All week long I've been editing the book for that author I told you about. It's 300 pages, and I'm at about page 121. It's easy reading, but it gets a little tedious because she keeps making the same kinds of mistakes, lots of misspellings, lack of commas and a strange fondness for using lots and use of adjectives (often the same ones), like 3 or 4 before a noun.

I assumed I'd be working on the book more or less full time, since the sooner I get it done the sooner I get paid. But I have yet to work more than 5 hours on it in a single day. My back starts bothering me and I feel like I need a break after an hour or so.

I'm also into Day 4 of the UConn nutrition study. Which means that I'm wearing my "belt" all day long. It records my movements and senses intensity as well, sending back all sorts of data to their computer. It kind of makes me feel like I'm being tracked, but they really don't know what I'm doing.

I've also been carefully recording everything I eat and drink with careful measurements as to time and quantity. Gee, when you write it all down, it sure makes you feel like you're pigging out!

I also have to record any "exercise" I do.

So I do all this for a full week. Then I get to drink an isotype and collect my urine overnight, then collect it all for a full 24 hours, storing it in the fridge! EEwww. But it must be kept cold, including when I transport it.

Then the next day I bring my urine, food and exercise logs and me to the UConn campus for my baseline strength testing and some other stuff. I'll get my first payment of $150, too.

When I go to UConn on Wednesday, I'm leaving very early, 6:30 am. I'm supposed to roll out of bed and head over there without eating and without doing any kind of exercise, to the point where they will come and carry in your urine for you and open the doors, cus my doing this will somehow mess up their testing. The whole study has to do with how the body metabolizes protein, which I think has a bearing on weight loss/obesity.

I won't have to do the exercise and food logs during the entire 6 months, just 1 week out of each month. Same, I think, for the urine stuff.

Earlier this afternoon I got out the electric trimmer and a wood ladder to trim 2 shrubs in front of the house, and 4 in back. Then I had to sweep up all the trimmings and dump one wheelbarrow full of the stuff behind the tool shed.

The guy who's supposed to do my vinyl siding, sometime in June, he'd said, now tells me he'll know end of July when he can do it. We had some bad storms here a few weeks ago and although I heard no mention of tornados in this area, he said one touched down where he lives and the walls of his house collapsed, so he is trying to take care of that and keep up with his customers' jobs.

I'm tempted to just drive by his house, just to make sure he's not feeding me a line. No reason really to think so, but I don't want to be bumped by some other customer, and I want to get this done this season.