-- Friday, February 25, 2000 --

3:37 a.m. Well, here we are a whole twenty-four hours later and I could cut and paste yesterday's entry into this space and it would be hideously accurate. Very little has changed.

I'm posting a photo from a few months ago, because I am pathetic. I still haven't been outside. I stepped out for a brief, shining moment at some point during the day, looked at the amount of after-rain cleanup I should be doing, and stepped back in.

All work. No play. All work all the time. No wandering into stores.

5:30 a.m. Well, I found a way to play and to wander. Chalk it up to too much stress. A really bad nightmare during my nap that has made me swear off sleeping for a while. The need to take a break without leaving my chair?

For some reason, I've decided that I need animations now. Movement on the page. Yes, I know. I've been online a long time and I know what everyone thinks about these things. They are childish. But I don't care. Maybe it's because I don't know how to make them, or maybe it's because I'm losing my mind, but now I want an animation collection.

It's sad to watch a perfectly good mind dissolve under pressure, but ... I can't just keep working on the same index forever without going insane. I can't keep sitting here hour after hour without turning into human mush.

So, animation it is. They're not so easy to gather up, let me tell you -- takes a long time to work through the same 100 banners of some kind of clip art cabal, a horrid house of mirrors in which you find yourself with a lot of windows open and nothing to show for it and you're right back where you started.

Only it's an hour later and the index is still not done.

But, it's worth it. I found this really great frog and suddenly, I don't feel so tired and alone. Now there's two of us -- and we're both dancing as fast as we can.