It was frustrating to be stuck in the house all day, watching it get darker and darker outside. Then, about an hour before I could have gone out and done some work in the yard, it started to rain. It's hard enough pulling weeds out of saturated ground, the way I've been doing these last weeks. As much as I need to get the job done, I'm not about to do it while the rain is actually falling. I care, but I don't care that much.

If I'd known how little I'd get done today, I might have tried to work in the yard this morning, when there were patches of blue in the sky. If all I was going to do was answer the phone all morning, I might as well have done that while carrying the cordless around the garden.

This was the Boss's first day with a fax hooked up since the middle of last week. He's been on the road, and now he's set up in his daughter's house in San Francisco for the next few days. He wants to run the business from there the same as he would from his office, but it's not going to be easy. His first question this morning was, "What time is it?"

Then we went on to the pressing matter of getting the fax connected to the one phone line available to him. I had to fax something to him to test it, and then I phoned to ask a question and got the fax tone. I tried three times before giving up, and a few minutes later he called to complain that someone was trying to fax him something but it wasn't coming through.

No, I explained, that was me trying to get you to pick up the voice line. It took another hour and a half before he was satisfied that he could answer the phone and then switch on the fax if he heard a fax tone. Whew! We faxed the same piece of paper back and forth a few times, until he was sure. I guess he's sure. I tried to call him later this afternoon and got neither him nor his fax machine.

That's pretty much how my day went, and that's more or less why I didn't get much else done. All those Monday tasks have already been downshifted by one day, and as new business piles up old business gets left in the dustbin. And we'll have to do this all over again later in the week, when he moves on to his next location. I don't know how long the grand tour will keep going, but there are surely trying times ahead.

It was just a shower, and by four o'clock the sun was squeezing through the drizzle. By that time, though, I'd resigned myself to staying in out of the cold and wet. So whatever gardening I would have done today turns out to be just one more thing put off until tomorrow. That tomorrow, should it ever actually arrive, is going to be crammed so full that it'll have stuff leaking out of it.