What?

The product of what tend to be solitary hours. You build piddly little thoughts into big ones if you don't have people around to keep you grounded. We're in piddly to pachyderm mode here, small thoughts that grow and fester into enormous bent but not necessarily beautiful flowers. It can get worse if you add alcohol.

What?

The sky is overcast, really overcast this early morning, and it's starting to rain. The Grand Lake farmers’ market putting itself together for the day as I drove over to breakfast. Not much to say: read the paper, ate a waffle with a sliced banana on top, drank my coffee, ate my mixed fruit cup provided by the coffee shop. My waitress gave me some little crunchy bakery Asian puffs of some kind. I think because she found them too sweet. They are a bit too sweet, even to my palate. I've had them before, nice of her to bring them, but not something you'd want to eat in any quantity. I understand Asian pastries and such are generally much less sweet than the corn syrup based stuff we eat here and overly sweet for people with the Asian diet isn't considered a mark in their flavor. Still, some three or four of the things sit beside me here at the desk, enough to last for a day or two is my guess, unless I talk myself out of them. In my new what in the world do I want to eat anymore mode.

Well, rain. What to do for pictures? I'm pretty much out of photographs to display on these pages at the top, although I can easily as not go through old never been run before photos and find some that are suitable. It happens, particularly in the winter. The Chinese New Year Parade is coming up at the end of the month, but that's some three weeks away. I can usually find at least one new one on any given day if the sun is out and I'm about, but it's not out today from the look of it. Innovation is in order. I'm feeling pretty good today for an old coot, innovation isn't too much to ask on a clear headed weekend. I can innovate in the apartment on a rainy day. (Hup! Hup!) With effort. Right?

Later. A walk down to the bank to make a deposit and pick up something to put in the envelope before mailing a birthday card at the post office to my nephew for his birthday. In college I was known as “Uncle Robert” for the title of a weekly humor column I wrote for the university Daily and now, for over twenty years, I've actually been one. An uncle. I don't believe I've set any uncle records for steadfast stalwart devotion, but you find you can't have everything in the way of uncles anymore, although I myself had some very good ones. Birthdays and Christmases I'm able to remember.

Cloudy, overcast with periods of rain as I was doing my walking, lunch at the breakfast place after the bank, something called an Oriental Chicken salad. I've known for some time it isn't the food that draws me to my particular restaurant and the salad was, well, edible. Must be the ambiance: the tables out beside the sidewalk are nice, although I never have breakfast at one (lunch during daylight a different matter). I took one picture passing the farmers’ market, not much of a crowd with the rain, no musicians performing, no inflatable slides and the like for the kids. Not much of a day for a farmers’ market, not much of a picture. I scrambled to tie up the camera in a plastic bag to protect it from the rain right after taking it distracting me, perhaps, from such things as focus.

Later still. I've had two separate naps so far this afternoon, short but real in the sense I dropped off for a few minutes in each and felt somewhat less tired. The sky is fairly clear and the sun is shining now that it's after three, maybe a walk with a camera later to pick up at least one decent picture. Then again, maybe another nap, maybe finish watching a movie I started yesterday. This Saturday, in the middle of a weekend.

Later three. A short walk to the lake to sit on a bench and watch the people passing, a photograph or two, nothing to knock anyone socks off, a sort of standard post card kind of picture with the clouds punched up a bit, what there were of them, another attempting a bit more drama that doesn't quite work and a last one on the way home just because it's not something you think to shoot when you're out looking for images. A decent day. Not every one produces a photograph but the looking and trying is often quite nice.