719 days, 10 hours, 15 minutes, 52 seconds

She writes in the cab, headed downtown, the cabbie complaining about patches of ice, and how he can't brake. She writes mostly when they're stopped for lights, so as not to get nauseous. Two things she's always (and often vociferously) hated – political poetry and the day-to-day chatter called Art by the New York School poets. This blog is both.

719 days, 10 hours, 36 minutes, 38 seconds

Bush is in town. His advisors wanted a Wall St. setting for him to talk about the economy and blast the huge bonuses paid on Wall St., the discrepancies between rich and poor. Then, since he's right in the area, he'll drop by Ground Zero. Meanwhile, she has to take a cab down to 12th St., all the way east, and with traffic tied up because of the presidential motorcade, God knows how long it will take, the meter running.

719 days, 22 hours, 49 minutes, 19.2 seconds

This is getting ridiculous, but it's getting later and later, she's sitting reading news stories, absently fingering the anemic ball in her hands, fascinated by its pliability, its overall softness. And she thinks about silicon breast implants: if maybe some men like those better than the real thing, if they might burst and give out a dye like this. Food coloring. Baby's milk. What the hell would a baby do with silicon? In other news today, a farmer's cows suddenly started producing pink milk – traced to the fact that he'd been feeding them a lot of carrots. Those cows went wild for carrots.

719 days, 23 hours, 22 minutes, 17.8 seconds

The gel ball's losing weight. She hadn't quite expected this, thought with that tiny capsule gone it might still retain its thickness if not its color. She's losing weight as well, with nearly ten thousand steps today. She squeezes the ball again, hard, watching the red squirt up almost snake-like, curling around itself. Nothing but food coloring, and way too bright for blood. Years ago, her husband's finger sliced open in a deli, they went to the St. Vincent's emergency room, had to wait and wait (like last night with the computer). Finally a resident came in to stitch it up, and he saw her jump back. Hours later, and still the blood could squirt out and hit her right near the eye. She'd gone to the lobby to get a soda, so she missed the scene. But today she ordered ten more. Balls, not husbands. Don't get her started. It's nearly one a.m. Her defenses are down. Bad puns at this hour are falling as fast as snowflakes. The tv news says it won't amount to much.

720 days, 10 hours, 23 minutes, 26 seconds

Baby Einstein, indeed! It doesn't take a genius to realize that if you've got a small hand exercise ball, and it has dye inside, and you squeeze it hard enough, twist it every which way, eventually that capsule's going to burst, getting red ink all over your fingers. There's a news story she saved years ago, about a robber who realized the bills were marked with a red dye, and that they'd stained his pants. He didn't want to be branded as a robber, so he took his pants off. This was in 1995, when the whole world was more innocent. She finds the article instantly. So parts of this computer still work. She shouldn't trash it. And that ball, once all its dye's run out, might still be pliable. She holds it under warm water, recalling how that eases the blood flow.

720 days, 10 hours, 52 minutes, 29 seconds

Thieves race car through store, the headline reads. Swear to God, and this is CBS News, not some tabloid. A car with two masked men crashed the main entrance, tried to ram through the sliding security grill at the jewelry counter, failed twice, then drove out through an exit on the other side of the building. All she can think is that it must have been an armored car. Probably government surplus. Probably Florida. But no, this happened in Denmark.

720 days, 11 hours, 56 minutes, 21 seconds

And 144 days, 16 hours before the one-year warranty on her computer expires. On the phone yesterday with a Microsoft technician for an hour, him getting her to try installing Explorer again and again and again and again. Then, later, two hours on hold waiting for another tech, she on one phone line, her husband on the other, racing to see which one picked up first. Their two speaker phones blared music in sync. Sometimes even jazz. And her timing's a little better this morning, though she doesn't think minutes and seconds count.

721 days, 10 hours, 49 minutes, 35 seconds

Also on yesterday's AP wire: Military Trash Becomes Florida Agencies' Treasures. Everything the U.S. Military deems no longer useful is shipped off there: helicopter parts, Vietnam-era helicopters, boats, dive platforms. An armored personnel carrier purchased for $1500 will provide extreme cover for police if they have to ram a building or whatever. Also prisoner-transport airplanes, don't leave them out of the picture. Florida has immigration problems too, you know.

721 days, 11 hours, 13 minutes, 18 seconds

One-third of the students in Texas don't graduate high school. In Houston or Dallas more than half of the kids drop out. This from education experts. This from yesterday's Houston Chronicle. More than two-and-a-half million Texans have dropped out of high school over the past twenty years. Experts warn, if this trend continues, there will be huge economic and social problems. Duh... Maybe she wouldn't have even noticed this were it not for the fact that it's Texas. She's been thinking about it all night.

