Well, the heat wave is over and life is back to normal.  I want to note something here, I'm not really complaining about the heat for myself.  Yeah, it was hot.  Yeah, I may have even had a touch of heat exhaustion.  Yeah, it was my own fault, so I'll own up to that.  No, any changes I made to my plans and lifestyle during the past week were for the family dog.  It's silly in a way, but it's only a week out of my life, and it's not like I spent the entire week in my room, in the dark, doing nothing.  There were a couple periods like that, but I'd like to call them sleep. 

Actually, I had lots of problems sleeping.  Ah, blah blah blah dog.  I'm not here to blame anything on the dog except my allergies.

Anyway, during the week, Seti@home was either turned way down or totally shut down.  It's back up, I'm doing work again, it'll be a couple days before the numbers return to where they were.  I can't make that time up, but I can get back to doing what I was.  In that area at least.  On a side note, there were stretches of time when all of the computers were turned off as well.  One almost only runs Seti@home and the rest of the stuff it does I either lived without or did on the main computer.  It's a little more complicated and crowded, but it's that much less heat. 

I also didn't watch a lot of television either.  Just enough Forensic Files to keep the DVR from overfilling.  Actually, now that I think about it, I didn't watch an entire episode of Forensic Files either.  They were all repeats that I'd seen dozens of times.  I'm a fan of Forensic Files, but this is ridiculous.  Then again, it was good for this week. I'm not too sad.

I did get to play some old computer games like Doom, Heretic, Terminal Velocity, and um.. Minesweeper.  There was some downtime and playing computer games is both therapeutic and pretty easy.  I don't have to hook anything up, I don't have to have lights on or special equipment running, and I can do it with the fan on full blast (for the dog).  Even internet movies get pretty hard to watch for me with all the background noise.  I have headphones too.  Dang hearing.

That isn't to say I gave up on the plan or list, but there were times when I just got frustrated enough at the distractions caused by the heat or the dog or I got tired of fighting with the fan to read the book I was reading.  Magazines were even worse, by the way.  So, during these periods, I found other things to fill my time and some of them were even productive.  One, might hold a promise, but it needs more time to do proper research and thinking about it.  I started that, but it's not something I want to rush into. 

While we're on that, I hesitate to promise more than I can deliver since it seems I do that a lot, but there is more promise.  Well, there are more possibilities than I thought of.  How useful these possibilities may be aren't fully apparent to me.  But it gives me a little more hope for the future.  Don't get me wrong - I'm still plenty ambivalent about my future, but I'm not slicing my wrists just yet.  I'm not suicidal anyway.  A more accurate description would be that if I fell down dead this very instant, I would be a little more disappointed than I would have if it had happened a month ago.  As I said, ambivalent.

I've also made a lot more plans and got a lot more ideas.  I may have even been productive, but it's hard to say.  I passed a milestone last month and I never remarked about it in the blog - namely, that it's been five years since I've been in this position by my own choices and by circumstance.  I won't say that it's been entirely unproductive, but it has hardly been fruitful.  Still, I know a lot more than I did before.  I know pitfalls that I want to avoid as well.  I think I have a more independent voice than I did as well, less imitative of others who influenced me over the years.  Is it enough?  Well, if I ever produce something, it might be.

Anyway, enough typing for the moment, I have to finish reading this library book.

- Jim