I’m trying to come out of a horrible Benadryl hangover today. I hate when I take this stuff at night and wake back up, but am so tired, I can’t go back to sleep. It’s a weird drunken feeling, that I can’t fully explain, but I hate it. I can’t believe I used to be practically addicted to this stuff, in the form of Tylenol PM. I’m currently trying to stitch together a travel story about my trip to Treasure Island, Florida in 2001, and one recurring theme is that I’d stay up until 3 or 4 every night and then bomb out with the Tylenol PM and wake up all screwed up at noon the next day.
My latest project is the aforementioned travelogue. Michael wrote a giant 175,000 word account of his story when he went to TI a few months before me, and that inspired me to do the same. I wrote one entry, on the plane ride down, and then lost the motivation. Now, I’m trying to reverse-engineer all of the pieces of my trip so I can write about it. I’ve got all of my sent email; paper journals; the dated photos I took; some comments I made in Michael’s story; and a couple of other scraps of notes I took at the time. That’s enough for me to get started. The account of my 2004 trip was about 14,000 words. I have about 6000 words into this story sofar.
I keep thinking about all of the dead projects I have floating around and wish there was a way I could pull them together or finish them. I doubt it would be that entertaining to put out a book with the first half-chapter of 20 books that I never wrote. The problem is that every new project steals just a touch of stuff from the last dead project, so those 20 chapters are really like about three chapters rewritten in different ways.
The Bay Bridge is closed for the weekend – they are tearing out a football field-sized double decker section and putting in another temporary one, to make room for the replacement bridge they are building next to it. It’s a monumental piece of engineering, and it’s taking place on our horizon. We’re at the wrong angle to see the big switcheroo, but we can see the giant crane they have assembled at the port of Oakland, which I think is the biggest maritime crane in history, and will be used to sling around steel for the new bridge. I don’t know why I’m obsessed with this, but I am. Maybe because I helped pay for it, or because it’s all happening in our front yard.
I’ve also been trying to get my ass in gear with investing. Now that the house purchase is done, the next big milestone will be saving money for retirement. We already max out our 401Ks, and that is under control, but we’re also trying to save every penny to make pull retirement from 72 to 59.5 years, and earlier. So I’m shopping for good places to park money and make it work.
But now, a three day weekend is afoot. Speaking of saving money, I think we will start by trying out the West Oakland library. Maybe it would be prudent to start checking out books and videos, instead of hitting Amazon every other hour.