When I start sneezing my head off, I never know for a few days if I've "come down with something" or if it's just another spell of the old allergies. Anything in the air is likely to set me off, and there's always something in the air if you dust as infrequently as I do. Whether I end up dusting or not, there's bound to be something in the air.

This weather we're having, all dark and drizzly, is likely to clear up the outside air, but it'll also keep me inside with the dust. I was out in it yesterday, though, closed up in a dark room with a bunch of sniffling strangers, so who can tell what combination of circumstances have brought me to the current sorry state, where I'm filling up every available waste basket with used tissues.

As if I needed an excuse to stay home all day, right? Especially after going all the way to Rohnert Park to see a movie yesterday, an adventure that took maybe three hours out of my busy weekend schedule. I had to stay home and not work Sunday just to make up the time I didn't spend not working Saturday. I also had to not watch fourteen football games that I'm paying too much to not watch every Sunday — not to mention all the movies recorded by TiVo that I haven't watched .

So what did I do today? Besides listening to some music and reading in the loft until it got too dark to see, not much. I stood in the window and watched the rain, and the birds in the rain, and the cats who didn't seem to mind the rain, and the branches blowing in the wind, and the leaves blowing off the branches and leaving them a little barer with each hour that passed. It was like having an orchestra seat at the changing of the seasons.

My attention span has grown even shorter since I got TiVo. No matter what I'm watching on TV, even if it's live, I can pause it and come back to it later. That's much too seductive a power to ignore. It'll probably take me until Wednesday to finish watching Return to Me, fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. (It's okay, I know how it's going to end. It's a romantic comedy, after all. But it's Minnie Driver and David Duchovny, and getting them together is all the fun. Besides, it was Carroll O'Connor's last movie, and Bonnie Hunt wrote and directed it.)

That's great for movies, I guess, to watch them in chapters. That's how I'm reading my 719-page mystery novel just now. But this approach doesn't translate well to real life. If I get restless fifteen or twenty minutes into a spreadsheet (and I do), I can't quit, because I know I won't feel like going back to it until I've done half a dozen other things in fifteen- or twenty-minute spurts. With all the starts and stops, it's a wonder anything ever gets finished (and truthfully, some things never do).

Then there's the Instant Replay Syndrome. As I was watching Life As A House yesterday, I missed a few scenes because I zoned out and forgot I couldn't hit the rewind button and see them again. It was a good enough movie that I rediscovered my ability to focus before I'd missed too much of it that way.

That happens in real life, too. I find myself clicking an imaginary rewind button when I'm talking with the Boss on the phone, because I've forgotten to listen to what he was saying. I can usually fill in the gaps with him, though. I've been with him long enough to know what he's going to say before he says it, so it's not hard to figure out what he's said afterwards using the same technique.

I do love my TiVo. It's a time-saving device as much as the washer and dryer (although with a slightly less noble cachet). It frees me to manage my time without having to worry about missing something. I know that any show I like will be there waiting when I get around to wanting to see it. Well... it will unless I wait too long and it gets deleted. I hate when that happens. It's too much like real life, where so often I just plain miss out.