Puttering around as a behavioral mode

Over the weekend I got to thinking about the activity of puttering around. I wondered whether or not there has been any formal study about. So I put the following prompt to ChatGPT 5.2:

I’ve talked a lot about DMF (default mode network) and mind wandering in connection with creativity. It seems to me that puttering around is in the same ballpark. I’m not thinking and pondering, but I’m doing stuff, rather casually and in no forced order. Just as things come. It seems I like to putter early in the morning, on Friday afternoon, and over the weekend. Thus I just spent two days puttering around.

Since I’ve not had a “day job” in years, the distinction between weekdays and weekends is not forced on me. Yet it remains with me. It structured by time for most of the year in primary and secondary school. A bit less so in undergraduate and graduate school, but still operative. It also functioned when I had a faculty position at RPI (1978-1985) and at those times later on when I had one of those day jobs. So, it’s become deeply internalized though no longer externally imposed.

Its response took the form of numbered headings, subheadings, and bulleted lists. I find that sometimes useful, sometimes annoying. Since I wanted to write it up in a blog post I asked ChatGPT to express that material in the form of expository prose. I’ve put its response below the asterisks.

* * * * *

I’ve been thinking about puttering—not thinking hard, not resting, but doing things casually and without a forced order. It feels important, especially in connection with creativity, but I don’t know of any literature that treats it directly. What follows is an attempt to make sense of that intuition.

Cognitive science has devoted enormous attention to the default mode network (DMN)—a set of brain regions that become active when we are not engaged in externally directed tasks. The DMN is associated with mind wandering, autobiographical memory, imaginative simulation, and creative recombination. It is usually contrasted with task-positive networks that dominate during focused, goal-directed work.

But this framing leaves out a familiar and, I suspect, crucial mode of everyday cognition: puttering around.

Puttering is not rest, and it is not deliberate thinking. It is also not task-oriented in any strong sense. When I am puttering, I am doing things—moving objects, skimming texts, opening files, following small curiosities—but without urgency, hierarchy, or a clear endpoint. Attention shifts as affordances present themselves. One thing leads to another, but nothing insists.

This matters because puttering is not simply mind wandering in the absence of action. It is mind wandering coupled to low-stakes activity. That coupling provides just enough structure to keep cognition anchored in the world, while leaving associative processes free to roam. In that sense, puttering is an enacted version of default-mode cognition.

Most DMN research is organized around a sharp contrast: rest versus task. Subjects lie still in scanners or perform narrowly defined activities. What rarely gets studied is the large middle ground—self-paced, low-demand activity where executive control is attenuated but not absent. Yet it is precisely in this middle ground that many creative insights seem to arise.

One way to think about puttering is as a form of foraging. Cognitive scientists have developed mathematical models of information foraging and semantic search, showing how minds move through memory spaces under conditions of weak constraint. But these models are typically abstract and disembodied. Puttering, by contrast, is foraging with hands, eyes, and objects. It is exploratory behavior distributed across mind and environment.

Embodied and enactive theories of cognition come closer to capturing this phenomenon. They emphasize that cognition is not confined to the head but unfolds through interaction with the world. Still, even here, the focus is often on skilled action or purposeful engagement. Puttering remains oddly invisible: too mundane, too informal, too unproductive by conventional standards.

Creativity research acknowledges something similar under the heading of incubation. We are told that stepping away from a problem can allow unconscious processes to reorganize it. But incubation is usually framed as a gap between periods of work, not as a mode of activity in its own right. Puttering is active incubation—ongoing, embodied, and temporally permissive.

Time matters here. Even though I no longer have a “day job,” I notice that puttering reliably emerges at certain times: early in the morning, Friday afternoons, weekends. These temporal zones were once imposed externally—by school schedules, academic calendars, workweeks—but they have become internalized. They now function as cognitive affordances. Certain kinds of thinking feel licensed in those periods, while others feel out of place.

That licensing effect is important. Puttering lowers internal monitoring and performance pressure. It delays premature optimization. It allows partially formed ideas to coexist without being forced into coherence too soon. In more technical terms, it increases associative bandwidth while keeping executive control at a minimum viable level. For someone with a large and densely connected memory base, that is a powerful configuration.

Modern work culture tends to suppress puttering. It valorizes focus, efficiency, and measurable output, leaving little room for loosely structured activity that may not immediately “pay off.” Ironically, many contemporary AI systems explicitly reintroduce formal analogues of puttering: stochastic sampling, random walks, background exploration, temperature-controlled search. We design machines to do what we often deny ourselves permission to do.

