A walk up to the local privately owned UPS/Post Office store to buy a photo mailer. Six fifty-one for an 8 X 10. A very nice 8 X 10 mailer I might add, but a run then to Office Max to buy half a dozen cardboard mailers for about one fifty apiece with a dogleg online to order a hundred more from New York, fifty cents apiece including tax and shipping. Now, will they be as nice? We'll see. They looked very similar to the ones I just bought, but familiar is not the same thing as the same. Diddle-dee-dame.

We are ten days from the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the beginning of winter, occuring at four plus a couple of minutes in the morning on the 21st. You seem to get there lickety split (I do notice how early the sun goes down, but notice as a kind of afterthought) and then it takes forever for the days to lengthen again. But that's why it's the beginning of winter, I guess. Right now as I write in the early afternoon the sun is shining and the Yahoo Oakland weather site says it's fifty-eight degrees outside. Warm. Just fine. Wear a t-shirt and a coat, leave the sweater behind that's so necessary to add in the evenings. Life is good. But the days, my buckos, the days sure are short.

In listening to a public radio program just now on newspapers - how no one under thirty is reading them now and won't be reading them in the future - I was thinking about - what else? - newspapers, my own reading habits, the fact I was a techie for a number of years and still spend so much time on a computer - still subscribing to two dailies, as I'm well over thirty and the newspaper habit is quite hard to break - thinking these thoughts, somewhat incoherently in this sixty-five year old brain so I went online and ordered a Kindle.

I have a very nice picture frame digital display sitting in the living room for which I believe I paid more than I did for this Kindle I've just ordered, a device I played with, but finally gave up on and never used, maybe now I'll have a Kindle sitting beside it gathering dust after it arrives. Will I actually use it to read my downloaded newspapers in public over breakfast? How fucking gearhead is that? As bad as wearing a Bluetooth phone plug in your ear? I hope not. Maybe this ease of one-clicking your way into penury on the web has driven me over to the “other” side. I'd say the “dark” side, but then I'd have to admit to the truth.