Well, Mr. S's band is playing in Santa Rosa this evening and Mr. E and I have decided to attend. Should be interesting. Keep the Guinness to a reasonable level, what with the driving and all. I'm up for it, I guess. I'll think twice about it a half dozen times before leaving and then I'll enjoy myself immensely once we arrive, shooting pictures and such. I'm easily amused with shooting pictures and such.

Let's see. I also got my Protime results (how the blood thinner is doing) yesterday and they were smack on where they should be. I also did some more online checking for the PSA results. Seems there's little or no issue in the readings I've received over these last three years. It could be a problem if they were from three to twenty times larger and increasing. They're not. Increasing. So I'll leave that lie until another year has passed by before going through it again.

The sensation of “feeling better” than I have in years that I described yesterday, realizing I was feeling really upbeat Thursday night? It seems to be holding, although you never know when you're kidding yourself. We'll say things are going in the right direction, cross our fingers and not talk too much, jinxing it by mentioning it. Kidding ourself by thinking about it overly much. Like that.

Another indication, though, I might be continuing to be making progress is I did go out last night around eight, drove over to the Grand Lake theater area and parked, then walked around the neighborhood with a camera, the ISO jacked up through the roof (using the new D3S) and took some instructive if not overly interesting pictures. You need to try these things, is my thought, look at them and then practice with more sessions. Practice is the key. You don't practice, you don't progress; you don't practice, you don't find out what's may really be there underneath, what it is that may suck you into something nice. It's good to be sucked into something nice is my thought, more of them than not, here in Oakland.

Later. Another walk when the sun was still out earlier, the rain back now as it approaches noon. A photograph here and there to capture the journey, a tree stump that caught my eye near the sidewalk, a woman pushing a baby carriage under the trees, the sun behind palm trees over beside the Highway 580 overpass, various photos of graffiti newly added to the deserted Kwik Way Drive-In in the process of being scraped off the glass as I passed. Looks better with the graffiti, but who knows? Maybe it gives the impression of a declining neighborhood, leads to lowered property values, the owners required to have it removed by some kind of agreement.

Otherwise good. The farmer's market up and running as I passed, nothing in the way of photographs, I'm not sure why I don't try. I walk through it often enough with a camera, but either my courage evaporates and I don't want to put a camera in people's faces or my imagination runs dry. Such is life.

Too many photographs, I suspect, to be linking them here. Cut it down a bit. Not the shooting, the more shooting the better, the longer the walks the better, the more thought and imagination the better. Now just how do I implement all this? Pay no attention, it's noon, there's still an afternoon and evening ahead.

Later still. The rain mentioned at noon, and it was a goodly amount of rain, a squall really, passed through and the sun came out again. So, of course, I took another walk. A bus downtown, an amble around the City Center area, three or four restaurants open but nothing in the way of an appetite. A walk then, back home. I noticed, as we passed the vacant store with mannequins for sale in the window earlier on the bus, a photographer in his twenties or thirties with a camera that looked a lot like mine (big and cumbersome) standing in front of that same window, photographing the same mannequin exactly as I'd photographed it yesterday. “Another one,” I thought. “There's another idiot out there with, in this one instance at least, with a similar eye. Which shouldn't be surprising. The photographic opportunity was obvious. Most people shoot pictures of mannequins in store windows as they pass, do they not?