Well, on Tuesday, I woke up to the telephone at 2 PM. For some odd reason, the first thing that popped into my head was the concept of motivation. Why do I want to do things? Why do I not do things I know I should do? For the rest of the day, I would be analyzing my activities, and realizing when I started drifting from the tasks I had set out for myself. I told myself to finish an adaptation subroutine of this thing I'm working on, clean my house, and send out all my bills, applications, and other paperwork.

Unexpectedly, I found myself having to partially disassemble my vacuum cleaner.I had noticed an increasingly powerful odor of burning human hair as I vacuumed. I didn't accurately identify it during previous vacuuming sessions. I thought it was the scent of scorched rubber from the belt, perhaps being blown out of the exhaust. It seemed odd that I would smell the exhaust, since it's forced through a HEPA filter, but I have little experience with vacuums. I didn't know that you have to periodically take them apart and clean them. For once, though, I decided to. Upon removal of the lower cover, I discovered approximately three large weasels worth of my own hair, wadded up in the machinery, clogging ports, and wound tightly around the roller. Yuk.

The burning smell was apparently coming from hair that had wound around the bushings on either side of the roller, rubbing against the rotating brush. I used a pair of scissors to try and scrape the hair away from the bushing, so I could cut it off. Then I realized that there weren't actually bushings on the sides of the roller. The hair had wound itself so tightly, it had formed nearly solid pucks of hair-material. I had to remove these with diagonal cutters. INSIDE the roller, there was some kind of fibrous bushing (probably asbestos), which I spent a good five minutes crumbling little bits of burned-on hair material out of, releasing clouds of (probably carcinogenic) fibrous particles into the air. So gross.

After re-assembly, the vacuum regained the hundreds of (what units are used to measure sucking power? Lewinskys? Enh, atmospheres.) amps of power it had been devoting to hair-disintegration, and wooshed my carpet astonishingly clean. It was such a huge win, I almost want to clog it up again, just so I can re-clean it. ... No I don't.

This reminds me of a story my Mom once told me about the time one of her brothers got the earwax cleaned out of his ears, and it felt so good to have them unplugged that he - well, it's not a very good story.

After a bunch of stooping and wiping and organizing and dusting, my house was clean. Then I mixed down a CD of practice tracks for my band, and then Brian came over and recorded a few takes. Before he left, I soldered his broken glasses back together, and improvised a nose-pad out of some leftover buffing pads I had, originally intended to fit a Dremel tool.

Then I realized that it was midnight on Wednesday, and I had been active for nearly 44 hours straight. Let's hear it for motivation. Oh, and coffee.

Gee, what else did I do today? Well, while at the office, I realized my Windows machine at home had its mail client open and was checking (and deleting) my mail every 5 minutes. It is protected against every remote crash I know of. Then I realized I could log into my router and firewall the machine off from the world, solving the exercise. ha ha, boy I felt clever when that worked. Of course, I accidentally firewalled my entire home network off from the world at first. This would be very hard to reverse if there weren't a "back door" into the network. (I felt clever for having that, too.) Also, I work with people who write convoluted ACL rules in their sleep, so I don't get to feel especially clever about that part.

Wow! My house is clean! I don't remember doing all the stuff it must have taken to get it like this.

Right before I went to sleep, I felt like I was melting, oozing over my chair like a digital Dali clock. Warm, yet numb.