There is, as far as I know, no direct scientific literature on puttering around. Instead, it falls through the cracks between DMN research, embodied cognition, creativity studies, and ecological psychology. Yet that absence is revealing. Puttering occupies a cognitive regime that our current conceptual frameworks do not handle well: neither rest nor work, neither task nor distraction, but something quietly generative in between.

If that is right, then puttering is not a failure of discipline or a lapse in productivity. It is a mode of cognition in its own right—one that deserves recognition, protection, and perhaps eventually, study. 

* * * * *

Note, however, that I did not explicitly ask it to write as my voice. As you can see, though, that's what it did. Oh well.

Five Hacks To Enhance Your Pleasure In The Bedroom

The five hacks:

1. Support your nervous system (0:58)
2. The Intimacy Accelerator (1:20)
3. Bridging Activities (2:30)
4. Figure Out What You Like (5:00)
5. Use Lube (6:30)

I note that the first three are about regulating your behavioral mode (as I've discussed it here and there on the Savanna). No. 3 in particular is about transitioning from one mode (e.g. work mode) to sexuality. The last two are about sexual activity itself. 

FWIW I think that learning to regulate one's behavioral mode is one of the most important skills a person can have. I'm still figuring it out.

Sorting Things Out: Emotions and Behavioral Systems

Note: This is mostly a quick post to remind me of something I (think) I know, but am not necessarily very careful about in my thinking and writing.

What’s the relationship between love and attachment? Attachment, I believe, is best thought of as a behavioral system; that’s certainly how John Bowlby thought of it, and our contemporary concept of attachment is due largely to him. Love, on the other hand, is an emotion. It’s an emotion that’s often experienced in the context of attachment, but so are other emotions. And love, presumably, can be felt in the context of other behavioral systems.

Thus Helen Fisher has identified three behavioral systems involved in romantic love: sex, attraction, and attachment (see abstract below). Manfred Clynes has identified seven basic “emotion shapes,” which he calls essentic forms: anger, hate, grief, love, sexual desire, joy, and reverence. I’m not sure about sexual desire. Sexuality is certainly a behavioral system. The desire? Seems more like a feeling than an emotion, but that strikes me as a semantic quibble. But of the other six, anger, hate, and joy can be experienced in various behavioral contexts. Grief? It’s certainly experienced with the loss of an attachment object. The loss of other objects as well? Love and reverence? I can see love in relation to both attachment and sexuality. Reverence? Hays thought it was how the infant regards its attachment object (Mommy).

This requires some sorting out. But not now.

* * * * *

Helen E. Fisher, Arthur Aron, and Lucy L. Brown, Romantic love: a mammalian brain system for mate choice, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2006) 361, 2173–2186, doi:10.1098/rstb.2006.1938

Abstract: Mammals and birds regularly express mate preferences and make mate choices. Data on mate choice among mammals suggest that this behavioural ‘attraction system’ is associated with dopaminergic reward pathways in the brain. It has been proposed that intense romantic love, a human cross- cultural universal, is a developed form of this attraction system. To begin to determine the neural mechanisms associated with romantic attraction in humans, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study 17 people who were intensely ‘in love’. Activation specific to the beloved occurred in the brainstem right ventral tegmental area and right postero-dorsal body of the caudate nucleus. These and other results suggest that dopaminergic reward and motivation pathways contribute to aspects of romantic love. We also used fMRI to study 15 men and women who had just been rejected in love. Preliminary analysis showed activity specific to the beloved in related regions of the reward system associated with monetary gambling for uncertain large gains and losses, and in regions of the lateral orbitofrontal cortex associated with theory of mind, obsessive/compulsive behaviours and controlling anger. These data contribute to our view that romantic love is one of the three primary brain systems that evolved in avian and mammalian species to direct reproduction. The sex drive evolved to motivate individuals to seek a range of mating partners; attraction evolved to motivate individuals to prefer and pursue specific partners; and attachment evolved to motivate individuals to remain together long enough to complete species-specific parenting duties. These three behavioural repertoires appear to be based on brain systems that are largely distinct yet interrelated, and they interact in specific ways to orchestrate reproduction, using both hormones and monoamines. Romantic attraction in humans and its antecedent in other mammalian species play a primary role: this neural mechanism motivates individuals to focus their courtship energy on specific others, thereby conserving valuable time and metabolic energy, and facilitating mate choice.

Let's take a break from work, a loonnngg one

Isabella Kwai, To Escape the Grind, Young People Turn to ‘Mini-Retirements’, NYTimes, April 10, 2025.

