Ernesto Latest Atlantic Tropical Storm, Not a Threat to US Mainland

 

In keeping up with the Atlantic hurricane season in '24, we now have the fifth named storm, Ernesto, currently (at this writing noon today) at tropical storm strength with sustained winds of 50 mph.  Although Ernesto is about to pass through the US and British Virgin Islands and enter the open Atlantic just north of Puerto Rico, unlike its predecessor Debby, it is destined to be a hurricane of the open Atlantic...only Bermuda is remotely threatened.  Of course, whenever there is a hurricane churning through the western Atlantic, coastal warnings will abound along the US east coast about high waves and rip current.  Ernesto is a sign that the 2024 hurricane season may be about to get into high gear...not a pleasant thought...

Five Years Ago in Chicago

Five years ago at this time Melissa, Will and I were having a great time visiting Chicago...the above picture was taken at the Navy Pier there by Lake Michigan.  It's still hard for me to fathom the loss of my dear, wonderful son.  Melissa is also deeply in grief, not to mention enduring difficult postoperative chemotherapy for her breast cancer.  It's been a very sad and tough summer for us, and the months ahead promise to pose their own challenges as well.  But for us still here with our lives to live...and I include my beloved daughter Rebecca...while it is important to recognize our own universal physical mortality, feeling and expressing gratitude for what we do have in this limited time allotted for us is also necessary, deriving joy from one another and appreciating the simple pleasures of existence while living in the present moment.  May you likewise enjoy and cherish your own life as well...

Walked the Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

Before going off to bed Friday nights, when I plan on doing the Depot Parkrun 5K the next morning I first check the local forecast for Gainesville...this time I knew it would be especially hot and humid.  And I was right: 79 degrees, 95% humidity...ugh!  So once again I easily decided to speed-walk the 3.1 miles instead of running it.  And like two weeks ago, I think I did well enough, with an identical finishing time of 38:19...click HERE to view the race results.  Yet I still feel that I can make some meaningful improvement in my walking form while pushing myself a bit harder.  My goal is to speed-walk a 5K at a better-than 12 mph pace: this would represent a 37:12 finishing time, so I don't have that much further to go.  This was my 50th finish at a Parkrun event, so I'm now qualified to get a "50" tee-shirt.  That's good, because I seem to have misplaced the "25" shirt I had been wearing.  The Depot Parkrun is a part of a wide network of Parkruns, having originated in England just a few years ago, spreading to several countries across the world.  Participation is free, although since it's completely volunteer-driven, they do encourage you to step forward in that regard.  To have your finishing time recorded and posted on their website, you first register online and then bring the barcode they give you to the race to scan along with the finishing token they hand you at the finishing line.  After scanning, the results are usually posted around 9-9:30.  On this particular morning, unlike the way it usually is at this pretty, partially nature park just south of downtown, I didn't hear any bird songs...maybe the muggy conditions had something to do with it... 

Quote of the Week...from Sting of the Police

"When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around"...by Sting of the Police 

The Police, a highly talented British reggae/punk-rock/jazz trio from the late seventies and early eighties, is one of my all-time favorite musical acts...I was not at all happy when they broke up after only five (incredibly good) albums.  The above quote, penned by their chief songwriter and front man Sting (Gordon Sumner), is actually the rather long title of a track on their 1981 third LP, Zenyatta Mondatta.  It is also a heavily-repeated chorus that rams home the deep...but oft-neglected wisdom...of making do with what you have.  It speaks to the tendency of folks to let themselves become mired in discontent and grief over their situations instead of working in a more constructive manner with the circumstances they face.  This spring and summer has been especially difficult for myself and Melissa, and our "world" has definitely fit the parameters of this song.  Not that the rest of our little planet isn't undergoing some trying times as well, and I could easily slide into a state of hopelessness by focusing on one thing after another that is "running down".  Yet in the middle of this there is hope and much to be grateful for.  That doesn't mean denying the tragedy and troubles, but rather to place them in a broader perspective and to realize that life by its very nature is a struggle...and embracing that struggle is indeed the way to "make the best of what's still around"...

Had Fun Putting Together Jigsaw Puzzle

I recently bought a new jigsaw puzzle titled October Skies, a 300-piece painting by Alan Giana in the Memory Lane series.  It was pleasant to take an hour or so and put it together...I'll probably be back soon at Joann Fabrics off Archer Road to get another one, maybe with more pieces.  They have quite a collection there. This one is put out by Master Pieces, the perfect name for a jigsaw puzzle business...

