I learned over eighty people got their end dates at the old company last Thursday, the two I know about, one leaving at the end of this month (Merry Christmas - Happy New Year!) and the other January twelfth. No information on packages and the like, but the layoffs have started with notices evidently as short as two weeks. Such is life. I have a get together with some of the usual crew tomorrow in San Francisco, some of whom are still with the company and will know more if only about their own situation. I feel a bit guilty about being retired and out of the fire, but not too guilty. Guilty perhaps in the sense I've been there more than once in my past, no reason to volunteer for that duty again, although there are no guarantees of any kind of safety in this existence.

You can see from the photograph gas prices rose four cents a gallon this morning at the station across from my morning breakfast place. Have we hit bottom and now we now make the climb back to, say, three dollars a gallon? Four? The oil cartel announced it's cutting production by a couple of million barrels today, will they be able to make their reductions stick? Oh, probably. Why not? We should be taxing gas to bring it back up to the three dollar level and using that tax money here instead of sending it to the Saudis, but then there are a lot of things we should be doing and redoing, looking at the things they and we have been doing to ourselves these last many years. Be nice if I really knew what was needed. Tax gas back up to three dollars? Sounds right, others have suggesting the same for a number of reasons, but I'm the guy that doesn't drive, who burns maybe two gallons of regular in a week. Easy to say silly things with certainty when you burn two gallons of gas in a week.

Cold this morning, but the sky is clear and the sun is shining so life is returning to Oakland. There was a picture of a snow covered Berkeley in the paper this morning. What part of Berkeley I didn't bother to read, but it really did look like snow and I suspect it was, wherever it was. No snow here, of course. Just overcast and wet until this morning when - I believe I mentioned this - the sun came up and is now doing its thing. A walk around the area maybe? Get the muscles loosened up? Perhaps?

Oh, and I did find that tripod base plate for the camera I was searching for all nicely packed in the zippered bag I'd put it in with the shutter release cord and the other things necessary for tripod work. An interesting memory loss that led to some cleanup around the apartment. Not a particularly meaningful memory loss I don't think. I watch the memory, as we all watch our memories after a certain age. I'm seeing more consistent typos when writing, for example. Not a lot, but more on a first draft than in the past. I forget names, but again, not all that often, no more often than I did ten years ago when I first began noticing it. If it keeps up at this pace I'll be long gone before the memory decides to leave. Cross my fingers. Cross my fingers twice.

Later. A first picture taken today at the apartment. Many corrections to make, many mistakes to make, many more miles to travel methinks.