Winter here lasted until the last week of May. We had Winter storm warnings and snow in the mountains throughout May. So my hibernation lasted far longer than normal this year. But we have now had a few good dry 100-degree days. And my body is doing much better in the past few weeks. Unfortunately, it will all come to an end in mid-October again. So while Summer is finally here, it is going to be short, and I am going to have to stick to the highest priorities.

My priorities are these:

1. to continue to identify 7AD men for monuments in Europe
2. to catch up on posting the information about the recently dedicated monuments
3. to prepare for this year's 7AD Research and Reunion trip
4. to continue the work of posting the 7AD records on the Document Repository
5. to give 7AD family members what information I can find on their soldier
6. to begin working through the e-mail and postal mail backlogs that go back to November 10, 2009.

The period from mid-February until mid-April was very difficult for me to do anything. As storm after storm rolled in from the Pacific like waves, I was sleeping sometimes 14 hours a day and averaging 11-12 hours a day for several weeks. We have begun to have some periods of stable weather, and during that time, I was able to start cleaning up my home. But the storms are not yet over: four days of storms, including hail, last week had me again sleeping 12 hours a day. But the storms are now more the exception than the rule. So there is hope, and I am making a very minimal update to the web site today, in order to reflect the results of research on the action 1/2 mile west of Provins, France on August 27, 1944. But there is nothing else in line behind that right now, so that I am not sure when I will be up to making more updates. And I certainly am still not up to dealing with e-mails. My e-mail backlog goes back to mid-November.

So please keep this in mind in your correspondence with me. I have a deep commitment to try to get to every e-mail that you send me, but my resources are now extremely strictly limited. So please if you don't hear from me for several months and then suddenly hear from me about an old e-mail, understand that I am doing everything within my limited power to respond to you and to every other person who wants me to respond to them and do not take it personally. And if you change your e-mail address, please let me know your new address, so that when I do get around to responding that I can actually reach you.

Immediately after posting my November 30 update, I began a sinus infection that while it is gone has left me significantly weakened. That was the third down-step in my worse, worse, worst sequence that started about October 24, grew worse in mid November and became the sinus infection at the start of December.

But now something has happened that is even worster than worst. Fortunately, this one is not my health but by computer's health: the hard drive died. The good news is that I was able to do a backup of all of my data files while it was still collapsing. The bad news is that the computer is useless now until the new hard drive arrives, which hopefully will happen by December 21. Physcially replacing the hard drive is the easy part. Reinstalling the operating system, all the drivers, all the software, all the personal configuration options and settings that I had made over the past year -- those will take me at least two weeks.

Before it died, I was able to set up an away message on my AOL e-mail. It says that I am away until January 12. That's the only option AOL offers: I could not give a message about the real reason. So if you send e-mail to me between now and whenever I finish rebuilding my computer environment, you will receive that automatic reply from AOL. I will not even see any e-mail (much less read it) until the computer environment is rebuilt, probably about January 12. And I already had an e-mail (and postal) backlog back to November 10 that I could not deal with.

So worst really has become worster.

It has been only three weeks since my last health update, but those three weeks have seen yet another marked decline in my ability to do what I want to do -- or even to remember what it is that I am supposed to do.

This is going to be a bit long. I want to try to explain just what my physical situation is so that you will understand how it is that I can do so very little over the months from October to May.

It is NOT that I am sick or have a disorder. It is that my body has a difforder -- a different order -- from mid-October to mid-May. And this makes it extremely difficult for me to do anything beyond routine maintenance. In fact, it sometimes makes it difficult to keep up even the routine maintenance of life. And it makes it very dangerous to try to keep up a Summer-normal schedule: if I try to do that, then I really will get sick.

This different order of mine has two main components: sleeping hours and waking hours.

1 - Sleeping Hours
The most significant component is that I need to sleep 9 or 10 hours a day. That is true whether or not I take naps or get all my sleep overnight: I am going to sleep 9-10 hours, and if I go for several days with less sleep, I am going to become very tired very soon and need several days of even more sleep to restore myself. This starts suddenly each year about mid-October, and this year was no exception. The good news was that it started just a bit later (about October 20) than last year (October 15).

Those extra 2-3 hours a day of sleep dramatically reduce my ability to do much beyond the regular maintenance of keeping myself, my house, my car, my finances in good working order. The first thing that usually goes wrong is that the mail starts to pile up. If I try to do too much discretionary work, then the maintenance suffers, and the car stops working, or the checks start bouncing, or the house becomes super-cluttered. These are wake-up calls to tell me to back off even more on the discretionary activities and commitments.

2 - Waking Hours
The other main component is the quality of my waking hours. This is highly dependent on the storm fronts that roll like waves in from the Pacific Ocean just 100 miles. I can feel a low pressure front two days before it arrives. (Maybe I am actually feeling something else that comes before a low pressure front, but this is the way that makes the most sense to me to understand it.) I feel it as a loss of energy and an increased need for even more sleep beyond 9-10 hours. If the storm is a strong one, then I also feel pressure in my head and sinuses that can be very intense and unpleasant. On those days, even when I am awake, I wish that I was asleep.

However, California has nice periods over the Winter. And during those days, I am able to do the basic maintenance tasks and even start to catch up on the postal mail backlog or the e-mail backlog if I ever reach the point where the postal mail is not physically cluttering up my life.

