As usual, I woke up way too early. Eyes left to take in the large red numbers on my alarm clock, numbers which slowly focused into the alarmingly early time of 5.00 a.m. I couldn't help but let a sigh escape as I turned over, pulled the bed clothes over me and tried to wrest at least another hour of sleep out of the night.

The red figures "6.15" glowered from the clock now, silouhetted against the curtains, through which the morning light from the bay to stole. Not too bad, I thought, counting back through the night of interruptions: around six hours all told.

I'm not precisely sure why I've been sleeping so poorly of late. Perhaps its just age. After all, another symptom of age is going to the toilet more frequently, and it seems that at least one of my awakenings each night is prompted by an indignant bladder.

I pulled my weary body out of bed, somewhat proud, despite all, of my morning erection, which persists even though I am indeed getting older. I dragged the curtains open: another beautiful morning, with the edges of Angel Island outlined softly in a pink haze, and a catmaran surging through the waters of the Bay, leaving a grey trail behind it which seemed to float into the dawn behind it, somewhere towards Oakland.

For once it was quiet out there on the balcony - I couldn't even hear any skateboarders down below. Oh, that reminds me: a quite shocking thing happened down there, I hear. You remember in my last journal, I took a photo of one of the skateboarders? Well, apparently, a day or two later one of the skateboarders was killed in a fight by another skateboarder right there on the plaza. That image I had of their innocence hasn't lasted even a couple of days for me.

Silently, I berated myself for my cranky morning thoughts about bad sleep, and getting old. After all, in truth, I knew that I had nothing - absolutely nothing, to complain about. And I'd been feeling on top of the world for the past week. Poor sleeping patterns hadn't seemed to markedly decrease my energy levels - in fact quite the reverse. I'd spent the weekend feeling as if I was on a mix of caffein and prozac, such had been my drive. I'd spent no less than two hours at the gym, Saturday morning, and had gone running in the afternoon. And what's more, I'd spent most of Sunday either playing tennis or hiking with a friend in the South Bay. So quit moaning already, Keith.

I shambled over to my desk and turned on my laptop, leaving it a while to warm up while I set the coffee-maker a' percolating in the kitchen. I grabbed a couple of protein bars for breakfast thinking once more that I really need to rethink my diet. But I'm such a creature of habit - and how! I know that left to myself I could happily eat Promax bars for breakfast for the next five years without getting sick of them.

I watched a few morning emails trickle into my inbox, now that my laptop was up and running, and saw with pleasure that one of them was from ... well... someone I'd rather keep quiet about for now. I'll just say for now that he's one of the causes of the more frequent smiles I've been sharing with the world recently.

I eyed my computer clock and reflected that I'd better pull myself together and get off to work. At last, new projects are coming into our office, and I can start feeling useful to my employer again - not to mention motivated. So off I went to the office, eventually, with a hop-skippity jump :)

Sitting here at work, now, though, I find I do indeed have abundant time with no responsibilities. I'm in limbo until a meeting at 3.00, in which we'll discuss the next step of our most promising project with the customer. So I've surfed the web a little, and have read the New York Times from cover to cover. I'm finding myself intrigued and attracted by Joe Lieberman, Gore's VP pick. I think that if ever Gore did something right, it was in picking this guy. I saw him interviewed on PBS's "The Newshour", and boy does he seem like that rare thing: an honest (albeit understandably partisan), humane, charismatic politician.

But I promised I wouldn't get into politics on here - not after the way in which my comments about McCain were received a few months back! So consider those remarks of the last paragraph to be struck from the record.