1:24 a.m. I have achieved a modicum of success! I have climbed the stairs and entered the post office with the first batch of mail ready to go, all stamped and taped and stickered and sealed.

Outside!! I have been outside today, and let me tell you -- lovely weather we're having here in Southern California. I really should get out in it more often. As soon as we finished up at the post office, we went all over the place, gathering up more supplies so I can make yet another, and another and another trip to the post office this week.

But we got lots of neat and wonderful stuff today, and may I take a moment to list and brag? Sure.

There is a huge, brand-new Office Depot that just opened up in Westchester, a town in the path of LAX. The planes skim the rooftops as they come in to land, one after the other after the other. And the Office Depot is a wonderland of new things, at least new to me.

Although I can't find cloth-covered loose-binders any more except in the occasional rare, older, and down-market drugstore, I did buy quite a few newfangled things instead. I bought a nice new white-out device that is more than a little pornographic looking (I'll take a photo tomorrow); a new lamp for my desk with a magnifying lens built in for $19.99; and most wonderful of all: a teeny little personal paper cutter for all those moments when you'd like to have a nice straight edge but you don't want to get up and wander across the room and move a bunch of file folders and fool with the big cutter.

Pure indulgence. Plus a wavy wheel for my big Fiskars, which is currently buried under the file folders. This is the first time I've seen the wheels for sale in a store, and I'd like to collect 'em all. There's deckle, and photo, and fancy Victorian ... just too much fun.

More indulgence -- we went to a used office furniture place to look at file cabinets and I found a new/old chair, with all the important features beloved by the sedentary, and I'm sitting in it, right now, as I speak. It bounces, it swivels, it rises and falls; it's arms are adjustable and it rolls very very fast. It actually streaks back and forth across the space I inhabit.

I have rammed into the far wall where the bookshelves are, going backwards at a high rate of speed. I hit my knee and bruised my calf on an opened drawer when I swiveled Wonder-Woman fast, and then careened sideways into the bookshelves again. It's going to take some getting used to, accustomed, as I was, to the slow gritty creep of the cookie-crumb-clogged wheels of the old chair.

It was a deal at $139, if you ask me. I believe it's the same one I was going to buy at Staples for $300, so it's: Cheaper and thus, Better (©).

And the printer continues to work like a charmed thing. I inserted a refilled black cartridge earlier this evening, and: voila! Perfecto. Not a smudge nor a missed line nor a gap. Tiny little squirts. That's the secret.

2:44. Time to stop rolling around and settle down and get this entry on its way. I saw a DVD movie playing on a portable computer for the first time today. I was transfixed. It is a brave new world, to have such wonders in it.

Tomorrow is a big day in Venice, with two competing, utterly divergent things to do: the annual Art Walk, in which you get to go into selected artists' studios and see their work in progress, or the Boat Show, which is, obviously, a hellacious hell-hole of a way to spend an afternoon.

Marriage: not for the weak.