Weekly Short Stories: 1997 Science Fiction, Part 5

Today I resume my weekly look at short stories I've been reading, slogging through the years in the genre of science fiction. I've reached 1997 and am in the middle of reading the late Gardner Dozois' series The Year's Best Science Fiction, this volume being the Fifteenth Annual Collection and containing stories from that year.  So without further ado, let's see my reactions to the next three tales appearing in that book...

ECHOES by Alan Brennert

A young woman, genetically engineered for high intelligence and artistic talent, begins to see images, or "echoes" of herself in her everyday life.  The disturbing phenomenon convinces her of the myriad lost possibilities as to what she could have become.  But is this simply in her mind, or is there a literal meaning to this all...

GETTING TO KNOW YOU by David Marusek

Sitting here reading this story in 2024 amid all the accelerating AI culture around us makes this tale more immediately relevant than many others.  A young jet-setting corporate investigator relies on her portable AI robot for information and direction, but Bug is getting just a bit TOO intrusive and testy...time for an updated model.  But after her "partner" acquits itself well in difficult circumstances, maybe that replacement model might not be the way to go. Being of mixed opinions about AI, I also had mixed feelings about this story...

BALINESE DANCER by Gwyneth Jones

A dystopian tale about a bickering couple, along with their young son, driving in a declining France looking for a camping site on vacation. The wife, a biological research scientist, has been summarily fired for simply reporting a find that her boss finds politically incorrect, and the husband is a moderately successful writer of children's books.  Their experiences on the road...and at camp where a cat they name "Balinese Dancer" befriends them...are a word picture of troubled times and an extension, in my opinion, of where we're sadly heading. It's also an indictment of how some people will twist objective scientific research to suit their own subjective agendas...

Next week: more from 1997...

About the Upcoming August Primary Election

Before the general election in November, my state of Florida is holding a primary election on August 20th.  I opted out of the vote-by-mail system and plan to cast my ballot in person that Tuesday morning.  In partisan nominating contests, the US Senate seat currently held by Republican Rick Scott is being contested, although I doubt his GOP challengers will garner many votes.  On the Democratic side four candidates are vying to replace Scott next January when the new term begins. US representative, state representative and Alachua County sheriff constitute the other partisan contests on the August ballot.  Then we go on to the county school board, with two incumbents being challenged.  And there is one county commission race and one city commission race there as well.  I'm not sure what good my one vote will do with each of the available races, it being just a drop in the bucket, as the cliche goes. But as with other elements of my life, I've grown to consider consistent, reasoned voting whenever the opportunity arises to be a worthwhile personal discipline that ties me in...no matter how tenuously...with the society around me.  May the best candidates win, and may all the eventual winners perform their duties conscientiously and ethically while I wish them success regardless of whether I voted for them...

On Developing a Second Brain in Foreign Language Learning

As Steve Kaufmann, a Canadian polyglot who fell in love with language learning early on during his ongoing 77-year existence on this planet, has reiterated that achieving a meaningful level of understanding in a foreign language requires a dedicated amount of listening and...hopefully...reading time whereby one's neural pathways are redrawn to develop what is essentially a "second brain" in that language. I am probably studying too many languages at the same time with Chinese, Russian and Spanish currently on my plate, but that's a lot fewer than the number I had been pursuing. Progress is difficult to measure or report since it isn't easily quantified: sure, I can count the words I've learned, but actually comprehending the spoken language in real time is a completely different matter. I would be better served in this regard were I to habituate myself to deeper, concentrated listening and reading with available translation...Kaufmann's LingQ website can be a help with this, and until recent difficult events arose demanding my attention, had been using ChatGPT to generate practice sentences in my target languages on different levels of proficiency.  Yet I'm a little too tentative with computer apps and maneuvering through the digital quagmire that others seem to effortlessly glide through. But if I can intentionally learn to better use productive apps and functions, then this can be a great help.  In any event, I do enjoy studying these three languages, and I guess that's the most important thing... 

