Well, I've kind of been existing. Nothing particularly new happening--still doing that weekly back-and-forth to Boston, still eating too much, health is on the downswing... eh! It's been a relatively miserable weekend. Continuing throat problems, shoulder pains that kept me up all night on Saturday, and the realization that for some reason I've accumulated six or seven orange vials with assorted anti-inflammatories, anti-histamines, muscle relaxants, pain supressors, microbial annihilators, nasal inhalers and such. One would think I'm a hipochondriac.  If anything other than inconvenient, it's given me a whole new brand of respect (to add to the existing) for people on HIV cocktails. I have trouble sticking to a three-pill-a-day regimen of industrial-strength Tylenol/codeine. Eek.

Finished reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon this weekend. Damn, that was a good book. There's definitely genius in the mind of a man who can write a mathematical and logical description of a cryptographer's horniness. Between that and a Harry Potter book I read a few weeks ago, I've had a rebirth in reading passion I hadn't had since high school. I had forgotten how difficult it can be to put down a well-written novel. 

The silence from the teeming masses has been deafening. Mail has come from few people. My favorite:

We found your site, Saddle Sores - Confessions of a Capital Pain in the Butt,
on yahoo, and noticed that you market products and/or services oriented around
food. We've recently launched a new hosting and development tool that is
designed specifically for businesses like yours. It allows businesses to build
custom web sites on-line and a product catalog of up to 2,000 items with credit
card processing for one low monthly fee of $24.95 and no additional fees.

My reply:

You've obviously not read a single portion of  my website, otherwise you'd
know that there's absolutely NOTHING in it that could POSSIBLY be REMOTELY
associated with food.
Unless you associate the "butt" part with eating, which I suppose that in an
eschathologically-oriented mind would possibly be associated with
eating... coprophagy maybe?

People never cease suprising me--you'd figure that someone would understand that there IS such a thing as negative marketing...

Things of which I want to take pictures to show all of you faithful readers:

• The prison in Boston's North End that looks like a fancy apartment building from the outside
• That sign on the Big Dig announcing that Glory Hole 57 is right next to South Station.
  The offramps on Boston's Central Artery that, because of construction, now lead nowhere.