Instead of the cardinal number I'll try to be interesting (and all that rot) with the ordinal--first.

If you come in first in a competition, that generally means that you have "won."

"First" implies either the beginning of a series or sequence (first gear, first grade, etc.) or it implies the best qualitatively.

And then there is the usage that suggests more is to come. Today is the first day of December. Tomorrow will no doubt be the second, as long as you stay in one place. Last year I chopped ten hours out of daY by flying east about 10,000 miles. Although only about 24 hours had elapsed, when I got there it wasn't "tomorrow" but the day after tomorrow.

Jette "suggests" we give a brief intro about ourselves. Okay--I live in Katrinaland, aka Louisiana. And yes, even though it's been more than a year, it's still pretty apparent that this area had a major major disaster of the first order. Huge areas depopulated. Thousands of dwellings still needing repairs, but even with half of Central America here working hard there still is not enough labor available for the magnitude of the job needing doing.

I work three days a week at the Women's Center of Newcomb College (Tulane.) I'm a volunteer, processing archives. BK I taught World Civ at another New Orleans university.

I live by myself, humanwise, but share my household with three cats, each of which is highly individual. My oldest one--an 8 yr. old 25 lb. male marmalade, has just set himself on the CPU--within scritching distance of my left hand. The other cats are 3 yr. old little girls I adopted from the Humane Society. They all get along quite well.

This time last year I was in a hospital in Mombasa, Kenya, with a broken hip. Once I got home I dictated the Holidailies entries to a daughter, who posted them for me.

This year should be more "normal."

At the moment my pet peeve is the Coke man who hasn't refilled the machine where I work in at least three weeks. It is now out of absolutely everything.

Today was an ordinary, uneventful, unremarkable day. I copied a journal of a woman's summer (1957) in New York City. It was rather neat reading about the places she visited. She had some pictures of the Stock Exchange.

I worked in NYC two summers, and the Stock Exchange was about two blocks away. I'd walk over there on my lunch hour--not because of any great interest in finance, but because it was one of the few airconditioned places around. (This was in the mid-fifties.) I earned $1 an hour--the year before it had been $.75, and the year before that it was the minimum for under 18s--$.65/hr.

Well, there's not much about one, or even first. You are aware that there are only 10 kinds of people--those who understand binary and those who don't.