Friday. What caused me to take the picture of the power poll above was seeing this written on the sidewalk below. Twelve thousand volts. Quite a jolt. Stuff you don't think about as you wander through your neighborhood.

Up this morning and to breakfast and back with the alarm, nothing unusual about it other than someone had run into a corner supporting pole on the bus stop kiosk in front of my morning restaurant and only when I'd returned to the apartment did it occur to me to have taken a picture. Nothing special in such a picture, but why had I spaced out carrying the camera? Focused on my routine, get in, get out? I'm usually better about such things, something you learn to think about.

The waitress said it had happened when someone attempted a U-turn that got out of control and it happens more often than you'd think. Remembering my scraping a fender and denting my own car in such a maneuver ten feet farther on down the street I realized I wasn't alone. There were other incompetents out there, some of them right here in my own neighborhood.

Finished out and posted yesterday's entry when I got back to the apartment just now, not altogether happy with the result. Maybe a way to go back and tell if a day was a little foggy from the reading, although I thought at the time the day had gone reasonably well. Reasonably well for these days anyway.

Later. A bus downtown to pick up a prescription I'd phoned in Wednesday, a quick down, stopping for a cup of coffee and a raspberry cookie at the Rotunda Building, and bus back. A walk starting maybe half an hour later ending up at the morning café, stopping on the way to sit at some of the usual places, a picture or two to mark my progress. A good walk of all about two miles when it was done, back now at the apartment to recover. Some aches and pains. Not many, but they're there after what wasn't a particularly long or stressful walk. So what? Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. Time for a nap, recharge the batteries and pick up the guitar.

My thinking finally on the heavy lens is it has a narrow range of uses for someone of my particular interests. I don't shoot wildlife or sporting events, both places where this lens is at its best, and using it along the lake has its limitations given the terrain. You need a monopod or a tripod at a minimum, better a nice duck blind where you can lie down and wait on the ducks and geese and chickens to fly by doing picturesque acrobatics. Like they do on television. I could do that. Try that. I could. Once.

That sounds sniffy, but my thought is, well, where might I go to find such places nearby? I'm not going to lug the thing along a sidewalk, but a drive to some reasonable place isn't all that impossible, even for someone with my miserable history. The zoo? Could. Might. Safe enough to drag it after me, although the image I'm having of clopping along looking for lions and tigers is not encouraging.

Evening. I've gotten in about an hour on the guitar, which is good, but it's time to sit down now and go through the lesson front to end, make sure I'm covering all the bases. I tend to go over (and over) individual chord changes and riffs without putting them together, learning the entire sequence straight through by heart. But I'm getting there. I'm doing it. I am.

It's been a good day, lots of sun, not too warm, the high sixties, low seventies, sixty-eight now at six o'clock. There are two festivals in San Francisco tomorrow, the Pistahan Parade/Festival and the Nihonmachi Festival in Japantown, both of which I've photographed in the past. Check out Pistahan tomorrow morning, catch the forming up for the parade, then take the bus to Japantown in the early afternoon. Maybe do Nihonmachi again on Sunday. Lots of stuff to shoot.