I have a USB LED light. Actually I have three: red, white, and blue, all the colors Kensington has ever made, as far as I know. Red least damages your night vision, though, and that's the one I take home at night and am currently enjoying. I have a USB hub on my desk at work just so I can plug in all three lights. They're very silly, and they make me smile.

The latest development in life is that as much as I have not seen the loved one much recently, I will see her less or not at all for about a month, as she will be quite busy and dropping off the face of the earth. So I find I have a long time by myself, which wouldn't really be my first choice, but I can use the time to keep getting my head straight, and reconnect with people I've lost touch with recently. Although I'm not so great with people these days, but I'm trying.

I finally bought a "learn to play piano" book--playing piano/keyboard has been one of those ongoing things-to-do that I never bother to tell anyone about, like learning French or visiting Turkey and Hungary and the Spanish Basque country (all countries I see as fascinating and highly textured, and the latter two have bizarre languages). Or learning to ride a horse. At any rate, I'm discovering some limitations I've always had with music, namely that visually mapping notes onto an instrument is not terribly easy for me, and that I don't have fine slow-moving rhythmic control with my fingers. On my left hand especially, trying to move my fingers in rhythm results in one or two fingers spasming and striking the keys too fast.

I'm still kinda tired. I have had a fair amount of loss in the past year or so, a lot of things and people to let go of and/or say goodbye to. So maybe that's it.

What with Hurricane Isabel trashing Cape Hatteras again, this time apparently washing out the only road in, or some such, I was thinking about Cape Cod. Chatham Harbor, on the ocean side, had a barrier beach sheltering it from the ocean, until in 1987 a storm broke through it. Cape Cod is essentially a giant sandspit of leftover glacial moraine (yes, I went there every summer as a kid and visited the museums many times), so erosion is constant and sometimes dramatic, as you can see on this USGS page. So with these hillsides and cliffs now exposed to the open ocean, houses periodically fall into the water, a minor addition to the wide variety of problems facing the area (well, erosion is a serious problem all over the peninsula, but probably not so much as the poisoning of the aquifer with toxic waste, the economic impact of any fluctuations in tourism, the decimation of the fishing industry, and the congestion and overbuilding caused by the massive popularity of a place served by a single two-lane highway.

Wow, writing that list out almost makes it seem reasonable to live in the world's seventh-largest economy, with a $38 billion budget deficit, for which the people are about to blame the governor they elected a year ago, and put in his place a musclebound woman-hating Nazi-loving Republican who has no administrative experience with anything and is somehow therefore qualified the lead the state out of its worst financial crisis ever. At least he's a California Republican. And, of course, he can be recalled too.

Not that I'm bitter. *smile*