Last weekend Phil and I built a fence. I will eventually get around to chronicling the entire experience, complete with animated photos of its progress, but for now, it's enough to say that I enjoyed it, learned a ton, and hope I never have to do it again.

Always looking to find a way to make my site self-sufficient, I decided to try out Google's Adsense program on the site for a while. What it does is let me host advertising from Google with links that match the content of the page. Pretty brilliant: Google knows what kind of search terms match my pages, so when my page is loaded, Google then shows ads from advertisers who want to be found for those search terms. Everybody should get what they want. Win-win, so to speak.

So I set it all up, and then go check out what ads are showing on my pages. For the most part, they are benign, or loosely related. In most cases, public service ads appear because the pages don't strongly match any key search terms. Then I checked out my article on why I'm going into teaching, and found the following ads:

1. Future Freak T-Shirts
2. New Hampshire Lawyers
3. DUI/DWI Resources
4. Playboy - College Girls

What the...??? If I were trying to pick the four most inappropriate ads for this page, I couldn't have done a better job. Except maybe this one.

I hate the morning. It's slow, and cold, and out of focus. The AM is needy, and persistent, and full of aches. What's good about the morning that you can't get in the afternoon or evening?

Well, after a long night of work, that turned into a morning of work, I climbed up from my basement cave to see... the dawn.

I can't remember the last time I saw the sun rise. It's inspiring. And knowing that I'm going to have to get up very early every day if I want to be a teacher, I'm thinking that this solar event might be the motivation I need to become a morning person.

Or maybe I'm just light-headed from the lack of sleep. Check back in a few days for coherent reflection.