I'm in rather a fowl mood this morning; but for reasons I'll explain in a minute, I thought I should write something this morning.

Back to my mood; that's almost entirely a result of a lousy night's sleep, but since it's the first such night in weeks, I can't complain too loudly. In the end it took the combined effects of melatonin and Harvey Bristol Cream to send me under, but not until around 3.00 in the morning.

My mood wasn't helped by the task I faced just fifteen minutes ago. Have you ever had to prepare stool samples for your doctor? It's not much fun. I have to prepare double samples of each of three stool "events" spread over five days. The technique involves "catching" some in a "margarine container or other receptacle". It's actually surprising how much a stool weighs, by the way. When the doctor's assistant told me last night that I have do do this over five days, I had to ask him what I do with the early samples. I mean, do I keep them in the fridge or something? (The answer was no).

If you're wondering why I need to collect the samples, it's because I saw a new doctor last night. After ten to twelve years of intermittent fatigue, I decided to make a determined effort to figure out what causes it, and how to treat it. I looked around for a doctor who'd be prepared to take me seriously, and work with me to figure out what's going on. I met him last night - he's a well-respected gay doctor in the Castro, a kindly, courtly, thin guy who should have been wearing a bowtie, but wasn't. I spent about half an hour with him describing the various symptoms and what has been done over the years to treat them. The next step is to run a whole battery of blood tests etc. to catalogue my basic system - hence the stool sampling.

Anyway :)

The reason I thought I should write a few words this morning is that today is the anniversary of two years of the photo journal. It's hard to believe it's been two years: that's about one fifteenth of my life. Well maybe a little less than one fifteenth if I'm to be honest about my age :) Two years of free-association, introspection, complaining (of course :), and of wondering, now and again, whether my life was even worth recording in this way. I came very close to stopping the thing after I came back from my Summer trip. And, in fact, I did, for a while, scale down to only two or three entries per month. But then I surprised myself by realizing that I missed not writing - not communicating.

So here I am ... still writing ... about stools and such like :)