Pack Rat and ADD Leads to Trouble. I admit it; the visit with my parents lifted my spirits. This morning, Monday, when I woke up around 7:30 AM, I was feeling motivated! I did sleep through breakfast, but that only buys you a little extra sleep time as you have to have your bed made and not be under any blankets by 7:45 AM.

The pack rat part of the story: as most of you know, I have been receiving the New York Times seven days a week. The Sunday paper, for those not familiar with it, is a ten or more section, heavyweight collection of more information than any one individual could possible read from cover to cover.

Two of my favorite sections are the Week in Review and the Sunday Magazine.

Since I have no access to any type of historical resources, I felt that keeping the Week in Review would certainly give me a good basis for building a current events file.

In a spurt of inspiration, I have spent the morning going through the last seven months of magazines and Week in Review sections and cutting out those portions that I really do want to keep. Not only do I not need to keep the entire section or magazine, but there are some weeks where I did not even cut out one article.

The ADD part is having done this most of the morning, non-stop, by 11:30 AM,

I was ready to move on to another project. I think I managed to clear out six or seven of both the Sunday Magazines and Week in Reviews. After making my personal octopus with spaghetti, I decided to try and get an early start at typing out some long delayed blog posts.

Okay now that I have typed one and a half pages of post I am ready to lie down for a nice afternoon nap! I will try to fight that urge and continue typing.

[And if you believe there was even a chance of that last sentence coming true I have a bridge I own in New York City that I am willing to sell to you. Here it is Sunday evening a week later and this post is still not even out of the memory of the typewriter. I have not gone back in to the stack of papers to sort out the important stories. I have also given another inmate first crack at reading the papers and he is feeding them to me even slower than my previous reading rate. I just received the September 10, 2005 issue from him. So even this lighter workload in reading the current papers has not spilled over to getting some of the other backlog done. As a matter of fact, I did not send one page of typed letters or blog post to my editor all week! I have no excuse.]  ¶ 7:24 AM