Marina Kausar wasn’t sure what to call the three-month break she took after quitting her job.

After working in a series of jobs in finance and technology, Ms. Kausar, 30, was feeling stressed and overworked. In December 2023, with a bit of savings built up, she quit without another position lined up to focus on things that had fallen to the wayside while she was focused on work.

“I had more time to work out. I was eating better, sleeping better. It was just like a full reset,” said Ms. Kausar, who lives in Houston. “For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have this looming cloud of ‘work.’”

Eventually, she came across a term for her hiatus that resonated with her: “micro-retirement.”

For most people in the United States, being able to save enough money to not have to work is a faraway ideal. That anxiety, especially for people closer to retirement, has only risen as stock markets have grown more volatile in response to President Trump’s global tariffs.

Discontented employees who do not have the means to leave the work force have turned to “quiet-quitting,” “acting your wage” or simply using their vacation days. [...]

Of course, many people cannot afford to take time out of the work force, and Dr. Schabram said that those who do take these breaks tend to be much more financially stable.

But for the workers who can manage it, she believes the “micro-retirement” is on the rise.

We need time off, time to play (Homo Ludens). It's good, perhaps essential, for our mental health.

If such breaks from work are growing more popular, it may be a reaction to a culture in the United States that researchers say often prioritizes work over other areas of life.

“The joke is: Europeans have a ‘micro-retirement’ every year — they call it summer vacation,” said Christopher Myers, an associate professor of management at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

But especially in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, younger Americans have shifted their attitude toward work, too. Many young workers feel less incentive to stay with one employer, he said, and people are generally more aware of the trade-off between work and well-being.

Let me repeat that: "the trade-off between work and well-being." Thus:

And the micro-retirees who Dr. Schabram interviewed said they had reaped benefits from their breaks, including increased confidence, clarity and better work boundaries. She said her research had attracted interest from nonprofits and public-sector employers who were exploring sabbatical policies to better attract job candidates.

There's more at the link. And you should check out a post from August of 2022, We don’t know how to have fun, not really [long-term behavioral flexibility].

Why are we as a culture addicted to work? [Because we have forgotten how to play.]

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue, both on general principle, and because it's relevant to a book I'm trying to get off the ground. Think of Maslow's well-known hierarchy of needs, with physiological needs at the bottom and more abstract needs – cognitive, aesthetic and "self-actualization" – at the top. If primitive societies could satisfy the physiological needs with a 15-hour workweek, then they must have had a lot of time to work on the higher needs. THAT's not the typical picture of primitive society. Economists see growth as being driven by the necessities at the bottom of the pyramid. I think they've got it wrong. It's driven from the top.

 

• • • • •

 This title caught my attention:

Why Do We Work So Damn Much? Hunter-gatherers worked 15-hour weeks. Why don’t we?

I immediately answered:

Because we’ve forgotten how to play? We’re stuck in work mode and can’t get out.

Is that the article is about? The article is an interview that Ezra Klein (NYTimes) conducts with anthropologist James Suzman, who has done research among hunter-gatherers and has recently published a book, Work, A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Here’s how Klein sets it up:

So one of the truly great essays in the history of economic thought is this 1930 essay by John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” And it’s a weird essay. It’s done in the depth of the Great Depression, so everything is terrible, and people are really poor. But Keynes steps back and just imagines the future.

And he makes his now famous prediction that by 2030, which was a 100 years hence, human beings would be so much richer, so much more technologically advanced, that the problem of scarcity — that the problem that had defined economics, and arguably, human civilization, until then — would have been solved. And now we’d only work 15 hours a week. And the whole problem would be what to do with all this time.

And the reason this essay still gets talked about and debated and written about today is that Keynes was interestingly right and wrong. The part of this that seems hard and probably seemed very out there when he did it, the calculations for how much richer we’d get in 100 years, that was not just right. If anything, it was conservative. We passed his predictions for income growth decades ago. And then we got even richer than that.

But you may notice we don’t work 15 hours a week. In fact, in an inversion of past history, the more money you make now, the more hours you generally work. It used to be the point of being rich was to not work. And now we’ve built a social value system. So the reward for making a lot of money at work is, you get to do even more work.

Here’s where Suzman comes in:

And the overarching argument is that the way we work today isn’t driven by what we need. It’s driven by what we want. It’s also driven by how, socially, we regulate or encourage wants, which is part of where his research on hunter-gatherers and how they approach this comes in.

