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January 2nd, 2000
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Time To Go Home
I ordered a lens this morning. An 85mm f 1.4 Nikkor. That's a big lens that lets in a lot of light and I'm hoping I will use it a whole lot in the future. Because if I don't I've just spent a lot of money on a paperweight. I've been using a 35mm - 70mm f 2.8 Nikkor zoom for most of my photographs and although I like the zoom's ability to adjust the size of an image without having to move my position, I've also wanted just a little more telephoto effect and I've wanted to see how an f 1.4 lens performs inside in available light. (And maybe I just wanted to go out and buy a toy because I've seen it advertised in a photography magazine and maybe I'll use it and maybe I won't, but I don't like to admit to that except when I'm experimenting with "the truth" and even then I don't really care very much.) I know this is not the first subject that crosses your mind when you get up in the morning. To be honest, it's not the first subject that crosses my mind either, but it's on its way from B & H Photo and Video in New York. This celebrates the retirement of my medical bills. Whoop.
I drove into the office around noon in time for the catered lunch they were setting up next to the command center. Chicken and colorful vegetables; peppers sliced thin and mixed with frilly green leaves and stems that vaguely remind me of lettuce. Although I like lettuce, I am not fond of the pungent flavors of these lettuce like leaves and I have never been able to eat peppers: green, red or yellow. I know, I know. These things are good for me. Multi-colored food makes for a healthy diet and I do try. But not very hard. I had two pieces of chicken (baked, no skin) and two pieces of fancy flat baked in a pan dessert with a bottle of water. It was OK. I was ready to tackle the rest of the archive make over I started yesterday and write this entry and then go home around nine this evening to search out some photos (which I don't have because I have not been shooting enough photographs lately to keep this journal fed which would have upset me greatly in the past, but now I'm just saying 'fuck it' and not worrying about it. Do you suppose this is progress? Not worrying about it? I think so.).
Later now, still two hours before I'm out of here. Nothing has been happening. No viruses, no
failures of systems that wouldn't have failed in the normal course of events. That's what they keep us on the payroll for, to fix the stuff when it breaks and to introduce new stuff so it can break in its own time and fashion in the future. The air moving through the heater ducts makes a whirring sound in the background, one or two people sitting at their desks in their cubicles silent and hidden somewhere out on the floor. It's 6:37 in the evening. No one out on the streets looking down through the windows up here on the 5th floor, my webcam displaying the blotchy colors of the Broadway 12th street intersection. Still the background whirring. Eight hours to work on my web site and they've gone quickly, but now I want to stop and get the hell out of here and back to the apartment. These last two entries, the first of the New Year, have not contained lists of Twentieth Century favorites or resolutions for the Twenty first and that's too bad, I suppose. I'm feeling a quiet before a storm and I'd think some more about that, but I'm usually wrong about quiets before a storm. Mostly it's just quiet, time for the imagination challenged to go to bed and pull the covers up. Time to go home.
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The banner photograph was taken at a cafe near Lake Merritt in Oakland. The photograph of a portion of a mural was taken on 24th Street in San Francisco.
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