The morning is bright, no clouds I can see through the window, the air clear after what's been a couple of days of intermittent rain. Good for the lungs, certainly good for the soul. What I'll do with the day I don't know.

Finished reading Eaarth last night, a bit more upbeat than the beginning with its inventory of disasters ahead. Well worth the read. I'll undoubtedly read more like it before the century is out, my part of the century anyway. I figure I'm something like a hundred feet up above sea level here, plenty of time left before the tide comes through the door, so we'll chill a bit with the global warming thing and think of adding a set of solar panels to charge the camera batteries in preparation for the worst. OK. Conscience placated, onward now, through the fog.

Later. A walk down the way to the bagel shop for a cup of coffee out at one of their sidewalk tables, a walk then back to the apartment passing the teachers picketing the Lakeview school. All the Oakland teachers are on a one day strike today protesting recent layoffs and salary cuts. They were out early this morning in force when I went to breakfast, their enthusiasm doesn't seem to have diminished at noon, but still you wonder what good any of it will do.

I took some pictures, but knew as I was taking them my heart wasn't in it. I'm good at faces and I wasn't ambitious enough to get close enough for faces. Bad photography. You have to think when you shoot. Sometimes it's automatic and the results are good, but with time you learn what works and what doesn't work and you put yourself in places where the better photographs hang out or a photographer you're not. Today I was not: carrying a camera, yes, but shooting like an idiot.

Later still. Another walk to the lake to sit on the same bench and watch - what else? - the people passing, running, walking, and take a couple of photographs of a pelican with a stabilizer fin of some kind on his beak. One assumes this is something extra that came with him out of the egg, but who knows? Maybe this is normal for his type. It doesn't seem to have slowed him down (if it's a him), as I've seen him swimming in this same area now for a couple of weeks.

A walk farther down to another familiar bench (I know all of the various benches now along my walk after that knee business) to sit and debate whether or not I should come back to the apartment and drive over to the car wash in Berkeley to have the car cleaned and gassed. You'd think there wasn't much to argue over, but I managed to drag it out. Tomorrow, maybe. Tomorrow.

And a walk back to photograph a seagull or two attracted by a couple feeding them bread at the side of the lake. I was using one of the older cameras allowing me to shoot with the equivalent of a 300mm lens and was able to get one or two pictures of gulls in flight. Nothing spectacular, but maybe I'll try this again one of these days and hang in there long enough to do it right.

As in tomorrow.

As in tomorrow. We're spinning our wheels, we are, no desire to go downtown, no desire to have the car washed, no desire to walk back to the Lakeview school with a long lens on the camera to see if the teachers were still about. The day itself is great, the sun just fine, the temperature not too warm, not too cool. T-shirt with a light jacket weather, what could be better for an old coot?

Somehow I think we've heard this before.

Change is coming, but it's keeping quiet and sneaking up.