But the big thing here is that Keynes had it backwards. Humanity solved the problem of scarcity and achieved a 15-hour workweek long before modernity. But as we’ve gotten richer and built more technology, we’ve developed a machine not for ending our wants, not for fulfilling them, but for generating new ones, new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition.

You can’t solve the problem of scarcity with our current system because our current system is designed to generate endlessly the feeling of more scarcity within us. It needs that. And so we keep working harder and harder and feeling like we have less and less, even amidst quite a bit of plenty, at least, for many of us.

That’s heading where I think we need to go. Just how far Suzman gets us, that’s not clear.

So, hunter-gatherer egalitarianism:

JAMES SUZMAN: One of the most distinctive features about the Ju/’hoansi and, indeed, many of the other hunter-gatherer societies, similar ones, was that they were, to use the words of Richard Lee, fiercely egalitarian. And they had various mechanisms to manage this egalitarianism. Now one of the most interesting mechanisms was a system called demand sharing. One anthropologist who didn’t like it much called it tolerated theft.

And it is a system which is, in many ways, the complete inversion of our rules of giving, sharing, and taking. When we ask somebody for something, we say please. It’s an offer of a debt. When somebody gives us something, we say thank you. I’m in your debt. There’s a kind of sense of an exchange going on. And it is in the right of the giver. And generally, I was always brought up, wait for somebody to offer you something. And always say thank you and be in their debt. And it’s effectively in the rights of the giver to deny somebody something that they asked for.

In Ju/’hoan cultures and, indeed, many other hunting and gathering cultures, that relationship is inverted. Basically, in an idealized form, demand sharing means that pretty much anybody in a society can go to anybody else. And remember, these are relatively small social groupings. Can go to anybody else and demand something from them. So if, for example, I have a bag of tobacco, somebody else is perfectly entitled to come and demand some of that tobacco from me.

And it would be considered extremely rude — in fact, it would be considered offensive — if I don’t give him some of that tobacco. At the same time, it’s not considered at all rude to make that kind of demand. So what you have is a society where, in effect, everybody can spontaneously tax everybody else. The net result of this is that nobody bothers acquiring services because you’re just going to share it and give it away anyway. And people end up spontaneously sharing everything.

And they see a certain virtue. It’s not a completely unconscious thing. I mean, culture is habitual. It becomes unconscious. But people are aware of the virtues of it. And in hunter-gatherer life, there was a real sense that if anybody tries to accumulate resources or dominate the distribution and flow of resources, it is socially unhealthy. It produces tensions. It produces anxieties. It produces a hierarchy or an attempted hierarchy. It adds a whole level of risk and cost to the social life of the group.

What about violence?

JAMES SUZMAN: My perspective on demand sharing was that it certainly made anthropologists feel violent until they got a bit used to it. But amongst everybody else, it was actually something very peaceable. Now, yeah, there’s been this pretty much endless debate. And it really is a debate about modernity, whether we’re on this great path of progress or not. To make the case of progress, it helps to say that actually our lives in the past were much more miserable and much more violent.

Three modes: Search, Inference, Exploration [a quickie]

Computer science knows a great deal about search and inference. What about exploration? That’s what I’ve been tracking down these last few weeks. That’s what I’ve been noticing as I go over my photos.

In search you’ve got a specific goal. You’re looking through a collection of objects and you have a good characterization of what you’re looking for. But there are different kinds of collections, different sizes, and this affects the procedure you use to conduct the search.

Inference is different. You’re starting with something you know and looking for something else, something that follows from, depends on, what you already know. So you make inferences. Of course, there are various kinds of inference. Analogy is different from (strict) deduction. Etc.

Exploration is a distinctly different mode. I note that it’s one of the basic modes that McCulloch identified in his reticular activation system paper. You aren’t looking for anything in particular. But something might turn up. If and when it does, you need to search “around it” and draw inferences to figure out what it is. This, I think, is where the DMN (default mode network) comes into play.

Computationally, what does exploration look like? That’s the mode we need to deal with unstructured and open-ended situations. That’s a mode that isn’t tested by these benchmarks. Benchmarks are about search and inference.

More later.

Modes for interacting with LLMs (ChatGPT and Claude 3.5)

Since the release of ChatGPT in late November of 2022 I have logged hundreds of hours interacting with LLMs. Most of those hours have been with ChatGPT, but about two months ago I started using Claude 3.5 and most of my LLM-time has been with Claude in those months. Many of these sessions have made their way here to New Savanna, where they are tagged with the appropriate label: ChatGPT, Claude.

