May a snake bite you on your ass.

Well, it's hard to judge, sometimes, how our little riffs sound out there in the real world. There was a reason most of us came here, you know, although it was for the people and adventure rather than the weather. Those of us remaining, those of us who've occasionally gone back to visit the places we came from, anyway, now say we stay for the weather. No unpleasantness intended with our feeble attempts at humor.

Back from breakfast having read the paper, a trip down to San Jose later this afternoon with some of the usual crew for a get together with dna. Or should that be DnA, the “n” for “and”? I don't talk much about friends here, more for the fact I'd have fewer friends if I did, but I was thinking just now I have a relatively large number of friends who were born in other countries. Another reason to live in the Bay Area, I suspect, at least if your bent leads you to people with somewhat different backgrounds. A number of friends from China, one or two laggards from Great Britain, one or two from Japan, Russia, the Philippines, Mexico, Guatemala, Chicago. None of them as off the wall, of course, as all those folks I knew from Austin when I first came to San Francisco. Perhaps it's just the result of having worked at the headquarters of a shipping company that had employees from everywhere. No big deal, but again, it's not just the weather.

For someone who describes himself as a loner you seem to have actual contact with people.

I am a loner, I do find I'm content most of the time I find myself alone and I do find myself alone nine days out of ten. I've thought about that, though. What happens as time passes and the people I know dissolve as people will dissolve into other jobs and other neighborhoods? The other half of the issue is my own daily routine. Am I engaged? Do I get up and do things that call to me, keep me occupied no matter how foolish or trivial? Can I get by with just writing a journal? That does seem to be changing, the sinus-head thing getting better, the interest in playing with other web pages, adding more photographs, setting out to broaden what I'm up to, a thought of getting up early to catch a sunrise out at the ocean. Boy-howdy have I not thought about getting up early to search out a sunset until just recently. Boy-how-howdy is that a change in the weather.

So we'll see. The attitude is pretty good at the moment, here in Oakland.