I had my share of coughing last night, my predictions of it leaving made moot, but cobbled together a decent night's sleep. Once I'm up for an hour the cough goes away. The chest lets me know it's still there and watching, of course, but keeps its peace. So we'll ride it out as far as it cares to take me and bid it an adieu when it finally leaves. “Y' all please don't come back! No reason to write! It's been years now, next time make it decades if you can! OK?” Indeed.

It's just after ten, I haven't had breakfast yet, the Sistahs Steppin’ in Pride are due to form up down the hill in another hour, so I'll photograph the event and then walk on past the farmer's market to breakfast. That should do it for the day, I think, with all this heat.

Later. OK, I'm not running at a hundred percent. Took two cameras to the forming up of the parade thinking for a while maybe I'd just take the one with a 50mm lens but chickened out. There was a small group under the white pillars with pink balloons and folding tables and I thought initially they were the Sistahs, but they turned out to be a women's group promoting women's cancer prevention programs.

The Sistahs were across the way, not all that many of them for a half hour before the event I thought, drumming and sitting around and talking. One or two pictures, none of them more than going through the motions, reminding myself I was there to find photographs. Feeling tired, feeling like coughing, feeling like an old man exploring the boundaries of old man-hood (no, I don't believe that either), I picked up and returned to the apartment thinking in terms of breakfast. Breakfast. Don't start your day without breakfast is the lesson learned for the day, not that I remember lessons learned on any given day or make an effort to write them down.

Later still. A drive to the usual café just before noon with the air conditioning going full blast, an hour over breakfast and the papers, a drive back only to run into the Sistahs setting off on their march. At one. The web site said they'd start at noon but that, I guess, was why there'd been so few arrivals when I was there at 11:30. OK. Still, I was in no mood or condition to have stayed to do the photographs, best to remain in the apartment today and chill. I'm feeling OK, but time to spend the time necessary to get things back up and running. Um, walking.

Play with this computer, for example, that's just lost the Internet when I installed an Ethernet driver downloaded from Microsoft. Everything looks OK, the lights are all lighting, the various menu choices say everything is working, but the Internet is dead. After installing a Microsoft driver. OK. Chill. Step back. I'm sitting here in front of a fan. My mood is good. I'm just not reaching the Internet. Here in Oakland.

One click on the “rollback driver” button in the network section and everything works. I started this looking for drivers business when the video driver failed, its driver not quite comfortable with Windows XP and PhotoShop. Not much fun. I may return it Monday and get another one, something the web says is perfectly comfortable with my operating system. One wants one's video card to be comfortable with one's operating system. Yes you do.