Monday. Awake this morning at eight. Civilized hour, eight. To sleep before midnight, a decent night's rest. I made a run to the supermarket last night and picked up some cheese, crackers and sake (what else?) and eased into the evening with a little television (I totally forgot about the Academy Awards, but what the heck). Now and again it's good to do this, how much and how often are always the questions you ask. I'm OK with how much and how often, have been for a very long time, I'm just, you know, talking about it overly much here with nothing else on your mind.

A bright sun, they're saying good weather through the middle of the week. Anything beyond the middle of the week is too far in the future to think about, so we're good. It was supposed to snow last Saturday morning and we awoke under a clear sunny sky. We set a record low temperature for the day, here in Oakland, but otherwise the weather was fine. We'll worry about rain when it's time.

Later. I scanned and retouched another four or five photographs from the early seventies at the Rip Off Press. For some reason I want to get these done, put them up on artandlife and then put them to rest as a chapter now long lost in the past. Well, I have other recent sections of photographs I want to bring up to snuff as well, not to mention a couple of web sites I may or may not develop. I guess I have an idea that's finally crystallized as to what I'm doing here, what this “hobby” I've been cobbling together has become, and working on these old photographs is a start. That's good of course, long hours spent eliminating scratches on old photographs aside.

Hup, hup?

Hup, hup.

Later still. More time in Photoshop, more time on the guitar playing to a shuffle beat. There's a difference in playing to a recorded drum beat rather than keeping the beat yourself, playing to a drum beat (or a metronome) introduces you to the way you'd be playing in a band and teaches you how to recover from your mistakes. And we do make our little mistakes. At least I think that's what I'm hearing and it seems to make sense. So we'll practice this evening (can you tell I have a lesson coming up?) and play the day out on guitar. (hup! hup!)