Operation ÖSTERREICH
I have now walked one hundred miles through the agency of my two & a half mile "daily" constitutional. One hundred miles! One hundred miles of exercise I would not otherwise have taken, one hundred miles of pushing & urging myself forward, one hundred miles through rain & sunshine (a bigger deterrent to me than rain) & wind & motorcars & barking, charging dogs. I'm proud of myself (but not boastfully so, methinks), but also reproachful that it took me so blasted long to get to one hundred miles. Months! Months of inactivity through the height of the summer! Lousy sloth! I've never walked five times in one week, but twice in consecutive weeks I walked on four consecutive days; if I do that regularly, or even semi-regularly, if I can lay down ten miles on course every week, I'll be to the next hundred miles in the later stages of January. Other weeks I've walked on four days, but non-consecutively. Observation of my times indicates that consecutive days produce the fastest times; a day spent at a standstill is the enemy of speed. More laps, & faster lap times. Those are my (admittedly fuzzy) objectives. Onward!

This means I've also put more-or-less one hundred miles on my sneakers. My informal adviser, Mrs. Skeeter, Esq., told me that a pair of training shoes have a life of approximately five hundred miles; I am logging the distance walked more to monitor shoe degradation than as benchmarks such as that celebrated above (a nice fringe benefit all the same). Four hundred more miles on this pair of sneakers. Let's run (walk, jog) 'em into the ground!

Warning: Mrs. Skeeter, Esq. is not going to want to read this next part, which discusses my moustache.

Project GLOWWORM
A hair fell out of my moustache today, perfectly intact from root to end. I caught it in midair & had a sudden inspiration to put it to the test on a ruler. Not every hair in my moustache is this long, & this one had indeed given up the ghost, but this one measured almost exactly two & a half inches. Wow! I really should wax the 'stache, at least on an experimental basis.

All clear, Skeet!

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
Lenka, "Trouble Is a Friend" from Lenka (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary:

"He's there in the dark,
He's there in my heart,
He waits in the wings,
He's gotta play a part,
Trouble is a friend, yeah,
Trouble is a friend of mine,
Oh, oh!

"So now don't be alarmed
If he takes you by the arm,
I won't let him in
But I'm a sucker for his charm,
Trouble is a friend, yeah,
Trouble is a friend of mine…"