Tropical Storm Debby to Soon Become Hurricane, Hit Florida's Big Bend Region

Before all this recent travail and tragedy entered my hitherto happy-go-lucky existence, I had remarked on this blog that I might just follow this 2024 Atlantic hurricane season more closely than in past years.  I'm still sticking to that idea, and we have the fourth named storm, Debby, churning and intensifying in the eastern Gulf of Mexico as it makes its way to an early Monday morning landfall at my home state of Florida's swampy "Big Bend" region.  Sometime this evening Debby will gain hurricane status and may intensify further before landfall.  It's dropping a horrendous amount of rain and Gainesville is currently expected to get around possibly 8 inches of water, creating localized flooding threats.  Once Debby passes through Florida tomorrow, it is expected to veer eastward and, as it slows down, cause much flooding in southeastern Georgia before inflicting itself on South and North Carolina.   As for Gainesville, tonight and all day tomorrow will be the window for concern.  Right now at this posting around 5:17 PM, Debby has maximum sustained winds of 65 mph with the barometric pressure at 992 mb, traveling northward at 12 mph...

On Present Personal Storms

I seem to be passing through a period in my life reminding me of the travails of Job in that Old Testament book of the Scriptures.  With my wife's illness and son's passing, for me it has been a time of "life, interrupted", with a grave challenge for me to either grow through it all or begin a withdrawal into inaction and hopelessness: I choose the first path.  I will never forget my dear boy Will and will cherish his memory...and the hurt will always be there, I am sure.  And I am determined to see Melissa through this medical storm in her precious life, and to come out of it stronger and looking forward to each new day as we enthusiastically face them together...

Walked Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

2024 has developed into a very trying, tragic year for me and my family.  Melissa was diagnosed in May with an aggressive variant of breast cancer.  Although she was blessed with a speedy early diagnosis and the surgery performed on the 30th that month removed the cancerous tumor (and presumably the cancer from her body), she is now on a succession of difficult chemotherapy cycles that will last into the fall...followed by radiation treatments.  In the midst of all this my dear son, Will, died on July 18th...nine days ago.  So with our bereavement for Will and my care for Melissa, my normal, routine existence to which I had grown accustomed has been drastically altered.  But some things can still be done and it's a healthy thing, I think, to continue with the Depot Parkrun I had been doing regularly before all this hit us.  This morning it was 73 degrees with 100% humidity...but clear skies...and I had already planned on speed-walking the 3.1-mile course through pretty Depot Park, some four blocks south of downtown Gainesville.  The goal was simply to walk as fast as I could and to keep some semblance of proper race-walking form.  The spirit among the volunteers and runners/walkers seemed very positive, and that was a help to me.  I sweated a bit from the walk after it ended, but wasn't even remotely tired...my finishing time was 38:19, some 30 seconds faster than my previous best 5K speed-walk.  You can read the results by clicking HERE.  Next month...although not next week...I'd like to continue this helpful habit with another summertime speed-walk at the park...

For My Dear Son Will

My dear son Will passed away at his home this past Thursday.  I miss him so much. He was the kindest, most generous person I've ever known...and he was my son.  What a blessing, and what a terrible loss, as if someone came along and cut out a huge part of my life.  This wound I know will be with me throughout my life, or at least its scars on my soul.  I will always treasure the memory of Will, from his birth in 1990, childhood, and as a wonderful and deeply caring, responsible adult.  God bless you, my dear, sweet Will, and may you enjoy His peace...

Family Tragedy, Blog Interruption

A tragedy occurred in my family today, the loss of a dear life close to me.  I am beside myself in grief and don't feel it appropriate to elaborate any further in this matter.  At the same time, I don't see how continuing to put out daily blog articles about various topics for public reading is appropriate, either.  Yet I want to maintain my daily writing habit throughout this sad and distressing season.  So I am making this blog...hopefully temporarily...only available to read by myself, the author.  I know of some dear regular readers and I regret this action for both their and my sake, especially the one who is so kind with her comments.  So, for a season of time you will not be able to read this blog.  Hopefully, though, when and if I think it's time to resume its public availability, I intend to return, along with a backlog of dated material to read...

Weekly Short Stories: 1997 Science Fiction, Part 4

It's time for another weekly look at science fiction short fiction that appears in the series The Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by the late Gardner Dozois.  The year in focus is 1997 and the specific volume is titled Fifteenth Annual Collection.  My local public library doesn't have this series for checkout and to buy them hard-copy would be way too cumbersome since there are a lot of them in the series and each one is pretty thick.  So the advance of Kindle has really helped me in this ongoing project: I have all fifteen of the first books in the series with easy digital access, and I can read stories conveniently at different opportune moments during my day.  But let's now delve into the next three stories...

