Monday. Lots of rain this morning: up with the alarm, to breakfast and back by eight thinking more guitar, a call to the doctor to have a prescription refilled (why does having a prescription refilled take so much coordination and effort?) and that damned set of lab test invoices my insurance company didn't pay that I've been putting off straightening out. It's good for the guitar practice, all of this, as I use it to avoid doing and of this stuff. There's a lesson in life buried in her somewhere, but probably not one I'll figure out in time to make a difference.

You do rattle on.

More like a conversation with self, words echoing off walls, lots of descriptors with little meaning. Rorschach stuff, the subjects of classes you didn't really like in college.

Please stop. Putting up with the rain is enough for a morning without this.

Indeed.

Later. An hour or so's nap that ended with listening to Democracy Now reporting on today's latest release of Guantanamo Wikileaks information. I'd read the stories in the Times this morning, a fair amount of coverage, read Glenn Greenwald's take at Salon. The NPR report I heard, as I was getting out of bed, was pretty tepid stuff - not good, NPR, not good toadying to the administration and not holding their feet to the fire, your TV people did much better - but all of it together was more than depressing.

What kind of people are we? No, we don't torture and disappear people as they do in so many authoritarian regimes, but it's always a matter of degree, of crossing the line. And we've crossed the line. Yes, they're dangerous, although we seem to have swept up well over a hundred or two detainees who weren't part of Al-Qaeda at all (and we knew it early on), who were kept for years, many of whom are still down there behind bars, but who said keeping a Constitution and the Rule of Law came without putting yourself occasionally on the line? We, who berate others for what we ourselves are doing hidden behind closed doors? Well, best to let this lie. Plenty of opinions on this.

Otherwise time on the guitar, pressing the fingertips to their limits. I'm getting better with the chords, the few chords I'm playing, but it does indeed take time. My guess is I'm well over an hour of practice every day now, approaching two hours, but it moves forward slowly and it still takes time. Lots of time. But we persevere. I'm retired. It's not like I'm neglecting the kids or the wife. Or the photography, for that matter.

Later still. A bus ride downtown, a small cup of coffee out at a table in the City Center, the sun rather nice under grey tinged white banks of clouds. A walk then back home. An amble, really. I've said this before. Sometimes I step right out, although stepping out in a way that doesn't look like I'm “exercising”, as such. None of this hup! hup! business. But sometimes, maybe most times lately, I “amble”. You amble enough miles and you've got your exercise for the day, today's two miles qualifies, so I'm entering the late afternoon feeling pretty good.

I did have some sake last night, more than I normally have, but had it over the course of four to five hours and never really felt a strong effect. So did that make a difference today? I don't think so, not when I got up, not as the day has progressed, but I have another, this time a full bottle, sitting in the kitchen and I suspect I'll get into it later. No more than the two glasses of wine equivalent, but still, maybe not good to get too enamoured of alcohol influenced evenings. Too many sad stories about old coots who've up and made that mistake. (hup! hup!)

You, of course, will tell us if you go over your self prescribed limit.

Of course.