It seems the family reunion I was planning to attend on the 25th is actually being held this Saturday on the 18th. My sister was under the same impression. We've discussed my coming up on the 25th, how to handle the logistics. She has a dinner party and tickets to a live performance scheduled for the 18th. I, on the other hand, can bend my schedule. Ding-a-ling runs in the family, I guess. Strange to only find out after sixty-six years.

All you had to do is ask any of your cousins.

Well, we won't go there.

I mentioned I'd recently received a copy of Gilbert Shelton's The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus in all its six hundred and twenty-four pages. I've been looking through it for these last few days, catching up on some of the strips I've not read, strips done after the seventies, when I turned to the last three or four pages and found a picture of the old Rip Off Press crew and there I was standing right in the middle. Hair down to my shoulders, mustache, looking more like Fat Freddie than I might like, but something of a shock when I stumbled upon it.

There are others who should have been in the picture who had more to do with the press during that period, but this muddy smudgy black and white photograph evidently was the only one available with pretty much everyone else who needed to be in it and so it was the one they used. Seeing it was both nice and something of a shock. I'd scan it and run it, but describing it as muddy smudgy doesn't really do it justice.

I'm to meet with some of the crew at Roy's later, something about picking up tickets to an A's game this weekend. My screw up on the family reunion in Seattle may make this moot, but we'll see. Two baseball games in a month, though, counting the Sacramento River Rats, um, Cats. I've never been a baseball nut, although I've followed the game on television at times in the past. I doubt this will start a fire, but it does get me out of the house and maybe generate some photographs.

There's also an Oakland Fire Arts Festival starting Wednesday night and running through Saturday. It parallels the Burning Man festival or whatever it's called in the desert and I haven't been to one before. They make anyone attending with a camera having interchangeable lenses sign a release stipulating you'll not run or publish any pictures without crediting the festival and the act and I suppose I'll go, although I've not been willing to do anything like this before. Commercial acts demand control over the use of any images of their performers and people like me don't like that very much. Still, they don't ask to control them other than by giving them credit and again, you don't sign the paper, you don't get in.

Later. OK, a walk to the local ATM, a bus downtown then in the opposite direction, a walk about to kill some time ending finally at Roy's to meet with Mr. E and Mr. S; a couple of hours, a couple of Guinness to discuss art and life and real estate. Real estate. You'd think by now we'd know better. We do, however, have four tickets lined up for Saturday's game, very good tickets from the sound of them. We're to come back Friday to pick them up and I suspect I'll go. Go to the game this weekend, go to Portland next weekend. You'd think, for someone who's not employed, that I'd have had this all figured out.