A walk to breakfast at the usual place a hour later than usual to avoid the local business group that meets in the back of the restaurant every Wednesday morning. It's depressing to hear their meetings as I'm trying to read the paper, local real estate brokers and mortgage brokers from the sound of them giving one another upbeat stories about sales made and sales to come. Not unlike sales meetings I knew in my dark past when I was first starting out in the investment business. God and the Commission, one and the same. I'm not sure your attitude necessarily changes with age, you either start out selling soap or you don't. Best to find out which side you're on as soon as possible so as not to waste your time doing something that for you makes no sense. (He said with great confidence. Hup! Hup! Hup!)

So what to do? Get on with learning lighting with small lights? I'm still happy with the equipment that arrived yesterday, the few shots I took last night more an exercise in turning them on and off and taking a couple of pictures to see how they work more than anything else. So we'll do more today and display them somewhere below. Or we won't.

Later. Interesting, I did get a couple of additional miles in this noon hour taking a bus downtown and then walking by restaurant after restaurant thinking, well, I could go inside and have this or sit outside and have that, all the while the stomach feeling just slightly sour. Just enough to know it was there without feeling uncomfortable. Before the operation I'd have had lunch. At other times I might have gone inside and had a Guinness.

Anyway, I was wondering if people who have no trouble eating until when they're really hungry might not have some variation on this “sour stomach” business, something genetic that has nothing to do with an operation that makes them say, well, I'm not hungry so why eat and this keeps them thin. Before the operation I would have hopped in one or another of the restaurants and used eating as an excuse to sit down, put my feet up and dawdle for a while. Does that make sense? This sourness will go away, but there are aspects of it that I may miss if I start gaining weight.

I'm still dragging ass on my portrait project. I have two or three actual photographers who come by here now and again and they're probably shaking their heads. I'm looking at the lighting and not the particular pose or subject. Now's the time to go through many and various setups and check with the manuals and the dust gathering texts I have on lighting to get a proper feeling for how to get these things done. How to light the background? What color background? How bright? Light on one side of the face, how to adjust? I think I'm up for it, although I've said this before without result.