Friday am

I woke up from a very jumbled and unclear dream. Something about moving some sort of office to some place that might have been either the eastern part of the county, or to some small town in another state — I'm not sure. There were other people doing something, too, but my part was to get stuff unpacked. There were medicines, liquor bottles, and some sort of big whiteboard. I was just tossing stuff everywhere as fast as I could because time was short, and I looked with some satisfaction as the clutter of a busy workplace grew around me.

Then I woke up and now I'm having some sort of mild panic attack.

I have spent the past week almost entirely shut up in the house. I haven't been to the coffee shop or any of my usual weekly haunts. I've eaten all my meals alone except for two with Nurse Kathryn. Once we ate at a restaurant and once she sat on my front porch with me while I ate the fish and chips she brought me. My long self-imposed ban on fast food has been broken by two orders of fish and chips and one bowl of chili from Wendy's.

I haven't been to the store, or anywhere else. There's been one trip to Home Depot with Ms. Landscape Person and that's it.

I am spending a lot of time with my two oldest cats, and we're all snoozing on the futon together. They seem glad — relieved might be a more appropriate word — to see me spending more time at home. There's a visible difference in their demeanor. They're more relaxed and not as grumpy as they recently had been.

This is the way I have lived most of my adult life, except that before retirement I did have to at least have social contact at work. Having a social life has been a recent development, and I think I may have hit some sort of overload point.

I don't feel very restless at all. I'm really enjoying the quiet and the dark in my old house.

But I have to make myself go downtown and pay my health insurance premium today. It's still about as easy to pay it in person as it is to take it to the post office and mail. But there'll be a crowd, because it's also where citizens pay their water bills, and downtown is just busy. I'd like to avoid that but it has to be done.

I'm reading a book that was among my father's personal stuff from Arkansas. It's a history of the Bolshevik revolution. I don't remember my dad being especially interested in history, but he had several popular histories among his books when he died.

Peace to all of you.