3:16 a.m. It's a crying shame that you've got to bribe your friends to come and visit your web site, but hey! If that's what I have to do, then I'm willing to do it. For my art, you know.

The lovely picture you see, opposite, is the typical way these two folks usually look. Cheery, fun, happy ... and take a good look; take all the time you need. These two are grandparents. Yup, this is what grandparents look like these days. You won't find a single wrinkle -- not even with a magnifying glass. I wonder when the guys who make the TV commercials are going to catch on?

But I digress.

It's been a very happy day for me. The fellow in the photo also happens to be the author of a book I'm designing and laying out this week. It's going to be a smashing, huge success of a book -- I can feel it in my bones. The cover's looking good, the pages are going to go smoothly, and Harold left me a nice package of pull-out stick-em-on tabs to play with.

I am lucky indeed.

Speaking of playing, I also put a search engine thing on my front index page tonight. It's simply amazing that such a simple thing would work so quickly and easily. I might as well advertise it before I start to rave and pound on the chair arms in enthusiasm: it's by a company called atomz.com and unless it blows up my site overnight or fills my mailbox with porn, it seems fabulous and thrilling.

So many words. In so little time. Forgive me for my own weird fascination, but I've been playing with it for a longish while now. It must be me, but every word I think to plug into it comes back to me unfurled and beribboned with phrases. My words. Alive in the little blank box.

Or maybe I've just never realized what weird stuff I've been talking about in these pages. I've searched on "pudding" for example, and come up with several instances. Or maybe it was just the slack-jawed surprise I felt when the search logs told me it had just searched through 130,771 words, not counting the words I'm typing right this minute.

Aren't we getting into the realm of the hefty book with these numbers? I won't even pause to ponder the fact that the searching robot over there at atomz.com only took a few minutes to complete its search. Or that it didn't roll its metal bee-bee-eyes in disgust at the words I like to make up. It did turn up two broken links in 170 pages, however. Not bad for an amateur, eh?

And tomorrow I will fix those two links. Perfection is within my fevered grasp.

As for now, I've sort of run out of words. Spent them too liberally in the past; did not hoard any succulent specimens for tonight. Fatigue has run away with the last of my supply. And speaking of hoarding, once again, I have to bring this distressing topic up.

Y2K. I laugh nervously. Yet I bought two refills of Mentadent at the grocery store, just in case. We have actually stockpiled toothpaste, therefore. And, for some reason -- mayonnaise. I wonder what's going to happen to all of us in just ... gaaa ... 39 days? Will we look back on these last days before the numbers spun and turned and will we wonder what were we thinking?

And if the web is ruined and electricity is spotty and I have to sell my keyboard for a stale Slim Jim, I wonder if my words will still be tucked away in there, over at atomz.com, all robotically scanned and complacent and waiting? Or will they get all scrambled and mismatched and dangled and then I'll never know what I was thinking ever again ...

... something to think about. A word to the wise: honey *.