The Reunion Effect
There is something else that happens at this time of year, and this year it has happened doubly. When I come home each year from the 7th Armored Division Reunion, I have to deal with two large masses of things. The first is the usual mail that accumulates while I am gone. The second is with the treasure trove of information that I have gained at the reunion: interviews, scans, photographs, and even memorabilia that guys have given to me. Even in the height of my ability in Summer, dealing with all that would still be a major effort. But in my diminished ability at this time of year, it is usually overwhelming. And this year, it was double because after I attended the 7AD Reunion in GA, I went to my niece's wedding in IL, and then to the Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge Reunion in AZ. So I had nearly 3 weeks of mail to deal with. And I had all the treasures from my 3 weeks of travels to deal with. And I am nowhere near having caught up on these things.

This Year's Experiment
I do walk 1-2 hours a day every day, which is something that I have committed to this year as an experiment. It does seem to have brought me into this Winter feeling physically stronger. But the long months do wear me down; so we have yet to see how much this helps. I am also walking to try to carry less weight and thus to reduce the physical demands on my body of carrying that weight. Before I developed the chronic fatigue, my weight was about 50 pounds less than it was after the chronic fatigue. This year, I have succeeded in reaching a stable weight about 4 pounds below last year. And that does seem to have helped with my strength as well. But again, it is a long haul until May, and I am going to wear down at some point.

Realistic Expectations
The key to living with my different order is to have realistic expectations. Sleeping 9-10 hours a day -- and even more when storm fronts are approaching (and I can feel them even when they are approaching Oregon and not directly here) -- that much sleep and the fact that I cannot be sure from one day to the next how I will feel, these drastically reduce the number of discretionary things that I can dare to take on. In stormy weeks, it means that I cannot do any discretionary things at all and sometimes cannot even do the basic maintenance things like balancing my checkbook or doing the dishes.

So I have to radically scale back my expectations until May. And I have to be balance out any discretionary activities with sufficient advance and follow up rest and attention to maintenance or else the results will be very bad.

What this Means for You
So I hope that this gives you some understanding of how I am from mid-October to mid-May and thus how it is that I am not going to be able to do almost any discretionary tasks, such as dealing with the mail, unless they are very truly extremely important and critical.

So if you send me an e-mail between October and May, don't expect an answer for several weeks or months. And if you change your e-mail address and don't tell me about it, don't expect me to be able to find you to reply to your e-mail months later. I will try in the Spring to start going through the mail backlog, but if your e-mail bounces when I try to send you a reply, then it is going to be up to you to contact me, since I will have no way of contacting you with the information that you requested or for follow-up on the action that you asked me to take.

My commitment is strong to do whatever I am physically able to do to respond to you. But those physical limits are extremely significant, so that my will alone is not enough to give me any extra energy or extra hours in my life to deal with all the important things that I receive in the mail. It is always extremely sad to me when someone contacts me, and I eventually do the research to answer them, only to find out that their e-mail address has changed. So don't assume that just because it is easy for you to send me an e-mail that it is also easy for me to reply, because it is not. And if you really want me to reply, then send me a followup after May. And let me know if you have a new e-mail address.

It has been only three weeks since my last health update, but those three weeks have seen a marked decline in my ability to do what I want to do -- or even to remember what it is that I am supposed to do.

The past two weeks I have slept 10 hours a day. And even when I am awake, I have forgotten three important things. The slightest distraction wipes my short term memory clean. So I really have to strictly prioritize my tasks and make a list and do them one at a time. So things have dramatically slowed down in the past three weeks. Almost all of the balls that I had been juggling are now laying on the floor, and I have no idea when most of them will be picked up again.

The good news is that my physical strength is better than it has been going into any Winter since my prostate problems began in October 2005. I have had no surgeries since June 2008, and that seems to be allowing me to have more physical strength than has been the case since 2004 at this time of year. Unfortunately the mental fog is just as much as usual, forcing me to the strict priorities and single-threading of my life that I mentioned above.

So please keep this in mind in your correspondence with me. I have a deep commitment to try to get to every e-mail that you send me, but my resources are now extremely strictly limited. So please if you don't hear from me for several months and then suddenly hear from me about an old e-mail, understand that I am doing everything within my limited power to respond to you and to every other person who wants me to respond to them and do not take it personally. And if you change your e-mail address, please let me know your new address, so that when I do get around to responding that I can actually reach you.

The good news is that I was able to do well in my three Sep-Oct weeks on the road, attending the 7th Armored Division Reunion in GA, my niece's wedding in IL, and the Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge Reunion in AZ.

The downer is that the day after I came home, CA was hit with a major storm, and I could not stay awake for more than 2 hours at a time the preceding day. So my Winter hibernation has begun. And I am very strictly having to scale back my activities -- even before fully catching up on everything new that came during my three weeks on the road. So that means that I have a huge e-mail and postal mail backlog, plus the tasks of organizing all the valuable new material that I brought home from my trip.

Almost all of my time in this first week back home has gone to doing the update to present the dedication ceremonies that took place September 19 for the new monument at Sillegny, France -- which I regretfully could not attend. Please click here to see the web page about this very significant event and monument.

So please keep this in mind in your correspondence with me. I have a deep commitment to try to get to every e-mail that you send me, but my resources are now extremely strictly limited. So please if you don't hear from me for several months and then suddenly hear from me about an old e-mail, understand that I am doing everything within my limited power to respond to you and to every other person who wants me to respond to them and do not take it personally. And if you change your e-mail address, please let me know your new address, so that when I do get around to responding that I can actually reach you.