Nothing seems to wear me out more than talking on the telephone. Long calls, such as a couple of hours or more, require twice that amount of time to recover.

That’s what happened yesterday. I got to the late afternoon completely exhausted. It wasn’t all the call’s fault. And, actually, it was a Zoom conference, but that’s the same thing as a phone call. I spent the morning working on the publication files for There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel. I managed to get about 2/3 of the way through it on this latest pass, looking for formatting inconsistencies, typos, missing quote marks, etc.

I pulled off the formatting to work in the yard. That was about 10:30 a.m. or so. Fortunately, I didn’t have any stock trading tasks to do yesterday. I worked pretty hard, mainly weed-eating at the front of our unbuilt lot, going around known blackberry plants and looking for new ones coming up. I worked on that until I figured the battery needed charging. I moved a few downed limbs, then raked some of the cuttings and put them on the compost pile. I didn’t even come close to finishing that. I also spent a little time working on a sitting-in-the-woods location to make it a spot where I could go out with a book, in the shade, drink coffee, and rest my body while working my mind.

I was almost done with outside work. I decided to tackle—that is, begin to tackle—a small woodworking project I’ve wanted to do for a couple of years. I figured out what I wanted to do, found the odd pieces of wood in the garage, and did some measuring and cutting. Possibly tomorrow I’ll work on it again. When that was done, I came into the house and checked the time. Almost 12:00 noon, so close to an hour and a half of this work.

I went to the hot sunroom for reading, a window fan making it tolerable. It was just a little over 90° there. I managed to get a few pages read in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, but not near enough to justify the time spent.

After a lunchmeat and cheese sandwich lunch, I headed back to The Dungeon for the Zoom conference. I won’t go into the work we were doing, just that it was a one-on-one conference related to our church’s Centennial celebration coming up in July. It was tedious, finding the correct places on Google Drive to put some files, creating new folders. I grew weary of it and, after 2 1/2 hours, told our committee chair I needed to leave. I had hit a wall and was unable to accomplish anything more. We had at least another hour of work, and by this time I was scrolling through folders and just seeing words or pictures racing by. I couldn’t find anything.

I went upstairs and, for an hour and a half, did nothing except sit in my reading chair, check a little on e-mail and Facebook, and nap. It was after 6:00 p.m. before I got up and started putting supper together. Fortunately, it was leftovers and pre-prepared salad.

By the time 8 p.m. rolled around, I was able to go back to the Google Drives and pick up where we had left off. Over the next hour I got a lot more done. It’s not finished, but it’s in better shape. I should be able to finish it today.

Well, for now it’s back to the book and try to finish that formatting today. Publication is getting closer.