It's not a rooster that wakes me up every morning after all. That sound, that wail, could only be our neighborhood peacock. He starts before six and does his banshee thing at least until I get out of bed at seven thirty. And I had a clear shot at him today while I was driving home. A nearly imperceptible twitch on the steering wheel is all it would have taken. No one would have noticed. I wouldn't have been called out for running out of the base line, I'm almost sure of it.

But I have my standards. I won't shoot fish in a barrel, and I won't give in to the temptation to take out a large, obnoxious bird standing stupidly on the side of the road.

I'm paying this week for a couple of things. I'm paying for taking time to move, by having to work overtime, even though I moved specifically so I wouldn't mix work with my real life any more. And I'm also paying for the shoddy packing job I did, by not being able to find anything. It's like the old Concentration game, where you turn over the cards a few times and remember where the matching ones are. I could never win at that, either.

I'm also learning something. I'm learning that keeping current on cleaning is a lot easier than trying to clean a whole house at once after years of neglect. I stole away from the office for a couple of hours this evening to try to make some headway in the effort to get my deposit back at the old place. They're holding seven hundred dollars that I haven't seen since 1988, and I'm willing to do actual physical labor to get it back. I'm not much for scrubbing walls and cabinets, except when there's big money at stake.

This morning I was all over Sonoma County. I had to trek down to Petaluma to pick up a bid bond at our insurance office. This extra driving is another result of moving; if I hadn't been out of touch for most of the week, this could have been handled by mail. Now the deadline was too close and I had to schmooze with our insurance agent, not one of my favorite pastimes. He's a nice enough fellow, I guess, but he's still an insurance agent.

I never know how to take someone in that business, because I have a basic distrust of the concept of insurance. It's like paying protection money. You're betting something bad will happen, and hoping you lose the bet. People who sell it must know that it's a racket, because they're so nice you want to smash a grapefruit in their face. If you're a truly congenial person in that business, you probably don't get enough credit from suspicious customers like me.

Okay, I take it back. Nice guy, a prince of a fellow. I'll have him over for a barbecue some time.

On my way back from Petaluma, I remembered that this was the last day to turn in my old cable boxes, so I stopped at the former Home Office and picked them up, then drove to the opposite end of Santa Rosa, past the cemetery and over the freeway, to the cable company office. The storage unit I rent is on the next block, so I stopped there. I did have something to drop off, but mostly I needed an excuse to take a photograph. I love my digital camera.

As cluttered as my house is, it's not nearly as bad as the storage unit.