Daily Report: Early Start, Tired Finish

I woke up again at 5:00 a.m. Actually, 5:02 a.m. to be precise, which is odd because it was the exact same minute as I woke up yesterday as well... with no alarm, and no loud noise, and from a deep slumber; just bam... awake.

I remember when I was living in New York City, and that actually happened to me for a few weeks in a row: Every day, I would wake up at the exact same minute each day with no alarm, no loud noise, and for no particular reason whatsoever. The annoying part was that it was always 11:50 p.m., shortly after I went to bed.

Anyway, I got to work at 8:00, after spending a quiet morning sitting around and enjoying myself, and worked straight through to 1:00. However, it was one of those days where stray ideas kept popping into my head, and I'd take off from work for 5 or 10 or 15 minutes at a time to look up something on the internet, before getting started again.

For lunch, I had Maid Go run to Bob's Carrefour to pick up the exact same order I described in my restaurant review: Three "pastor" tacos, beans and rice, and guac and sour cream. I was right: Quite filling, and delicious.

During my trip to America, I found some old notepads of mine from the Navy 20 years ago in which I had spent time writing out my financial goals and plans for the immediate and distant future. Heh: I was a funny, simple kid back then. The only real goal I had at the time was to get out of the Navy, buy a pickup truck, customize it in the "chopped and dropped" California style of the day (with an electric blue paint job), put in a huge sound system, and then... well... according to my 18-year-old self, I would go to college, be the coolest person ever, and due to my overpowering coolness, upon graduation life would apparently explode into a rapture of success that would catapault me effortlessly to the international millionaire playboy status I so richly deserved.

Sheesh... except for the pickup truck part, I came soooo close.

In the evening, it was out to a birthday party for a friend of a friend of Pui's... named Joy. It was about a mile away from my own house in another neighborhood. There were a number of farangs there as well, mostly British and Scottish, with only one other American. Heh: Could have used a translator for some of those fellows.

There was a retired British cop who kept me entertained by talking endlessly about how he has brought a little boat and spent time exploring the canals of England. There are apparently over 4,000 miles of canals in England... most of them small enough to be leapt across, or shallow enough to be waded through... that can be navigated in a small enough craft. They even have tunnels that go on for miles, and grand aqueducts that will carry small vessels a hundred feet above a valley floor. You pass through quiet villages, empty fields, and old forests, working your way through every possible part of central England. It sounded like great fun.

He's promised me that if I should ever want to do my own exploration of the canals, I could have his little boat for "a peppercorn rent"... "bu' if ya knoch da' roof off 'er un' a low bridge, lie' I did in Corn'all, ya 'ave ta fix 'un yaself."

At about 8:30, with only 7 hours of sleep the night before (much less than my average), I was exceptionally tired, and went home and almost straight to bed.