We decided not to stay at the camp this weekend. The weather forecast called for heavy rain (which hasn't come). We helped my father get his sailboat into the water. Elden, a neighbor on the lake and good friend to my father and us, came over with his tractor to handle the real heavy work.

Sandra and I were quite tired and fell asleep early, only to have me wake very early. (See timestamp.) I'll read my Khrushchev book until the Sunday papers arrive. After inspecting the back porch for chipmunks, Marley's come back in and has settled at my feet.

One of the remarkable changes that comes from being out of work is the dramatic drop-off of email. At work, I'd typically get 100 messages a day. Now, even with subscriptions to several mailing lists, I get 10-15. (That's not counting spam. Microsoft Outlook does a great job of filtering spam. I have it automatically delete spam. At last check, I was getting >100 spam messages per day.)

I'll write personal emails and get some nice messages in return. Even on my busiest days, however, my personal email never gets close to the volume of mail that I received at work.

That email would pull me through the day, set the agenda and be a measure of the amount of work that I'd complete in a day. It's harded to gauge progress now. "What did you do today?" becomes a harder question to answer.