ITSY BITSY SPIDER by James Patrick Kelly

The setting is the year 2038...only 14 years from now but 41 from when this story was published.  A woman visits the father who abandoned her in her childhood many years before, full of bitterness at him but feeling responsible to her recently deceased mother, who inexplicably maintained some affection toward him and bequeathed him some money.  At his home she encounters a robot girl who looks and sounds uncannily like she did as a little girl.  As she talks with her long-lost deadbeat dad, who has declined cognitively, she realizes why his robot assistant/caretaker is the way she is...and why her mother wanted her to see him.  I wonder how close we'll be to this scenario with AI when 2038 gets here...

A SPY IN EUROPA by Alastair Reynolds

Off in the reasonably distant future when the solar system has been settled and humans genetically transformed to adapt to different environments, the balance of power has shifted from Earth to the outer planets...mainly Jupiter...as two competing factions based on moons Europa and Ganymede play a life-and-death struggle to dominate the other.  A spy from the latter is sent to pick up special information from an agent they planted in Europa...lots of crazy plot twists and double-crossings here, enough to make my head spin.  And a bit of hard sci-fi, especially with regard to biology, is thrown in for good measure...

THE UNDISCOVERED by William Sanders

An alternative history story has William Shakespeare one night fleeing pursuers in London while drunk.  He finds a ship and climbs aboard to sleep it off and then discovers the next day he's on the high seas, headed for what would become America.  This story is told from the vantage point of a Cherokee leader who befriends Shakespeare...now a slave won from another tribe in a skirmish.  The language barriers are immense, but the two reach a basic level of communication and Spear-Shaker, as he is called, even stages a play with the community actively participating.  A funny story, but ultimately I failed to see where the author, a Cherokee himself, was getting at other than maybe showing how crazy they thought white people were...no argument from me...

Next week: more sci-fi adventures originally published in 1997...

Just Finished Reading You Like It Darker by Stephen King (Part 2)

Below are my reactions to the final six tales appearing in the recently published short story and novella collection by Stephen King titled You Like It Darker.  Overall, I was very impressed by this effort of his...

RED SCREEN (short story)

A New York City detective is investigating a man's murder of his wife, who he claims was no longer in her body and had been taken over by an alien.  The suspect further elaborates that he knew of this extraterrestrial conspiracy by going on the Dark Web, and that a spouse's nit-picking, nagging behavior is a sign of being possessed.  The detective returns home to his own wife, who recently has been stepping up her own nagging of him: guess where this goes...

THE TURBULENCE EXPERT (short story)

A man seems to be in a special "black ops" organization, going on special assignments that seem to carry some extremely unpleasant and scary elements with them while he enjoys special privileges and amenities from the "organization".  With great trepidation he boards a passenger jet flight, and as it goes into extreme turbulence he knows he is about to die...and reveals the reason for his job in the first place.  I thought the story's premise was extremely cool and it was one of my favorites in the collection...

LAURIE (short story)

After an elderly Floridian man's wife dies of brain cancer, his rather pushy-but-well-meaning sister gets him a dog to care for, against his wishes. Gradually he warms up to Laurie's presence although the pooch seems to have some difficulties with her "toilet training".  One day he and Laurie are out on a walk and encounter a big, mean old gator in the worst way.  A "man's best friend" story where Lassie descends into the Twilight Zone...

RATTLESNAKES (novella)

Related in setting to King's Duma Key novel and plot and characters to his Cujo work, this novella provides closure to the trials undergone in that latter book by characters Donna and Victor Trent...and their son Tad.  In Rattlesnakes, it is several decades gone by and Victor, alone now, is staying on a southwest Florida key at his friend's for a while.  He encounters a woman who is always pushing a stroller with the empty clothes of her long-diseased twin boys, who died from rattlesnake bites some forty years before.  Victor soon discovers that the "boys" aren't exactly gone, and they've decided they just might like to hang out with him...

THE DREAMERS (novella)

A celebration of sorts of the writing style of H.P. Lovecraft, a reclusive amateur scientist hires as his assistant and stenographer an embittered Vietnam veteran to investigate different experimental subjects for their dreams after placed under hypnosis.  Need I say that the experiment goes horribly awry?  The experiment goes horribly awry...

