Monday. To bed early, up early with the alarm, to breakfast and back feeling pretty good, ready for the day ahead. Overcast, as it has usually been overcast these mornings, but the sun coming out before noon. Given recent history. I'd think.

A mild form of ocular migraine last night, so I now (really) know sake is a contributing cause. (And possibly the dinner too, which hasn't varied but for one entrée every time I'm there.) So we'll stop this sushi and sake business at the bottom of my hill and save a small fortune in the sacrifice process. We can stand saving a small fortune, given my profligate ways, not that we won't experiment later with store bought sake and its alcoholic brethren when the memory dims. They say at my age ocular migraines tend to last but a couple of years. Sake and I will look forward to it. We will.

And you'll get in more of that good guitar practice too, clear headed and all?

Well yes. How'd you guess?

Later. Spent the last couple of hours finishing a J-Pop section for artandlife. I'm a bit ambivalent about it, not for the photographs themselves, but their perceived lack of a certain coherence. Because I didn't stay long enough and needed to shoot a wider selection? Could be, but it's more in defining what it is that gets me out there, what I want to bring back. Doesn't matter what it is - in can be completely trivial in other people's eyes - but it matters to me that I know it better and continue to work on refining it. For whatever reason, all of it having to do with me (deedle-dee-dee). At this later stage, after this much time focusing on shooting, better to nail it I'd think.

Otherwise what? I'm thinking a walk and then guitar, but first the walk. The sun has come out now just after ten so I'll wear one of the broad brimmed hats. I usually go without, but after a weekend bare headed in the sun I've taken on a reddish cast. Nothing peeling or anything, but best to be careful.

At your age what's the difference?

Let's be nice. Many people my age have a good decade ahead of them to run around on the streets like an idiot. You can shoot a lot of pictures in a decade if you work at it. Then, whatever time is left can be spent in front of a computer finding, filing, adjusting, re-posting, printing, cropping and such sailing into the sunset.

Later still. A walk down to the morning café to have a cup of coffee and then return, a nice spring in my step even after a long weekend. Have no idea why that is, the spring in the step, but I'm not complaining. Not really. A picture walking by the white columns, two people obviously conjuring up a water sprite, hope it's a reasonably pacific water sprite, don't want no more upsets around here than we've already got.

Guitar now, let's see (in the next paragraph) how that turns out.

Still later again. A bus downtown to pick up a bus pass for next month, the rationale I used to get me to go (why all this downtown avoidance?), then a wander over to the City Center to sit at a table to eat a package of peanut M&M's while watching the people pass by, up then to the Rotunda building for lunch at a small Asian barbecue place that serves nicely barbecued chicken cut into small pieces over rice with a decent salad on the side. Haven't eaten there in a while. A real lunch. My, my.

A walk then home managing to miss the passing bus, taking one or two pictures. I like this bell on the brick wall. Nice lines with a nicely drawn bit of unreadable graffiti. How many times have I passed by without seeing it? And this truck, of course, I've photographed it before. Photoshopped the color a bit. Don't usually like to do that but, given the subject, it made sense.

Back now to pick up the guitar again and finish out the afternoon with the usual news programs babbling in the background. I played this morning for thirty or forty minutes and found I had that repeated now so many times blues riff down pretty solid. We'll go over it for another half hour or so and then work on the barre chords. Need to work on the barre chords, get to a point I can move between them cleanly on the beat. It takes time, it does. Maybe the rest of my life.