Tuesday. Another dark overcast morning. No precipitation since getting up and going to breakfast, a decent night's sleep, home now at eight with a second load of wash underway in the basement. Get it in early and it's done before you know it (hup! hup!). Still, a crappy looking day outside, doesn't portend well for a walk later or finding one or two decent photographs. We'll make do, we will, here in Oakland.

Later. Not much of a day - not bad, not great - no complaints. A sort of a semi-nap lying down listening to a decent talk outlining the financial meltdown on the radio, lots of chatter in these last three years, but not much information. A walk to the morning breakfast place for no apparent reason, noticing gas prices had gone up another six cents since this morning, they're saying it will be over four dollars by summer. That will be amusing.

Otherwise I need to get in my guitar practice, prepare for my lesson tomorrow. I fight sitting down and tuning the guitar, which takes but a minute (tuning, not sitting down), but otherwise it goes pretty well once I've started. Once I've started.

A wind out there now blowing under a really dark set of clouds. They're saying rain later this evening and I do indeed believe them. Otherwise what to report? I thought of having sushi down at the bottom of my hill, but thought better of it. Lunch at my usual place ran about a tenth what I'd have spent for sushi and any idea of drinking sake this early in the day was, well, not tempting.

Later still. If I push the practice I seem to get my fingertips up and stinging pretty good in about fifteen minutes. I'm not sure that qualifies as having callouses on your fingertips, adequate callouses anyway. One problem is learning exactly where and how hard that finger should be pressing the string against the fret. Some of these chords require a bit of finger bending in ways we don't do in our normal intercourse. And then there's moving from one chord to the next. Strumming a particular chord is not difficult as long as you have the time to set it up, but keeping the beat requires speed and accuracy. Such is guitar playing. And practice.

And so?

And so we go. Just the rules of the game. Still, fifteen minutes on, fifteen off, back then for another fifteen minutes of scales, riff's and chords. Enough of that and you've gotten in your hour and more. We're making progress.