Tuesday. Bingo! Oakland, we have lift off! As in I awoke with the alarm after a decent night's sleep and felt just fine, thank you. The flu has left the area, the body feels like a body and all seems swell. Not sure what I'll do about that, feeling swell, but it's something I'm determined to live with and resolve.

To breakfast and back at the usual place, managing to get the whole damned breakfast down for a change, back now with the sun coming up over the building across the way, another nice day emerging from the darkness. And I am in a good mood, although I'll probably get back to aches and pains pretty soon. I suspect - well, maybe it would be better to say I know - if I have a period of clarity and ambition one coming day - that I'll go back and review some of this stuff I've written. I'm expecting to be depressed: a veritable litany of grunts and groans with few if any redeeming aspects interspersed with the occasional decent photograph. Such is life. And art.

No word yet from the Nikon repair shop, but I'm hoping to hear they've finished the cleaning and shipped it today, which would mean I'd receive it by the end of the week. Then one more camera left to send them and I'm done with cleaning up cameras one hopes for many years, becoming more careful in the future with changing lenses in the field. And I am careful when I change a lens, but something must have gone wrong during a bad sequence of lens changes, which and when I'm not sure.

Guitar today. I'm well along with the lesson, although the flu did slow me down. I'm ready (sorta). I am.

Later. A walk setting out a little earlier than I usually do down along the same track: by the lake and then on to the morning café for a cup of coffee sitting at an outside table in the sun. A picture or two, making more than a mistake or two, but the attitude good and no complaints. Back now thinking guitar and a nap, more so for guitar than the nap. I'm always thinking in terms of a nap, it's just sometimes more, sometimes less. We are now at less. In Oakland.

Later still. Well. A nap. A lie down, anyway, a rest. Listen to the radio babble on about the Republican primaries in New Hampshire. Most Europeans consider the Democratic Party here to be to the right of what they call their Conservative parties, the Republican Party far, far right of it. And I suspect they're, um, “right”. Which, for someone like me, can be depressing.

A slow day for such a nice day, no great impetus to go out again and - what? - walk around the downtown? Take another walk to the morning restaurant? I think not. Lack of imagination more than anything else, but such is life. Such, it seems, is this life.

I've spent some time now on the guitar, forgetting I'd put two 9-volt batteries in the recharging unit yesterday, believing the batteries in the guitar and the tuning pedal needed replacement. So they've had twenty-four hours to recharge. They say something like twelve for the 9-volts, maybe overcharging is not a problem. We'll know soon enough. Not that I've ever done this in the past.

So, other than over charging the batteries, there's been little of excitement around here today. Actually, since the paragraph before the last I've had another "“lie down”, another “nap”. I say I feel good, but maybe there's still a few things to iron out. I have things to do here on my list, but then I always have things to do here on my list, it's part of the fabric in this place.

Has this always been true?

Hell no. I was once at the top of it. That's what all this writing is about.

Evening. Finished up on the guitar, watched another Scandinavian police procedural on TV, they've put in a schedule where they play one from a different series at six every day of the work week. Better than the Korean soaps, less directed at training small children in the local social rules of behavior, although even here I find the characters frustrating. More like real people, but nasty people. Even the “good guys” get off course. More like real life than not. I would have liked them much more when I was younger.

I understand they're good, but, as I've grown older, I've grown less interested in finding reality that's a bit too ugly in my entertainment. At least of the police procedural kind. I don't think I can watch another CSI or its ilk, too many serial killers is too many serial killers.

The first time I noticed this tendency starting, starting slowly at first, was in watching David Lynch's Eraserhead when it was released some decades back in the theaters, realizing afterward that it was a great movie, a classic, but boy did it put me through my paces. Unpleasant paces. All this stuff starts somewhere and that's where I'm saying it started with me. Deedle-dee-dee.

Anyway, we'll see if we can get to sleep earlier this evening, maybe pick up that book I started just before the flu set in. A light, not very serious flu, but flue enough to kill any interest in reading.