Every day is Earth Day for us.

We celebrated Earth Day by recycling our old cell phone. We would have done it sooner, if we had known about CollectiveGood before today.

I accidently deleted this entry, so this is a re-creation...

It's been a good day.

I got to work in the clinic for most of the afternoon. People are somehow nicer, friendlier, easier to understand, face-to-face. Someday, I'll be able to explain why that it.

I learned this evening that, even with the biggest bureaucracies, it is still possible for the truth to be revealed through simple evidence.

It's true - I don't really trust computers. Tonight, I backed up our Opera directory and upgraded from Opera 7.5 to Opera 8 (better security! faster! width rescaling! voice recogniton!). The download was quick. The upgrade was instant - no need to reboot the computer, even. I didn't trust it. Something didn't go right. The browser didn't look all that different, aside from a couple of icons I hadn't seen before and an X on the window tabs (no more right-clicking to close). I checked the version - sure enough, Opera 8.0.

Now our browser reads to us, if we ask it to.

Michelle's Daily Writing Exercise said: "Picture a street/block that you know well. Now imagine that place without buildings or people. Write about it."

Add another one to my growing list of books I've started but didn't finish: Frankenstein. This time, I blame the size of the book, and I don't mean the number of pages. I'd put it on reserve at the library, knowing it was an annotated version, but not knowing until I picked it up that it was a coffee-table sized book. I kept it in the bedroom, but it just wasn't comfortable to read a book that large - plus the annotation was distracting. I may give it another try later - I know the Capitol Hill branch has a more handy size on the shelf.

This morning, I started reading The Telling, by Ursula K. Le Guin - a book Phillip and I picked up during my parents' move.

Just as having a cell phone is useful for resetting clocks, maintaining a blog is useful for recalling the date when you started your present job, or the date when you switched from Netscape to Opera.

Here's another "You don't have an exclusive physician" scenario (see last Friday, the 15th):

If you call your doctor's office and get a recording, it doesn't necessarily mean that no one is answering the phones (although, I suppose, it could). More likely, it means that other people are calling your doctor's office at the same time as you. The unfortunate reality is that if it's a convenient time for you to call (before you leave for work, during your lunch break, as soon as you get home from work, etc.), it's probably a convenient time for other people, too.

Now that I've gotten used to the alternative, having steps in and out of buses seems rather unnecessary.

I decided this morning that although I enjoy a good cup of tea, I just don't enjoy tea nearly as much as I enjoy a good cup of coffee.

I watched a very good film last night. It's called Open Water. I recommend it with qualifications. It was a well-written film - I enjoyed the economy of story telling. The scenes in the open water were scary as hell. (Despite a professional review to the contrary - I felt that knowing those were real sharks in the water with the actors - no digital fakery - made it even more scary, not less so.) The scenes out of the water, however, seemed frustratingly amateurish. The camera seemed to lack confidence - not really knowing what it wanted to focus on. The supporting cast - the hotel manager, the guide, other people on the boat - just weren't very good actors.

Open Water scared me a lot. This morning, my sister called. My nephew is going diving, and wanted to know if it would be OK to use us as an emergency contact number.