Daily Office: Monday
¶ Matins: What a weekend! I was about to say that it left me in need of a rest cure, but then I did a little research.
¶ Tierce: How sweet it is: Robert Crandall, the daimon of American Airlines during the glory days of deregulation, declares that only government intervention can save the airlines.
¶ Sext: The lost art of diagramming sentences: Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, at Portico.
¶ Vespers: Now that the Wi-Fi is working fairly reliably in the living room, I’m running the household from the secretary desk and staying on top of the paperwork.
Oremus…
§ Matins. On second thought, I was getting a bit hysterical on Sunday afternoon. Woefully behind on all fronts (except for Fun), I wanted to spend the afternoon with the heap of magazines that I’ve got to catch up with. I made my way through 2.5 before deciding that I really must write something about Friday’s movie while the memory was still halfway fresh. Then it was time to go out for dinner. Again! You see? When I complain about having to go out for dinner, it’s time for a rest cure.
The day beckons blankly; I’ve got nothing on. (Just the Naked Bloggers’ application to fill out…)
§ Tierce. Mr Crandall discriminates nicely: “We do not need to return to the over-regulation of the past, but some government intervention is required.We do not need to return to the over-regulation of the past, but some government intervention is required.” On the venerable principle of “it-takes-one-to-know-one” that inspired the installation of Joseph P Kennedy as first head of the SEC, Mr Crandall ought to be invited to run the FAA.
§ Sext. The amusing thing about Kitty Burns Florey’s reminiscence of a now all-but-forgotten pedagogical device is that it teaches the reader how to diagram sentences without any systematic laying-out of rules and principles. Fun for all!
§ Vespers. I’ve got everything but a bulletin board. There’s nowhere to put one, and I’d never look at it, anyway. Or rather, it would quickly become “art.”
It’s easy for me to be neat. The problem with neatness, however, is that I ignore it. When things are neat, they seem to me to be taken care of. Wrong! I stack the mail in a handy divider — and leave it there to ripen. I’ll harvest the bills at least monthly, but everything else ages indefinitely.
This afternoon, for the first time since the idea first occurred to me six years ago, I opened a bill and wrote out the check on Quicken. Then I tucked the bill into the appropriate pigeonhole, where it will be all ready for mailing when it’s time to pay the bills in May.
One of these days, I’m going to write about how, in the twenty-odd years that I’ve had them around, computers have made me considerably less efficient in the management of most personal matters. Thinking that I would simply transfer handwritten matters to the computer turned out to be a miasmic, chaotic delusion.