THE ANSWER MAN (novella)

This is the story of a man's life, a New Englander who is just on the verge in pre-World War II America of making crucial decisions about his upcoming marriage and where they will live.  While driving he encounters a roadside man who dubs himself "The Answer Man"...with the answers he gets, our protagonist then plunges into the war and beyond, only to encounter the Answer Man decades later...and with a different set of answers.  I loved the tail ending of this story, which I think was probably the best one of the twelve in the collection...

Just Finished Reading You Like It Darker by Stephen King (Part 1)

You Like It Darker, published just a couple of months ago, is Stephen King's latest collection of novellas (5) and short stories (7).  I just finished reading it, and I'm happy to report that he hasn't lost a bit of his touch when it comes to spinning a good yarn.  His writing, to me, is so far and above that of the science fiction authors featured in Gardner Dozois' annual "best of"  collections.  Below is a list of the first six stories as they appear in the book, followed by brief commentary from me...

TWO TALENTED BASTIDS (novella)

Two rural Maine friends, one a mediocre writer and the other an equally average artist, suddenly find themselves catapulted into fame for their skills and outstanding works...what was the pivotal event changing their lives? As the story progresses, the answer leads to a fateful outing in the woods they experienced.  Ultimately this is a tale about artistic talent...and doing things for their own sake (as I am currently doing)...

THE FIFTH STEP (short story)

A retired widow lives a life of routine in upper Manhattan, regularly taking his morning walk to northern Central Park.  One day he is sitting on a bench there and is annoyed by a young man who sits next to him, and who then begins to explain he is working on his drinking problem with A.A....and could he get help fulfilling Step #5 of the Twelve Step program they have?  Not for the faint at heart, but we are talking about a Stephen King story, right?

WILLY THE WEIRDO (short story)

Willy is a cruel little boy who tortures bugs and likes to look at dead things...he is drawn to his paternal adoptive grandfather, who spins many impossible tales of his experiences in the distant past going back to the US Civil War at Gettysburg and even to Cleopatra's time.  The ending makes you wonder about the people among us...well, not really... 

DANNY COUGHLIN'S BAD DREAM (novella)

The longest story in the book, Danny Coughlin is a custodian at a Kansas high school who has a recurring, horrible dream of a remote, abandoned gas station and a corpse's arm sticking out of the ground, with a feral dog going after it.  His pursuit of the mystery leads him to become the chief suspect of a grisly murder, and the chief inspector, patterned after Victor Hugo's Javert in Les Miserables, just won't let up on his persecution.  A story more about fickle human nature than a murder mystery...didn't change my mind about how people generally are...

FINN (short story)

A boy seems destined to live a life of bad luck...one improbable disaster after another.  Then, as his fortunes are apparently beginning to change, he has his own doubts that things are really going to improve. I thought the story was a bit incomplete and could have closed a little more clearly, but that's just my take...

ON SLIDE INN ROAD (short story) 

A great character study on the people in a family, three generations of them, as they visit the grandfather's sister who is dying from cancer.  The father is embarrassed by his irreverent father, but his son respects him and is interested in his baseball talk.  The car lands in a ditch, where a gruesome sight is witnessed by the little boy...and then they run into some very unsavory dudes and true character and courage is revealed among the family members...

Tomorrow I'll continue with my discussion of Stephen King's new book, covering the six remaining stories...

