Not needing to go anywhere, I slept in. Then I took a nap. Relaxing and zonking out, more than any other leisure activities, underscore the lack of urgency presented by my new mode of employment.

I deeply enjoy sleeping. There are few things more simply pleasurable than opening one's eyes ever so slightly to the morning, then shifting position and going back to sleep without regard for time. I rarely indulge in this, however, because its pleasure value derives almost entirely from its nature as an exception. I am a compulsive accomplisher: for my sanity, I need to complete tasks and keep moving down my lifelong To-Do list. If the day were longer, perhaps I could have it both ways. Reality being what it is, sleeping late is a rare treat.

I read some documentation on sendmail, the notoriously arcane yet frustratingly standard Unix mail system, and configured my Macintosh Quadra to handle mail for schmonz.com. Since the Quadra is behind my firewall (a Mac IIci), I also had to instruct the firewall to pass incoming mail connections through. I haven't yet set up POP service because the Quadra's disk is both somewhat unreliable and low on free disk space.

My sister is in medical school, where they keep you pretty busy. I hardly ever get to see her because she is studying almost all the time, even during REM sleep. Having completed a test today, she took a short break and invited me over. We ended up schmoozing at Arabica with Matt Schemmel and a Dutch friend of my sister's whose name I dare not attempt to spell. Schemmel is working on his thesis, which involves inducing computers to generate original music without human help. He is also a pretty silly guy, his methodology in some ways similar to mine, and when placed together we seem to exceed some commonly accepted Threshold of Total Silliness. Intimidated, my sister started focusing her conversational efforts on her Dutch friend while Shemy and I attempted to distract them. We did a pretty good job striking a symbolic blow for the forces of silliness.