August 14

Terrible weak of recurring medical stuff (reactive hypoglycemia flaring back up) leading to muddle-headedness and depression.  After making some diet adjustments (more slow carbs, especially in morning, careful rations of coffee) I think I've got thing back under control.  Hard to perfectly control my blood sugar and still maintain a weight loss diet, however, though I think I'm getting back to it.  Probably what messed things all up was the weekend in Vegas.  No exercise, lots of fatty foods, not enough sleep.

Also very hard to get back into writing groove.  Think that as of today I'm almost there.  Before I left I was working twelve hours a day and had no problem getting down to work every morning.  Now I find myself wanting to go check the internet every hour.  The work I have done has been all right, but I haven't done enough of it.  My hope is to have a rewrite done in a few weeks.  At which point, we'll see.

On top of all this, Bink has decided that he needs to get up every night at 3 AM and howl for a while.  Maybe he thinks the Redcoats are coming? I  don't know.  We've been experimenting with letting him roam around the house at night (instead of penning him up in the kitchen).  It seems not to be working.  The problem seems to be the neighborhood cats.  They wander through our yard in the early morning and Bink feels the need to protest.  The cats, of course, are unbothered.  Not so his owners.   The kitchen-penning must return, I fear.

Finished a very mediocre Balzac novel before going to Vegas (The Black Sheep).  Now reading Herodotus, though not intently.  Listening to Wodehouse's ultimate Jeeves and Wooster novel (Aunts Aren't Gentlemen.)  Not his best by any means--most of the plot and characters feel much-recycled--but still not without its joys.

Two great TV shows to recommend: Workaholics, on Comedy Central, and Louie, on FX.  Everyone knows about the latter, I think, but I'll add my voice to the chorus of those calling it the best show on TV.  (The recent episode featuring Dane Cook turned out to be one of the most unexpectedly fascinating and--somehow--moving 30 minutes of TV I've seen in a while.  A close second was the less recent one with Joan Rivers).  Workaholics is a lighter, sillier show but still well worth watching.  It's twenty-something guy humor, which is not a genre everybody necessarily warms to.  (My wife, e.g., tends to hate it).  But, for my money, it's about as good a representation of that kind of humor as I've seen in years.  The actor's timing is especially noteworthy.

Terrible dreams last night in which my brother and a long-ago girlfriend conspired to keep me from attending my brother's wedding (to his current wife) and rehearsal dinner.  I ended up crashing the latter, to the dismay of my entire family.  Now all day I've felt this strong urge to apologize to various people for ruining an event that didn't happen.  Hmm.