I was just reading about Iran again. I realized that, in response to an email from Dik Silver yesterday, I could almost spell Ahmadinejad and Khamenei without checking Huffington Post, where I still spend an inordinate amount of time. I have said the name “Ahmadinejad” out loud several times and think I pronounce it correctly. I am reading “Infinite Jest”, mostly because John Gruber of Daring Fireball said it was his “favorite novel ever”, and I’m trying to not think about the fact that its author, David Foster Wallace, recently hung himself after suffering from severe depression. The book is 1078 pages long and I’m currently on page 71 - so there will be another 1007 pages of slight discomfort with Wallace’s often black humor. It also trips me up a bit that he says “like” all the time. As in: “He uses the word “like”, like, inappropriately”. He also doesn’t use paragraphs which makes for large, intense, blocks of text. I listened to Merlin Mann’s talk on doing creative work this morning. He’s a funny guy but his only real points were that I should get started and not be afraid to suck. Good advice. I didn’t start then though. First I paid a bill. Fedex charged me a $10.50 “Advancement Fee” for paying $3.38 to Canada Customs for taxes on a $25.00 guitar pick order. That’s what the lady told me when I phoned to ask what the $10.50 was for. And I don’t have the time (or inclination) to write about the US audio/video company that wouldn’t take my Canadian VISA and didn’t like my PayPal and eventually cancelled my headphone amplifier order. Also this morning. I wrote to Paul Tobin thanking him for his CD and called the lady that had called Red Robinson who had called me because the lady knew another lady who wanted to give me a portrait that my Dad had done of me in the seventies. She was very nice and particularly understanding. I also called the roofer who put plywood where my skylights were about a month ago. I called last week and his wife told me she picked them up a week before that. This morning I said something about maybe getting the new, opening, skylights sometime before the end of summer. She agreed that would be a good idea. I forwarded off a couple of pieces of email for clarification after discovering there is, apparently, a new person who seems to be representing us in some manner at our booking agency. I made some notes containing what I know will seem like stupid questions and saved them to my desktop, from where I’ll retrieve them at a later date when seeking further enlightenment. I had to re-calk the sink in our upstairs bathroom this morning because the DAP Kitchen and Bathroom sealant didn’t seal when I did it last week. Today I used a new product that jammed-up in the tube two-thirds of the way around the sink and refused to extrude any further caulk. I probed it with a 2″ finishing nail and forced small blobs onto my finger, which I then applied piecemeal to the seam. I also finished, laying on my stomach on the bathroom floor, the tile caulk replacement job in a spot that I had missed down under the cupboards. My Trooper email didn’t work this morning, but before I could ask about it, our Webmeister had already jumped in and taken care of it. Our lighting Director sent an email about flight scheduling and holiday time that made my eyes glaze over and my head start to ache and I was only slightly relieved that his questions were not directed to me, since I will be asked to weigh in with my opinion at some point. Probably after my holiday is over.