy novel that everyone in town gossipped was a roman a clef.
Last week I thought about how rarely I ever write in my own voice when I write poetry. In my weblog, by contrast, I think that all my real life people can hear my voice and recognize me by my words.
The shoe soles came out great. He took extra care and extra time, while I waited. He also polished the shoes. I don't polish shoes often enough, though I love both the little round cans of polish with the "kiwi" on them, and even the spray polish. I still feel cheated, a little, to digress, that I don't get to wear clip-on ties. They actually are cooler in a way, than the four in hand ones.
I fly tomorrow to Philadelphia, and then take a car to a nearby New Jersey town. I'll have a meeting, stay Wednesday night, and then fly Thursday night after more meeting to Los Angeles. I wish I had time to go fishing in Los Angeles, but unless I want to spend midnight on the Manhattan Beach Pier, I think that I'll watch NBC instead.
Tonight "Veronica Mars" got pre-empted by this odd basketball game involving a team called the Dallas Mavericks. As I generally find professional basketball but one step removed from professional wrestling (and that, by the way, a very big negative step downward), authenticity-wise, I felt the programming a very huge trade-down indeed. Fortunately, Fox had "House" on, a very capable quirky medical drama show.
Hugh Laurie is the real deal, even when he is not playing Bertie Wooster. I would say the obligatory thing about how it's disappointing that two good new shows are on the same night at the same time, but that's actually not so bad, because that makes reruns more fun.
I must mail the payment for the other tank I won on eBay, which, coupled with my craig's list tanks, will be a quota until I give some away. I must also decide on a recipient for the chess set I freecycled. So many people asked for it, each with good reason. The world should be full of chess sets.I I felt today that I got a lot done. I feel that way often, but I always wish I did more.