I did get out for another walk late yesterday afternoon after posting, two walks in the day, clearly meeting some need of mine to get outside. A picture or two as I ambled along. I say I don't go out (very much) after dark and that seems to be true, but other people do. Lots of folks walking the lake, walking here, walking there. Any silly thoughts of being alone in the dark in Oakland in the early evening evaporating in the crowd. We have crime in Oakland, we have crime in my neighborhood, but it's crime that takes place after midnight, car break ins, family fights and the like, nothing to concern a photographer who's tucked himself into bed by ten.

Still, rain. I'm not sure at the moment what I'll do with myself today with the rain. I can look out over my balcony and see large drops of water along the power lines or phone lines or whatever they are, and yes, squinting a bit, rain. We're in for it. Plenty to do with the image backups and framing project and the like. We'll see. Momentarily.

Later. It is raining now after returning from a walk. Something like a walk. A bus ride downtown carrying a camera with a short 50mm lens, easy to slip inside the jacket, thinking what in the hell am I doing going downtown? Everything with the exception of the hot dog place in the City Center will be closed and it's started raining. A walk over to the old APL building, a photograph of rain puddled on a marble slab, a look around the corner at Peet's to discover they were open for another fifteen minutes; a cup of coffee out on their patio, a photograph of something or other, a plane in the distance, another photo of the building across the street (is it any more interesting when it's wet?), a walk then back toward home, the bus not due for another twenty minutes.

I'm not sure why I felt the need to get outside (in the rain), but it seems to have done some good. I stood under an awning waiting on the bus for a while, remembering to take a picture of the old guy my age with the long hair and the hula hoop well after he'd passed by, a bus then and a picture of the usual tree by the lake as I set out up my hill for a warm and dry apartment. Maybe I need to add just a little something to the mix and getting out on the street brings back buried memories of tramping across the veldt looking out for saber toothed tigers and such, the system automatically going through some kind of tightening up and the rest of the day becomes OK. Or something like that. Still, home now, dry, the camera dry, the world in its orbit. It's always good to see the world maintaining its orbit, rain or shine.

I think straightening up some books, throwing out some old ten pound treatises about computers long since gone to dust, operating systems no longer in use can be done in my present state. I need more space and I don't have any more room for shelves. Not without taking down the few framed pictures I now have on the walls. Don't want to do that. Nothing else strikes me as feasible. Necessary, but not feasible on this particular afternoon. Tomorrow the attitude will change and I'll become amenable to doing something else: the framing project, the backup project, the clean the kitchen project. Best to have a choice of projects is my guess, pick on the one that calls out. One day a project is hot, one day it's not. One day you take a walk in the sun, one day you take a walk in the rain, it all seems to work itself out.