Sometimes it seems as if my body is wearing down, and sometimes it seems that I'm doing everything I can to wear it out.

All that yard work yesterday left me sneezing violently and running through Kleenex like they were made out of paper or something. Allergies are a fact of life for me this time of year, and all year for that matter, but I've never been much for deliberately making things worse by spending a lot of time messing around in the plant kingdom. Now that I'm living in the country, I don't have much choice, so I have to take the consequences. I'll survive, I think.

Then last night I tried a new kind of frozen pizza, one of the high-end ultrachic brands that everyone says is so great. Just like in the restaurant and all that. It was awfully greasy, and the mushrooms tasted funny, and it put me in severe gastric distress, from top to bottom. There was a time last night when I was thinking of looking up the number for 911, just in case. But I survived that, too.

It's a luxury for me to eat pizza. I allow myself to have it once a week, but I'm going back to my old brand. I might even take a week off.

I also planned to take a day off from yard work, but I couldn't stand to stay inside and look out on all that sunshine. And I had a hard time looking at the weeds, too, knowing that this might be the last chance I have this week to get rid of them. So I spent most of the afternoon dragging the big old green container around and filling it with stuff. I'm glad I did it, but I can feel it in my nose and head and throat.

With the work week coming up, I won't be getting outside as much. I hate wasting all this good weather, but maybe it's for the best. My body is definitely giving me that message.

Saturday night is movie night, when you have no social life and a satellite dish. It might be movie night anyway, for a lot of people, but I don't have a lot of options.

I did have a lot of choices last night, though. The three big movie channels — HBO, Showtime and Starz — all have new movies on Saturday, but usually at least one is something I don't care about. Last night's choices didn't include anything I was dying to see, but they all held some tangential interest, so I sat down with the satellite guide and figured out how I could watch them all.

And it worked. I watched movies, off and on, from five in the afternoon until two thirty in the morning. In brief:

I Dreamed of Africa, proof that not all true stories should be put on film, just because they can. There really isn't much reason to see this movie on the small screen, and when it was in the theaters I didn't care. Seeing all those sweeping vistas on the big screen might have made this one more palatable, though.

Snow Day, a film whose parts are better than the whole, and whose kid actors are better than the adults. There were a few nice scenes, most of them featuring the wonderful Schuyler Fisk, but the move is a meandering, ridiculous mess.

Mission to Mars, which I liked more than the other two, despite the lineup of stock space opera characters. One of those was played by Gary Sinise, a favorite of mine. It was pretty standard stuff, mostly, but fun.

I wish I could say I had the TV off all day today, to make up for the hours squandered on all this unenlightening entertainment, but I watched a little basketball and a little baseball. It was the first Giants game televised in the Bay Area, but it was against the A's, featuring their announcers. So I turned off the TV sound and turned on the Giants' radio broadcast.

My big accomplishment today was to hang my hummingbird feeder. I was sitting outside reading late yesterday afternoon and heard a hummingbird buzzing around the bush next to me (the pink-blossomed bush, not the blue-blossomed bush or the purple-blossomed bush; I wish I knew what these bushes were really called). So I decided now was the time.

Here it is at the corner overlooking the garden. The hook was already there, holding the wooden wind chimes that came with the house. And I stayed outside long enough this afternoon to see the first hummingbird find it. That's a sign of some kind, right? That spring is almost here?