First Day of Quest, 25th of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Deneb): I'm not good with unstructured time. I've known this for years. Back when I was a working stiff, if I parlayed some vacation days with a three-day weekend and managed to take a week away from the job, I would fall into a dissolute state of listless entropy, unsure what to do with myself from one hour to the next.

When I retired, I devised a daily schedule of activities to keep my time structured. That schedule lasted maybe a week, if I ever followed the whole thing through for even so much as a single day. But eventually, and especially after the covids lockdown, a schedule has organically emerged, centered around my alternating days of walking and sitting, but also including time for meals, crossword puzzles, reading, shopping, video games, and blogging. The schedule isn't necessarily time based - I don't have a specific hour set aside for, say, posting to this blog - but is more of a sequence of activities: first this, then that. But breakfast isn't eaten until after morning coffee and no sooner than 10:00 am, dinner after 7:00 pm, and no gaming before 5:00 pm.

It all might sound a little ADD, but I find the routine gives my days the structure I need, and when I depart from the routine and the structure is gone, I feel adrift.

As I said, writing something (anything) on this blog is apart of that daily routine, but yesterday I forgot to post something here for the first time since September 29, 2023. Almost two years of daily blogging without missing a single day and, no, I don't remember the reason I missed posting back on 9/29. I think the reason I missed yesterday was that the Georgia Bulldogs football game (3:30 - 7:00 pm), the first game of the season, threw me off my schedule, although I did manage to post about the game to the sports blog. That organically derived daily schedule didn't have a 3½-hour window set aside for football, and I got thrown off my routine.   

Today is First Day of Quest in both Angus MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar and my New Revised USC. The 50th day of Autumn (September 25th in the Julian calendar) is the Last Day of Quest, so apparently we're on some sort of 25-day quest for something. Who knows what that might be - the meaning of life? A new daily routine? A new route to the Orient? The Epstein list?  

I guess we'll know when we get there.