723 days, 23 hours, 24 minutes, 42 seconds

It's takes awhile, sometimes, for the news to hit home. But on January 23rd, the same day as Bush's State of the Union address, beggar children in Nairobi invade a five-star hotel's food tent and grab what they can. Food is selling for $7 a plate. Most people there, the ones who work, are lucky to earn $2 a day. This is at the World Social Forum where leaders from around the world are gathered. Bush is busy writing his speech. Half a world away, in Switzerland, other leaders attend the World Economic Forum, discussing the problem of poverty. Bush is cooped up in his oval office, reading over his speech again, practicing reading out loud, hoping not to flub too many words this time. And, lest he be called a man who only cares about the rich, he decides to introduce basketball player Dikembe Mutombo, from somewhere in Africa he thinks, who recently had a hospital built, again somewhere in Africa. Underlining this, so he can double-check the town, he breaks the tip of yet another pencil.

724 days, 11 hours, 39 minutes, 55 seconds

At least the Globe hasn't warmed completely yet. Those zoo bears, coaxed into hibernation a few weeks ago, could have managed on their own now.

724 days, 23 hours, 18 minutes, 11.2 seconds

She's not the only one who's crazy here – even her husband suggested it might be fun to bundle up and stay out watching the temperature drop. It's down to fourteen degrees. And don't think she's not tempted. They could sit in the courtyard, maybe blocked from the gusting wind. But The Five Pennies pops into her head again. What she remembers most is the little girl sitting out in the rain waiting for her parents to visit. And ending up with polio, the camera zooming in on the iron lung. She would have been ten or eleven, in Atlantic City, which had two of the major polio hospitals of the time. She has no idea what her parents might have been thinking when they took her to that movie, and she's right in the middle of trying to put everything in place when her husband undresses and crawls into the bed behind her.

725 days, 7 hours, 10 minutes, 18 seconds

4:50 p.m., and twenty-nine degrees out. When she woke this morning it was thirty-four. For the rest of the night, it's supposed to go down a degree or two an hour, bottoming out at sixteen from 5:00-8:00 a.m., then slowly starting up again. She doesn't understand what all the fuss is about, can remember nights here when it got down to two degrees. Except it's been so warm this year, the world's spoiled. She thinks about staying up to watch the degrees drop. Given her sleeping patterns of late, that would be child's play.

725 days, 16 hours, 9 minutes, 37 seconds

1 day, 13 hours, 9 minutes, 37 seconds since Bush's State of the Union speech. Nothing much worth remembering, though. Her husband comments it's the first time in their twenty-two years together that he's seen her sit through the whole speech. And she supposes it is. They sprawled on opposite ends of a gold sofa bought last year, she watching tv, he with a radio and headset on. Their tv has been problematic for months now, cutting out briefly every five or ten minutes. And he didn't want to miss a word. She, on the other hand, really enjoyed those frozen, distorted faces. State of the Union.

729 days, 5 hours, 53 minutes, 1 seconds

Snowing hard in Chicago during the second half. She can see it on the screen. And she thinks of the tv snow she saw as a child. Interference, it used to be called. Another sports term. Another political concept.

729 days, 8 hours, 26 minutes, 4 seconds

Chicago and New Orleans. Blue and Gold. She's trying to be adult here. Having hated football as a child, she's trying to watch with him. She roots for New Orleans, the city after Katrina, trying to pull itself up in spite of our government. They've spent some wonderful time there, listening to music, just walking Bourbon St. She watches two tackles and one interception. But all she sees is blue and gold, gold and blue, those dreaded summer camp color-war divisions. Turnover, punt, turnover, punt. It was never fair.

730 days, 11 hours, 4 minutes, 19 seconds

She did dream last night, one of the few lately she remembers, and it was of her computer being hijacked. Something called Road Warrior, an animated white screen in the center of the desktop, indexing all her files. Then, trying to record it this morning, Dragon crashed. On reboot her desktop icons were raised almost off the screen, and Dragon wanted to come up with a C+ runtime screen but never got that far. He tells her Hillary's now officially running for President. He says this election promises to be a battle. She reboots again, everything back in position, re-records her dream. It's shorter now.

730 days, 11 hours, 6 minutes, 34 seconds

He says she's dreaming.

730 days, 11 hours, 18 minutes, 13 seconds

She was awake at 3:15 a.m., unsure whether she'd been asleep for awhile or not. She got up. It looked as if there was fog outside the window. She went to the bathroom, then downstairs to take a muscle relaxant, which she supposes she should have taken before she went to bed. That fog is really snow. She sees it coming down fast outside the kitchen window, maybe a quarter inch accumulation on the ground, even on the sidewalk. There would have been reasons to get dressed, go out and enjoy it, but he was sleeping beside her. She assumed it would still be there in the morning. She assumed a lot of things.

731 days, 10 hours, 30 minutes, 7 seconds

Alone in the exam room waiting for results. With no one here to look at, she picks up Family Circle. "Can This Marriage Be Saved;" a three-page ad with mothers telling how proud they are of their enlisted daughters; a Topomax ad which shows a woman with her fists clenched, wedding band clearly visible on her finger: "Do you worry about migraines even when you're not having one?" No. No, no, no, no, no.