Wednesday. Another Scandinavian police procedural last night, starting at nine and ending at ten-thirty, so to bed before eleven, getting up with the alarm. Off to breakfast and back by eight feeling pretty good. Every now and then I'll have a little epiphany thinking, my, where's this energy coming from? I think back to a period not all that long ago when I was feeling fuzzy headed to the point I was worried about my driving, had had a couple of minor fender benders, both of which were my fault, contrasting that with how I feel over breakfast with good thoughts of interesting projects ahead.

Maybe just an introduction to the realities of the days coming. Yes, you get down, but then you go up and all is well again. For a while. One hopes a long while. Just a little more pronounced set of ups and downs than those you may have had when you were younger. Either that or this adjustment to retirement has its interesting phases, a kind of detox from habits ingrained over the last decades. I'm going with that last one, detoxifying from the past, if only in the hope how I feel right now will indeed proceed unimpeded into the future. As in tomorrow. The weekend. Hope springs eternal!

Now, now.

My guitar lesson coming up at ten and I need to get ready. A decent week of practice, decent in my estimation. Need to remind myself of that: I'm happy with the way the guitar is going, no need to fret over the fact it's not going more quickly, I'm not practicing enough and all the rest of the stuff you can imagine if you let yourself go. So hup! We're OK today. And, as I mentioned, maybe even tomorrow.

Careful.

Later. Well, not too bad. My instructor seemed pleased, although I can't really imagine that teaching beginners like me isn't somewhat maddening on occasion. We'll go through last week's lesson this week as well and get it better. That seems to be the way it works: repeat the lesson until you're there, then go on to the next. Sometimes it goes quickly, sometimes it doesn't. Progress is progress.

Mr. D & Ms. Y are coming by to drop off that malfunctioning laptop shortly so I can take a look. We'll also head out together and have lunch, which will be nice. I assume I can revive the thing, it's one of the Dell company era laptops with the same XP operating system I was once so familiar with, but it's been a while and I'm rusty. No regrets. Better to spend my time these days on images and pixels rather than bits and bytes, but I'd still like to think I can fix it.

Later still. Nice. Lunch at the old company hangout Pacific Coast Brewery in downtown Oakland, a pint (a Hefeweizen, they didn't serve Guinness, and it seems to have had a fairly substantial effect for such a small afternoon transgression), a Shepard's Pie and a salad. Back now, checkdisk (CHKDSK) running on the laptop file directory for the last two and a half hours, another two and a half hours to go. My, my. What did they do to that disk? I can see why the Windows installation disk couldn't see it, let alone repair it. Hup. Let's hope it boots when it's done.

At least you know enough to not count your chickens.

But not enough, evidently, to keep my mouth shut so as not to tempt the Fates.

Later yet again. It's been four and a half hours and the repair software is still running. Some time on the guitar and something close to an hour's nap while it was grinding. Didn't get to sleep, really, but dipped in and out of the fog, that one beer having had an interesting effect. No walk, no pictures, but I'll make up for that tomorrow. We passed by the Occupy area in front of City Hall on the way back and it looked as if it was stirring: flags flying, a small number of people clustered about, police standing in front of two black and white cruisers. Not a large group, but more than what's been happening recently. Without that beer I might have started this repair operation, grabbed a camera and gone back.

Evening. Well, it worked, the laptop is up and running. A little more on the guitar, I think, and then to bed. Whatever that beer kicked off this afternoon is gone, feel pretty good, but tired. Up and at it again tomorrow. (hup!)