Beautiful day, by the way. The sky clear, the sun bright, the air crisp and cool. None of this too hot to venture out business, reminds me of a Seattle summer. Without the rain, although I'm not sure Seattle had all that much rain in the summers, the fall, winter, spring a whole different matter. But that's the memory talking, memories of decades and decades past, we don't trust our memories when it comes to weather. It rains in Seattle, yes. No as much as it rains in Portland, but it does rain. As to when, what seasons, we'll not trust our recollections on the subject.

Later. A standard, off the shelf, done this before a hundred times ride downtown to hit an ATM and sit out in the City Center with a cup of coffee and a banana muffin. Not the noon time crowd so there were chairs and tables available to sit with the head shielded by an umbrella, but most of the body comfortably warmed in the sun. A picture or two, nothing presented itself I could see an image in, but a good half hour's relaxation before heading over to Broadway and catching the bus back home. No exercise as such, but life goes on and the day has hardly begun.

So the ambivalent days go by. I did work a bit on Here in Oakland yesterday, following through on some things I'd been thinking about for a while. I'd posted a series of photographs I'd taken at the local March 4th School Budget demonstration at City Hall (last March 4th) to show to another photographer I'd run into who specialized in photographing such things and the thought has been building as to what I should do with them and the site.

The design is far from final, building as I did on Rien Post's original design for artandlife. I may contact him again to see what he can do with hereinoakland to bring it to something closer to final. The spacing and placement of the type used in the logo, the titles, the menu and the individual photo pages aren't quite right, but it's making progress. It takes time and experimentation and thought. I do have a bunch of domain names I've acquired over the years, none of them for potential gain through resale, but I did have some thought I might use them in the future when I retired. Well, I'm retired, the future is now, and so here I am and there they are.

You try things, practice the guitar when you've never played a guitar before, create a web site to do this or to do that, try many things to see if one of them might not fit for a day, a month or a life. I could see this leading somewhere and then I could see it leading nowhere. Such is life. I've even thought, well, something like hereinoakland could lead me to video! I know, I know. I have this exotic Nikon camera that shoots video as well as stills and I haven't even bothered to try it out yet. Still, I'm retired. Who knows what it might bring? The Shadow? Does The Shadow know? Is he talking?

Well, if he is, he's not blathering on like an idiot.

Later still. More work on the Here In Oakland site, changing the arrangement of the logo and heads. Continues to keep me amused.

A walk then along the lake and then down to the Grand Lake theater deciding to see The Last Airbender which, I'm afraid, isn't worth the effort. When they were making records in the seventies they talked about adding a “sweetener” to a track - the addition of strings - to get a larger audience. In many circles this was not considered a plus. The Last Airbender is all sweeteners to attract the largest possible audience, is my guess, and, as such, comes across as boring. Some movies go by quickly, catching your interest; some movies make you feel like you're doing time. It probably isn't quite that bad, but its close, so no star, no cigar, doing time, here in Oakland.

What later? It's now early evening. Maybe another crack at the guitar, toughen up these fingertips some more. I may not be able to play, but I can pretty much finger the strings without discomfort. So progress, don't you think?