Breakfast at the usual place over the papers, the sky overcast, the temperature cool. They've been talking about the unseasonably cool summer we've been having, but I find it just fine. Cool evenings and mornings, warm and sunny afternoons. What's not to like (coming from a Scandinavian heritage, well fed and shooting pictures here at the end of the rainbow)?

Enough of that.

Indeed. Much too early. The mood is pretty good, though, and there does seem to be an interesting weekend, a bunch of interesting weekends, ahead.

Later. A mid-morning bus ride downtown to have a cup of coffee at the Fountain Café in the City Center and then a walk through what will be the Art & Soul Festival starting tomorrow where they block off a number of the streets, set up stages for the four or five concurrent band performances, and erect the many white tents needed to house the various exhibitors and vendors who will be out there looking to sell, sell, sell.

They'd already begun blocking off the required streets and setting up yesterday, it being too big a project to accomplish, say, the night before. I'd worked in a building right beside one of the stages before I retired and so I've photographed this thing now since the beginning, its tenth anniversary tomorrow. My, my. Even things I've done now in Oakland are fading, sliding, well on their way into the local history, no wonder the brain is fuzzy. Or have I said that before? Memory? I've mentioned memory? I have?

A walk over to Rite Aid to pick up the prescriptions I'd dropped off yesterday. They had yet to fill them. So, what the hell, I waited for the ten or fifteen minutes required, looking through the stuff they had stacked along the various isles. Do I need one of these swell weekly pill minders, so good when you travel? Probably not. Not at that price, anyway. Still, this consumer urge seems to be surviving in the background, making its little suggestions. Perhaps best to avoid any and all musical instrument shops and/or camera stores if I can in the future. Don't seem to be able to avoid them on the web.

OK, out the door with a bag filled with pills and inhalers. I'm becoming a minor league poster boy for the pharmaceutical industry. Not a fit fate, methinks, for a man or a beast. A “get your flu shot” sign had been sitting on the floor beside the prescription counter when I entered. Were they available? They were? No brainer. I got the shot.

Last year, with all of the H1N1 crap; after learning at my doctor's office, in for my annual checkup, that he'd run out of the promised vaccine; I vowed to get it whenever and wherever I might run across it and boy-howdy I'd just run across it: to hell with waiting on the doctor. So that one's done. Hup!

I have friends who, as a matter of principle, never get flu shots. They have rationalizations. Some claim it causes them to come down with the flu, and that might be true. Some people do have reactions. At my age, thinking I'd like to get older, I get the shots, have gotten the shots, and will do my best to get the shots in the future. (More hup! hup! hups!)

Later still. It's mid afternoon, so I've obviously been out walking. Downtown, most likely. A picture or two. And, gosh-a-rootie, it's true. Doodle-dee-do. Another swing through the Art & Soul setup, they're making progress, the stages going up, more tents for booths in place, small designed to be truck towed kiddie rides being unloaded and moved into place. They all look better under an afternoon sun.

I thought of going on to Jack London Square, catching one of the new green free ride busses that now run up and down Broadway between the Square and Grand, but my timing was off and I moved on before one could arrive. I'll try one eventually. One hopes. A picture or two on the way downtown and on the way back, nothing to write home about.

Sitting now at the computer with the news droning on in the background, two pundits going back and forth about what amounts to nothing. Well, something, but nothing that relates to anything of importance. No longer particularly odd or idiosyncratic to say something like that these days. Sad, though. I once liked listening.

I think some guitar for now, finish out the day on a high note (I know: ouch! Sometimes I just can't stop.). Maybe read the instructions that came with these inhalers and pills. I now have three inhalers dispensing what I assume are different drugs sitting on my kitchen counter. Three. Should I be worried? Oh, and another pill picked up earlier to add to the list. Pills and puffs. They call them puffs. I call them something else.