During that time I seemed to have developed five modes of interacting with an LLM. The boundaries between the modes are fluid. Within a given session, I may move from one mode to another. But there are also sessions involving only one mode. This post is an initial attempt to classify these modes.

Exploratory

This is where I began with ChatGPT back in 2022. I just wanted to see what the engine would do, how it would response to a particular prompt. It’s not clear to me that any session ever remained in exploratory mode the whole way through. Rather, I’d initiate a session in exploratory mode and then switch to one of the other modes as seemed appropriate.

For example, when I approached ChatGPT with the intention of seeing whether or not it would be able to analyze Steven Spielberg’s Jaws using the ideas of Rene Girard, I began that session in exploratory mode. As soon as I saw that it was working, however, I switched into object mode.

There are many sessions where I begin in one of the other modes and stay there for the duration of the session.

Object

In this mode I am treating the LLM as an object whose behavior I am examining. I want to see what it can do, how it behaves. Much of my work with ChatGPT has been in this mode. This work has been fairly systematic, so systematic that I could probably develop protocols that others could use to duplicate the tasks I’d set for the LLM. See, for example, this working paper about stories.

Much of my recent work with Claude has involved having it describe a photograph. Almost all of these sessions are undertaken in object mode. I want to see what Claude does when asked to describe a photo. A few of these sessions became quite long. In those cases I suspect that I have slipped into exploratory mode within object mode.

Query

This is fairly straightforward. I’m looking for information. Thus I’ve had quite a number of sessions with Claude in connection with my inquiry on melancholy. All of those sessions have been in query mode.

Play

I wasn’t expecting this. But when it emerged, I found it delightful. It probably began when I was working on stories with ChatGPT. I believe the first extended example of this is the story I improvised a story about the OpenWHALE, a whaling vessel on a reality line that collides with the Starship Enterprise. The Green Giant Chronicles is another example. Both of these interactions took place over multiple sessions.

The signal characteristic of these sessions is that I laugh, often out-loud and with noticeable body movement. There is certainly an exploratory element here. I want to see how the engine will react to this or that prompt, where I really don’t have any reasonable expectation of what it will do. But I want it to provoke laughter.

This mode is very important, for I believe that it is my experience with this mode that led to the last mode, interlocutor.

Collaborator

In this mode I am treading the LLM as a dialog partner, we’re working something out together. We’re not equal partners here. This is not like sessions I used to have with David Hays. I definitely take the lead in these sessions. But I’m not simply looking for answers to queries. I have an idea I’ve been thinking about – sometimes for a long time – and I’m using the LLM as a sounding board. Does this idea make sense? I’ve only used this mode with Claude 3.5. I might be able to use it with ChatGPT, but why bother?

I’ve uploaded a number of these sessions and labeled them Claude_collab (for collaborative or collaborator). These are shade into sessions I’ve labeled Claude_partner. I’m not sure of the distinction between the two, and there are sessions with both labels.

Doctors need a transition ritual to get into “medical head”

Stephen G. Flynn, Raymond S. Park, Pete G. Kovatsis and Anupam B. Jena, The Hack Doctors Should Take From Pop Stars and Quarterbacks, NYTimes, Jan. 6, 2025.

Imagine a pro quarterback stepping onto the field without his coach running pregame drills or a pop star taking the stage without vocal warm-ups. In sports and music, such last-minute preparation is generally nonnegotiable. Coaches review and refine performance, address weaknesses and ensure readiness.

Yet in medicine, where the stakes are often life or death, the idea of warming up with a coach before performing a high-stakes medical procedure is virtually nonexistent.

Pre-operative coaching:

Our findings were striking. Coaching inexperienced clinicians within an hour of intubating an infant significantly improved success rates. The coached group placed the breathing tube in the infant’s windpipe on the first attempt over 91 percent of the time, compared to nearly 82 percent in the control group.

Intubating a baby on the first attempt is a crucial patient safety metric. Infants are particularly vulnerable during intubation because the oxygen levels in their blood can rapidly fall, which creates time pressure and increases the clinician’s mental effort. Studies consistently show a higher probability of low oxygen with more than one intubation attempt, and respiratory events are a leading cause of brain damage and death, an important source of malpractice claims for young children.

Clinicians who received coaching within an hour of performing intubation could not only intubate infants on the first attempt more often, but the intubations proceeded more quickly and more safely. For example, coached clinicians reported improved ability to see the larynx, which predicts greater ease in placing the breathing tube in the right place. The coached group also reported significantly lower mental effort while intubating, which is vital because high cognitive strain while performing a procedure can increase errors.

