The outside light today was so frail it couldn’t penetrate the window glass. It was as if I’d spent the whole day with the blinds drawn. After more than a week of warmth and sunshine, this was a day of clouds and gloom. I am singularly uninspired on days like this, and I wallowed in inactivity.

It’s a hard blow to take, getting real March weather in the middle of March. If you told me it would rain, I’d probably believe you. That’s the way things are headed.

Getting started this morning was a problem, because someone over at the kennel decided to fax me eleven pages of receipts — before eight o’clock. One page coming over the fax at that hour might not have made me wake up, but by the time eleven pages had been printed, I was terminally astir. I had to get up and see what was going on.

It was a mistake, is what it was. We have a system, and I’m not supposed to have to deal with these receipts, ever. Someone else gets them, tallies and collates them, and sends me a summary. That’s usually a one-page fax. That would have started my day just fine.

As it was, I was up two hours earlier than I wanted to be, and it took me three hours to get going. That’s a law of diminishing usefulness that we non-morning people know only too well. The more you leave us alone in the morning, the better off everyone is. It was only fitting that the day turned out so dreary and gray. Sunshine today would have been a sort of taunt.

The Boss phoned at 2:30 pm. “I just got your message,” he said. This is the message from last night, when I was hoping to finish up our current project. He also faxed me a page before I got up this morning, something I could have handled in five minutes last night. It took the whole three hours I was trying to wake up today for me to get around to it. Serves him right. But he did promise to walk down to the kennel and talk to the mystery faxer. I hope that kind of annoying awakening won’t happen again.