The Sistahs Steppin’ In Pride Parade later this morning and then a run downtown for the Oakland Chinatown Street Fest. Maybe a trip farther on down Broadway to Jack London Square to check out the Eat Real Festival. I'm feeling pretty good at the moment, just home from breakfast - the vision not too weird, the attitude good, the head clear - so I can say such things with a straight face, but when's the last time I've shot pictures all day long without crapping out? We'll see. All this is happening close to home and there's plenty more on the plate for tomorrow. (Hup! Hup!)

Later. The good news (and it is good news) is that the back muscles ache, nothing too terrible, but ache they do, but the rest of the body seems to be holding firm. The head is clear, has been clear, the upper palate and sinuses are there, they let me know they're there, but nothing too terrible and the gerbils have remained quiet, the little bastards, really quiet now for a while. No scritching and scratching, running about in the walls, making ill mannered little chirps like they owned the place at four in the morning.

I did photograph the Sistahs, their parade kicking off just down the street at noon. Enough (just barely) to make another page of photographs, but make it I did.

I futzed with the photographs on the computer before heading out again to photograph what I could find at the Chinatown Street Fest, arriving about two. Yes, there is was, somewhat smaller than last year's I thought, just one music stage, but lots of people, lots of booths with long lines of people waiting to play various games that ranged from a standard sink the ball in the hoop to spin an upright wheel roulette.

Meg Whitman, the Republican candidate for governor, had a booth with a number of people out in front asking people if they were registered to vote. They had a story in the Chronicle today saying she's spent over one hundred million dollars of her own money on her campaign to date and that she planned to begin campaigning in the Bay Area where Republicans are few and don't go out after dark.

I don't think she can win the state, but we live in interesting times and I have no idea what people think or do (or how they vote) when you get about a hundred miles out of town. Still, she's never run for an office prior to this run, evidently didn't vote in elections for years, and maybe none of that kind of thing counts. First The Terminator and now an eBay billionaire? New York City has a Republican billionaire mayor. Maybe, all things said and done, you get what you deserve and I sometimes shudder to think what we might deserve in the more cosmic sense with our track record here on this earth.

Now, now.

A walk then back along Broadway to City Hall, the afternoon getting longer and I getting tired. I'd seen an event of some kind breaking up from the bus coming in, something that had drawn a whole lot of people around City Hall, but I'm not sure what it was. An Oakland Raiders rally last night, I read about that, but I didn't ask anyone figuring I'd read about it in the papers tomorrow morning. I mentioned there was a lot of stuff happening over the weekend around here? Seeing whatever this was, the long lines of people waiting to get something worth waiting in a line to get, there obviously was.

Back now, hungry for whatever, but no urge to go out and find anything to eat. Sushi down the hill? Take a chance on a couple of glasses of sake with photographs to shoot tomorrow?