About the Summer Olympics and How I See the Various Sports

The Summer Olympics will be beginning in Paris, France on July 26, lasting into the first couple of weeks in August.  I've watched some of the American qualifying trials in various sports, and have found that they can be divided in three different ways.  First of all, there are the sports that are objectively scored...races of all sorts like swimming, running and walking get specific finishing times that rank the contestants.  Others like jumping and throwing get minutely-measured distances to their credit.  Then there are the events that, like America's Got Talent, require a panel of judges to deliver the scores subjectively...gymnastics, diving, and synchronized swimming belong to this group.  Since many of the first type have special limiting rules requiring judges at them (walking and special swim-stroke races), we see a mixture of the two types there.  The second way they are divided is into individual and team events.  Sports like soccer, water polo, field hockey, basketball and baseball all are heavily dependent on that subjective judging element yet ultimately come down to which side has the most goals or runs.  The third way the Olympic events are divided is a bit more subtle, but in my opinion just as important.  Some events have a widespread following and participation aspect to them: soccer, basketball, running, and jumping are in this group.  Others, like gymnastics, swimming, race-walking, water polo, and golf...to mention just a few...are either not very popular among the masses, are relatively exclusive to more privileged elements of society, or require fashioned settings not available in many places.  To get that gold medal can have different meanings based on whether the winner was raised in a "privileged" sport without much competition, or maybe the sport is so unknown and unpracticed that this limited the degree of competition as well.  But my big problem in all this is that first division, between subjectively and objectively-scored sports.  In the trials I tended to avoid sports like diving and gymnastics for this very reason.  I'll probably follow whatever happens to be on TV at the time when the Games begin, but my clear preference will be for the sports that (1) are objectively scored, (2) are individual in nature, and (3) have been popular with widespread availability.  And oh, by the way, I'm no flag-waver...I'm eschewing nationalism although if the US wins, that's cool, too..

Some Running, Walking...and Weather...Talk

I skipped the Depot Parkrun 5K again this morning...just wasn't feeling all that well, and to tell the truth, getting off from work at 10 pm the night before doesn't exactly predispose me to getting up early the next morning!  But since I don't run in order to race...it's the other way around...the rest of today is open for me to do just that.  On a related note, I've been noticing the excruciatingly hot temperatures elsewhere in the United States over the past week, and I just have to chuckle to myself at the notion I had once entertained of bypassing Florida's summer heat by signing up for a July or August long distance race somewhere up north...I remember one held in scenic western Wyoming.  Well, that place...among others...is currently deep into a severe heat wave that would make us down south feel like we're in air conditioning by contrast.  Weather does what it wants to do, and where and when it wants to do it.  Of course, human-caused climate change isn't helping any.  But returning to running, I was planning to walk that race earlier today, and would like to get in some practice with that as well.  I'm starting a new daily regimen...weather be damned...of walking the .7 mile loop around the block my house is on and recording the time.  I speed-walked (for me) the first one yesterday at a time of 8 minutes 47 seconds, and plan to try it again today, rain, snow, sleet, hurricane, heat wave, torrential flood notwithstanding.  The idea behind this is to continue to gradually improve my walking form to make the motions more efficiently and to accustom myself to the kind of exertion I experience while running...

Quote of the Week...from Ron Desantis

I think the country's on the wrong track.                  Ron Desantis

And I think that regardless of which major political party you're looking at, the most popular figures within are bound to be tagged with the label "divisive" by their opponents, and our Florida governor Ron Desantis certainly fits the bill there.  When he successfully ran for that office in 2018 and reelection in 2022, I voted against him both times.  The last was primarily as a reaction to what I considered his failure to adequately protect the population of this state, which has a heavy demographic tilt toward susceptible elderly people, from the COVID pandemic that ravaged the state.  Yet I haven't always agreed with the opinions and actions of the politicians I've supported over the years, and I believe that Desantis is a decent, intelligent man who has a kind of integrity and character to his personality that would better suit him as his party's presidential standard bearer than the jerk currently running the show over there.  Also, he is very good at getting his points across lucidly...in contrast to our also decent...but declining...president.  This isn't a campaign ad for Ron Desantis, and if Donald Trump inexplicably picks him as his vice-president running mate for 2024 I'll be voting against him for the third time.  But if Desantis were the one residing in the Oval Office, I'd feel the country would be on a better track than it would be with the Orange dude in there....

Podcaster's Time Management Strategy

I've written in the past about Rob Dial's Mindset Mentor podcast, and the various topics he's presented regarding personal development.  Sometimes he's on point and sometimes not...and I'm finding more and more that he's repeating the same things that I've heard in the past.  That last thing is something I would have expected and embrace...at least in the areas that resonate with me.  And time management is one of these.  The other day he broke down his strategy of managing a day in his own life with four key points: mastering one's to-do list, mastering one's schedule, employing the Pomodoro Technique of 25 minutes focused work on ONE thing with 5 minutes rest, and then reviewing the day at the end.  I tried it the other day and pleasantly discovered that I was actually getting ahead of my plans, finishing tasks earlier than expected.  Yesterday I didn't do it and...it didn't work out so well.  Everyone's different and I doubt that Rob Dial would even recognize my own interpretation of his suggestions...I always take what he says with a grain of salt: I think he'd like that...