I read somewhere that women think of time in terms of function and men think of time - in terms of the clock. That means that when a woman says she will be ready to leave the house at 9 a.m. what she means is she will be ready to leave the house after breakfast, unloading the dishwasher, talking to her friend, and getting the disc out of the computer.

Obviously I like that explanation. Not that it means that men are always on time and women aren't - it's just that I happen to fall into the function category of time.

Somehow I arrived in the office on Monday, my press day, with "everything finished." Well, with no major stories to finish. I planned to spend the day writing a story for next week as soon as the details of this issue were finished.

As I said, I thought I was all done.

Then I had to revise two items; I needed captions for the story about the Syosset fire company; I needed another sports story as a result of a revision to a story; an ad wasn't where it should have been; I had to do the caption for the front page photo that I shot on Saturday; and I put through two mystery photographs.

Luckily I received a Bayville sports story, that helped.

As it turned out, I spent as much time taking care of the details needed to finish what I considered a "finished newspaper," as I have spent on finishing up a late-breaking story.

Somehow the time just flows through the hourglass one way or another. What I seem never to be able to do is estimate how long something will take. It just seems that how much time I have to do a job, is the time it will take.

I think that's another of Murphy's Laws!

- DFK