Minute by minute report of my day. OK, so the 7:30 PM moves comes up and I am tempted to head in, but I opt to walk! I did skip yesterday, and knew that one day off is good, but two would become a pattern. So I walked. I listened to half of Fresh Air, and then at 8:00 PM, Selected Shorts comes on.

I did the first four laps in 20:14, the next four in 20:50, and the last two in 10:59. Not bad. The bad part is really bearing the pain to my ankles. The track tends to be somewhat uneven, and my clod hoppers always seem to want to land on a slant. The pain is reminiscent of the first time on ice skates before one discovers the joy of ankle supports.

Selected Shorts had one fifteen-minute story and then the second one was entitled the "End of the Line" by Jonathan Franzen. The story actually is a good one about the life of a sheltered 18-year-old girl working in a railroad company home office in the blueprint room. The room houses the thousands of prints of all the electrical stuff, crossing gates, red/amber lights, etc.

She works as a "summer intern", and her father is the boss about three levels up. The timeframe seems to be the late 1970's. And yes, she is warned to stay away from all the other workers in the department, who are described as all white, and who have been promoted from the field after having worked on the electrical systems for so many years that they figure it is easy enough to just train them in blueprint reading.

Anyhow, as you might have guessed, there is a sexual tension set up fairly early on, and it gets better. Go to symphonyspace.org for a reading list and you will enjoy the story. The first story is about dads reading to their kids. You would like that one too. By the way, have you cracked the cover of the True Love book yet?

So here it is, Recall, the middle of the story, and I have to march back to the unit without being able to have my headphones on. So I crank the volume up and hold one earphones up to keep track of the story. The Koss headphones need and can take more power than my little Sony gives, so it not easy to hear with the ear cup three to four inches away from my ear.

I came back to the room and have to accomplish a bunch of tasks by 10:00 PM and some are not combinable. The first is listening to the rest of the story. So that precludes the shower. And since I am actually listening to the story, that nixes writing to you.

So I go ahead and mix up my dinner, tuna fish without mayo. I finished the last of the mayo and am not replacing it. I mixed the tuna with the salsa. It’s not as smooth as mayo, but since the calories of mayo are all fat, I have decided to skip it for a while. So I munch my dinner, kick two people out so I can concentrate on the story, and then 9:00 PM comes.

So I "send a message to the Warden" as some might say, and then head to the shower. Now I am feeling torn between shorting the shower to provide more writing time, and the need for the soothing waters of the shower.

I get out of the shower around 9:25 PM and dash off that short letter to you. Now you have the full minute by minute report of my day here at Club Fed.
  ¶ 9:15 PM