The importance of ritual:

Warm-ups with expert coaches are standard in music, sports and even military operations. Research suggests they sharpen focus, reduce errors and build confidence. Admittedly, integrating this approach into the fast-paced and cost-conscious world of medicine isn’t without difficulties. Critics may worry about the time required or the potential disruption to work flow. However, warm-up and coaching in our study took just minutes.

And it helps in the transition from an everyday walk-around mindset to the more focused mindset needed for performing a medical procedure.

There's more at the link.

Some anecdotal evidence for segmented sleep: When I've been up during the night in December 2024

Over the years I've developed an interest in segmented sleep, as it is called. Instead of sleeping straight through the night for eight hours, or seven or nine, whatever, you have several sleep sessions interspersed with sessions where you do other stuff. This happens to me during a creative phase. I went into a down phase a couple of months ago and started coming out in the third week of November. I've had a LOT of segmented sleep since then. 

One of the things I'd do in one of my middle-of-the-night work sessions is make an entry on my Facebook page indicating that I was awake. I don't know just when I started doing that, but the first time I did it I posted a video clip of one of those "Time to make the donuts" commercials from the 1980s. I've been doing that every once in awhile since then. But other things as well.

This time I decided to keep a systematic record. Here's the record for December, 2024. I was up during every night except the 6th, 10th, and 13th. In some nights I was up more3 than once. I'll try to keep a record through January and then we'll see.

Time	Date	Content of Facebook notice
4:18 AM	12.1.24	Awake in the middle of the night. Good thoughts. All’s well.
3:22 AM	12.2.24	Middle of the night. Awake. Good thoughts.
4:02 AM	12.3.24	4:02 AM Tue 12.3.24 [I simply noted the time]
4:30 AM	12.4.24	Just another marker.
3:36 AM	12.5.24	3:38 AM & I’m just cruising by.
5:20 AM	12.7.24	Still at it.
4:33 AM	12.8.24	It’s that time again. [plus a photo of a donut]
3:18 AM	12.9.24	How’s everybody doin’?
4:16 AM	12.11.24	Peek-A-Boo!
5:41 AM	12.12.24	on the trail of CONSCIOUSNESS
4:32 AM	12.14.24	Someone’s been busy [+a photograph of a box of Krispy Kremes]
12:45 AM	12.15.24	12:45 AM
3:00 AM	12.15.24	Imagine this is about donuts, that's my state of mind at 3:00AM. [Attached to a video of “Shrimp Boats.”]
5:01 AM	12.15.24	Would someone please pass the donuts.
4:34 AM	12.16.24	Time to check in.
3:32 AM	12.17.24	Just a quick one, I promise. Comment added: Umm....er... Not so quick. 3:32 to 4:43. & I make two blog posts!
4:02 AM	12.18.24	Me to Self: You just HAD to check our email?
2:28 AM	12.19.29	2:28 AM and the night is still young.
4:09 AM	12.19.29	Nag Nag Nag! U do the donuts, I got work to do. (4:09)
4:02 AM	12.20.24	Psssst. Anyone here? {4:02 AM}
4:49 AM	12.21.24	Up every night in Dec. so far but 6, 10 & 13.
12:46 AM	12.22.24	12:46 AM and the night is still young. [Note: I’d gone to bed at about 8:15.]
3:17 AM	12.22.24	It’s been 2 1/2 hours since last check in.
5:14 AM	12.22.24	#3
2:38 AM	12.23.24	12° at 2:40AM in Hoboken
4:33 AM	12.23.24	11° at 4:34AM in Hoboken
2:54 AM	12.24.24	I tried to resist, I held out as long as I could. 2:54 AM
		Comment to above: & now it's 3:51 AM. Back to bed...& maybe to sleep as well.
3:46 AM	12.25.24	Gotta put cookies out for the Big Guy. 3:46 AM
2:10 AM	12.26.24	Resistance is futile. 2:10 AM
4:22 AM	12.26.24	Curse those Borg! 4:22 AM
4:21 AM	12.27.24	What time is it, kids? [Howdy Doody opening]
4:09 AM	12.28.24	Not Doris Day. 4:09 AM [Clip of Pixies singing “Que Sera Sera.”]
2:46 AM	12.29.24	I cannot believe...
4:49 AM	12.29.24	AGAIN? 4:49AM
4:24 AM	12.30.24	Right on time: 4:24 AM
1:21 AM	12.31.24	Peek-a-boo!