4:62 a.m.

Please excuse the lack of posts the past few days. I've been busy.

The hectic schedule of the past two weeks has continued unabated. Waking up at 5:00 am Monday morning, I decided that I needed another 90 minutes of sleep more than a hour and a half of meditation, and skipped the morning service at the zendo for the first time in two weeks. Monday night, after a full day of work, I did open for the usual evening service at the zendo. My "talk" afterwards was unscripted and simply horrible; I couldn't believe the shit coming out of my own mouth. I pity the poor students who stayed for it.

Tuesday, I had a 7:30 a.m. meeting at the Development Authority to discuss the project-that-shall-not-be-named, so I skipped the morning service again. That meeting was followed by another meeting with a separate client, followed by an impromptu and not-altogether-voluntary walking tour of various Brownfield development "opportunities" (in other words, alarmingly distressed properties) on the wild west side of Atlanta, followed by a permit review at the Atlanta Bureau of Buildings. And somewhere in there, I found time to get my driver's license renewed (and listing the address I've lived at for almost two years now). And all that was just Tuesday.

By Wednesday, things were finally calming down a bit. When the alarm clock went off at 5 a.m., I simply could not get myself out of bed due to sheer exhaustion, so I skipped morning service for the third day in a row. When I finally got home that afternoon, looking forward to the opportunity to catch up on some reading and blogging, the lights suddenly went out for about an hour. No problem, June 21 was the longest day of the year, and it was still light outside, so I made the best of things, grabbed some back issues of The New Yorker that I had fallen behind on, and sat outside to read. When it finally got dusky outside, the lights had come back on.

For a while. I was on the phone with a neighbor, discussing Tuesday morning's meeting and its ramifications, when the lights went out again. And then back on. And then back off. And so on and so forth until almost 11:00 at night.

I had reset my clocks several times that evening, thinking that each restoration of the power would be the last and final, only to have to repeat the task. I gave up when I saw that the bedroom clock was reading "4:62 am." How confused does a clock have to be to read "4:62 am?"

I'm actually composing this Thursday night, but will back date it to Wednesday since that's the topic here. But I will blow the suspension of disbelief by stating here that on Thursday morning I completed the week by blowing off the morning service for the fourth day in a row - there is no Friday morning service, and it didn't seem worth the effort to change my sleeping pattern for the one morning of the week.

I'll start in again next Monday.