If Monday was a bumpy ride, Tuesday turned out to be a downhill run. That's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's more or less the way I believe a weekday should go. I start the morning with a lot of energy, get a lot done during the day, and run out of gas at the end. I'm so tired tonight I can hardly hold my head up, but I can look back with some satisfaction at how the day went.

If February was a pit of vipers, March so far has been a field of daisies. And it's all about money, in the end. If there's enough, everything else takes care of itself. If there's not enough, nothing you can do can make things work the way they're supposed to. It begins and ends with whether there's money in the bank to take care of the bills. So far this month my biggest work problem has been not enough time to spend all we've taken in.

Most of what was wrong with yesterday was corrected today. I didn't have much to do with it; I just went along. My conversations with the Boss were just the way I like them, brief and infrequent. I don't mind discussing the money situation with him, when the money situation is good. He knows I just paid him back most of what he had to loan the company last month, and that improves his mood. If he's happy, I'm happy. If he's quiet, I'm happy.

They love to see me coming at the bank these days. When I was trying to deposit credit card access checks just to cover payroll, they didn't like me as much. They made me wait for my money, and I let them know I didn't appreciate it. Now that I'm giving them big checks from city governments and large businesses, they smile and ask me about my day.

I have to stop watching Ground Force all the time. It's making it seem too easy to make over a garden. Then I look out my own front window and see the wild state of affairs in my own garden, and I realize that what's easy for some people is impossible for others. I don't have the basic skills necessary to turn my yard into anything but what it is, a tangled jungle of weeds and grasses, with no "focal point," no rills, no fountains, no gazebos.

I've never been one to watch do-it-yourself programs, but something about Ground Force hooked me from the first time I watched it. Now I can't get enough. (Well, maybe I can. It was on five times today, and I didn't manage to find time to watch all five shows.) I'm not as interested in the interior decorating shows like Changing Rooms, for some reason.

One thing that made today better was that I got to start a new book I've been looking forward to reading (Blue Shoe), by one of my favorite authors (Anne Lamott). There was a time when I had to scratch and scramble to find any of her books for sale, but this latest one was available from Amazon, Book-of-the-Month Club, and just about every bookseller in town. I'm happy to see that, since she's a wonderful Bay Area writer who happens to include a lot of locations I know about in her stories.