Thursday. To bed early and awakening early to take my time getting ready to walk to breakfast on a cool, bright and sunny morning. Had the plain waffle with sliced strawberries and bananas as threatened yesterday. I do quite like them, usually prefer them over the café's usual fare, but wonder sometimes at the repetition. So maybe no funky stuff brought on by breakfast later.

The walk home was nice. Felt unusually clear headed and took more pictures than I usually do. Nothing to write home about, but the attitude was good and the eye was searching.

Are we angling for a gold star so early?

Just mentioning. Nice attitude on a nice morning. Wouldn't mind more of them as summer approaches.

Later. The clear head and upbeat attitude have continued and so on the downtown bus to Latham Square to take another set of pictures to include from the stairwell before walking on to the City Center for a chicken Caesar salad and a V8 juice. The idea was to get lunch, specifically a salad and I figured, if I'm going to be downtown, I might as well photograph the Square. It does look like they're getting closer to completion if they're now putting in the plants and trees.

The timing turned out to be right with the half hour for lunch and so finishing just in time to catch the bus back home, thinking I'd take the new camera over to the lake again, but with a much longer lens. If the birds won't come to you, you go to the birds, hence the unusually large telephoto lenses most bird photographers carry. I'm not “into” birds, just every now and again, so I do have a couple of long lenses and now a camera to make use of them.

Sounds like a rationalization for getting that camera.

Every excuse at some level is a rationalization of sorts, so I'll cop to the accusation.

Later still. A walk to the lake with the camera and a 300mm lens, giving the equivalent of a 450mm lens on a full frame camera. Not many birds about, but a picture of a Brown Pelican preening itself popped into view on the floating boom near the white column pergola. One decent picture out of many, but the combination seems to work and isn't overly cumbersome. So more, maybe tomorrow.

Evening. Watched Democracy Now to hear the interview again with Yanis Varoufakis, the Former Finance minister of Greece, after listening to most of it this morning. Europe is getting ever more scary.

Charlie Rose started with a Loretta Lynch interview, the U.S. Attorney General, discussing encryption, the crime bill, the problem of eight justices on the Supreme Court and I'm assuming other subjects, but that's when I bailed and went to bed. Read enough about all this stuff in the papers, don't need anymore this evening.